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Key Agreement Protocol for IoT devices with minimal airtime consumption

This page is dedicated to the implementation of a Public Key Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol for Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) devices with minimal airtime consumption within the OpenWSN protocol stack.

The contribution of this work are:

  1. our proposed approach is among the first to concretely integrate and experimentally evaluate “implicit” Elliptic Curve Qu-Vanstone (ECQV) certificates within an authentication and key agreement protocol devised for IIoT devices and scenarios. We here show that viability of such technique is greatly improved by the native and efficient support of elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) over modern IoT devices.
  2. our novel proposed Key Management Protocol (KMP) relies on an ordinary and widely established “fixed” Elliptic Curve Diffie Hellman (ECDH) exchange so as to fit with the recommendations of the NSA Suite B of cryptographic algorithms, but still provides authentication without any explicit signature, as well as ephemeral key derivation (and very fast re-keying, when necessary). This is obtained by exchanging per-session nonces and by securing the exchange using a minimized number of messages (two per each direction, i.e. four in total).


The code is freely available here.

Please, see the README file to understand how merging the code within the official release of OpenWSN and use it on real devices.

For any problems, contact savio.sciancalepore@poliba.it

Enjoy the Key Agreement Protocol!
Telematics Research Group – Politecnico di Bari (IT)