Mathematical Aspects of Security and Privacy for Internet of Things

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) represents a dynamic concept in the realm of information and communication technology, influencing various aspects of daily life. In essence, IoT acts as a comprehensive infrastructure for the information society, connecting both physical and virtual elements to improve service delivery. IoT devices operate as smart objects capable of real-time communication and data exchange. IoT-based services have experienced exponential growth worldwide, especially in industrial applications, e-healthcare and vehicular networks. However, IoT devices exhibit limitations regarding memory capacity, energy resources, computational capabilities, data privacy and cyber safety. So the most important and difficult problems in the IoT context are security and privacy-related issues like resource management, secure storage, connectivity, data integrity, authentication and scalability. Resiliency is another important parameter that measures the security of IoT network in an adversarial situation. Secure communication within the network for IoT under adversarial situations requires suitable key agreement among communicating parties towards performing encryption and authentication. It is crucial that only authenticated and permitted users (either persons or objects) access IoT devices; otherwise, they will be vulnerable to a variety of security issues like information and identity theft. Our proposed key agreement schemes use key pre-distribution techniques based on the Chinese Remainder Theorem (CRT). This thesis explores user authentication solutions grounded in mathematical hardness assumptions, offering improved effectiveness, reduced computational overhead and smaller key sizes while maintaining the same level of security. First, we propose a black-box approach to enhance the resiliency of lightweight CRT Subset scheme while preserving connectivity. By introducing unidirectional and bidirectional hash chains, we develop HC(CRT-Subset) and 2HC(CRT-Subset) schemes using key doublets and triplets. In multi-key s