Achievable Multi-Security Levels for Lightweight IoT-Enabled Devices in Infrastructureless Peer-Aware Communications

The emergence of social networking and proximity services is driving the Internet-ofThings (IoT) paradigms toward a location-aware connecting society. To prepare for such a booming paradigm, IEEE 802.15.8 standardizes peer-aware communication (PAC) within the strict consideration of infrastructureless property and fully distributed coordination features. Since no central entity exists in a PAC network for control and management purposes, every PAC device (PD) plays an equal role in terms of communication. This situation leads to a variety of security challenges, especially in authentication and key agreement for lightweight IoT-enabled PDs. Recently, there are some proposals aimed at the aforementioned problems, such as approaches with personal identification number, physical layer features. However, due to its inconvenience and computational complexity for the lightweight IoT-enabled PDs, authentication and key agreement are still open issues in PAC. From this view, this paper proposes a new approach that utilizes social networking features closely tied to the PAC in order to support authentication and key agreement procedures. A number of trusted PDs are delegated to authenticate the requesting PD on behalf of the requested PD when an association is established between them. Intensive analysis and evaluation show that the proposed protocol provides multiple security levels as well as user convenience with reasonable resource consumption.