Open Access

ARTICLE

End-To-End Encryption Enabled Lightweight Mutual Authentication Scheme for Resource Constrained IoT Network

Shafi Ullah^1,*, Haidawati Muhammad Nasir², Kushsairy Kadir^3,*, Akbar Khan¹, Ahsanullah Memon⁴, Shanila Azhar¹, Ilyas Khan⁵, Muhammad Ashraf¹

1 Department of Computer Engineering, Balochistan University of Information Technology, Engineering and Management Sciences, Quetta, 87300, Pakistan
2 Computer Engineering Section Malaysian Institute of Technology, Universiti Kuala Lumpur, Kuala Lumpur, 50250, Malaysia
3 Electrical Engineering Section, Universiti Kuala Lumpur, British Malaysian Institute, Salengor, 53100, Malaysia
4 Electrical Engineering Department, Mehran University, Khairpur-Mirs, 76062, Pakistan
5 Department of Mathematics, College of Science Al-Zulfi, Majmaah University, Al-Majmaah, 11952, Saudi Arabia

* Corresponding Authors: Shafi Ullah. Email: ; Kushsairy Kadir. Email:

Computers, Materials & Continua 2025, 82(2), 3223-3249. https://doi.org/10.32604/cmc.2024.054676

Received 04 June 2024; Accepted 14 September 2024; Issue published 17 February 2025

Abstract

Machine-to-machine (M2M) communication networks consist of resource-constrained autonomous devices, also known as autonomous Internet of things (IoTs) or machine-type communication devices (MTCDs) which act as a backbone for Industrial IoT, smart cities, and other autonomous systems. Due to the limited computing and memory capacity, these devices cannot maintain strong security if conventional security methods are applied such as heavy encryption. This article proposed a novel lightweight mutual authentication scheme including elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) driven end-to-end encryption through curve25519 such as (i): efficient end-to-end encrypted communication with pre-calculation strategy using curve25519; and (ii): elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) based mutual authentication technique through a novel lightweight hash function. The proposed scheme attempts to efficiently counter all known perception layer security threats. Moreover, the pre-calculated key generation strategy resulted in cost-effective encryption with 192-bit curve security. It showed comparative efficiency in key strength, and curve strength compared with similar authentication schemes in terms of computational and memory cost, communication performance and encryption robustness.

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Keywords

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