A Lightweight Pairing Protocol for IoT Devices in Smart Homes

摘要

The concept of Internet of Things (IoT) and smart homes is now a reality. The stake of both academia and industry has increased in the devices related to IoT and smart homes. A lot of work has been done in this domain in the last decade or so. However, the architectures and frameworks related to this domain are still evolving. IoT enabled devices and smart homes are promising revolutionary changes in the normal day to day activities for the consumers by providing easy access and control, cheaper products with less energy consumption and a considerable difference in their monthly bills. However, at the same time a lot of challenges related to security and privacy of consumers data are emerging. These devices contain a considerable amount of information related to consumers like name, phone number etc. The security and privacy issues are posing a big threat to the legitimacy of these devices. However, due to the inherent limited memory and processing capabilities for most of the IoT devices, the traditional security mechanisms cannot be applied. This paper proposes a lightweight pairing protocol that not only works towards making IoT devices communication secure but also contribute towards making the smart homes less vulnerable to all the wireless attacks. Also, consumers information will stay safe and adversaries will not be able to steal any data stored in those devices. A unique signature is extracted depending upon various factors of IoT devices like location. This signature is used in the mutual verification and to prove the legitimacy of the IoT devices. Moreover, a unique concept of trust has been introduced. The trust builds over time and once it gets over the certain threshold the devices start communications. Without building trust devices will not communicate to each other. Moreover, security and complexity analysis of the proposed protocol has been performed that indicates that the proposed protocol is lightweight and has the ability to protect IoT devices from various threats and attacks.