A Key Management Protocol for Secure Device-to-Device Communication in the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a network made up of a large number of devices which are able to automatically communicate in a Peer-to-Peer manner. The aim is to provide various services for the benefit of society. One of the main challenges facing the IoT is how to secure this Device-to-Device communication. Among all the security issues, the Key Management is one of the most difficult. This is mainly due to the fact that most of these devices have limited resources in terms of storage, calculation, communication and energy. Although different approaches have been proposed to deal with this problem, each of them presents its own limitations and weaknesses. In this paper, we propose a novel Key Management protocol for Device-to-Device communication in the Internet of Things. Compared to the existing Peer-to-Peer schemes, our solution provides the best compromise between the IoT requirements: resilience, connectivity, efficiency, scalability and flexibility. To achieve this balance, the network members are uniformly distributed into logical sets. A device shares then a distinct pairwise key with each member of its set and a unique pairwise set key with the members of each of the other sets. We then prove that our solution is resilient as the capture of a member compromises a negligible part of a large network. Moreover, we show that our scheme has a good network connectivity. It is then efficient as it does not require additional calculation or communication costs on the network members. We also demonstrate that our protocol is scalable as storage cost on the network members does not significantly increase when the network gets larger. We finally show that our solution is flexible.