A Novel Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol for Internet of Things Based Resource-Constrained Body Area Sensors

Secrecy and integrity of communication, as well as the authenticity of messages must be ensured by the security primitives and is critical element in Internet of Things (IoT). Devices in IoT applications such as smart healthcare applications deal with sensitive data of our health and daily lives and thus can execute malicious actuating commands with serious safety consequences. Therefore, it is important to ensure secure communication channel establishment among the medical sensors or devices and the remote servers. In this work, we propose a novel authentication and key agreement protocol that is lightweight for resource-constrained sensors and suitable to protect sensitive health related data in the context of IoT. The protocol is based on cooperation by offloading the heavy cryptographic functions of resource-constrained sensors to the trustful neighboring sensors. This trust verification is ensured by finding the data correlations from the data of embedded accelerometers in the smartphone acting as gateway and the sensors installed on the body. Security analysis and performance evaluation results show that the proposed protocol is secure and is energy efficient.