A pragmatic elliptic curve cryptography-based extension for energy-efficient device-to-device communications in smart cities

The rise of Smart Cities with underlying adoptions of technologies like the IoT and Cloud Computing has made the integration between them a promising field with different challenges including security. Authentication is one of the foremost attempts to address these issues. Allowing direct device-to-device rather than only device-to-service communications can introduce several benefits like high data transmission rate and reliable communications even when the central clouds fail. However, the resource constraint nature of IoT devices makes it more difficult to develop secure protocols that can provide a sustainable deployment in practice. This article proposes an authentication scheme extension providing secure control from resourceful cloud servers to devices while also enabling the direct secure communications between them. The scheme is designed to use ECC and low-cost operations to provide efficient resource and energy consumption. The protocol correctness is proven by using a formal security analysis with BAN-logic. Detailed analysis is presented to show its resilience to common attacks. A performance analysis is also given to show the scheme's practical value as it only consumes at most 29 mJ on each device in addition to the amount required by the original protocol.