Leveraging Smart Contracts for Asynchronous Group Key Agreement in Internet of Things

Abstract

Group Key Agreement (GKA) mechanisms play a crucial role in realizing various applications in different networks, such as sensor networks and the Internet of Things (IoT). To be suitable for IoT, a GKA must satisfy several critical requirements. First, a GKA must be robust against a compromised device attack and satisfy essential secrecy definitions without the existence of a Trusted Third Party (TTP). TTP is often used by IoT devices to establish ad hoc networks securely, and usually, these devices are resource-constrained. Second, the GKA must be able to distribute session keys successfully, even with offline devices. Third, a GKA must reduce the burden of heavy cryptographic computations for IoT devices. Based on these observations, we propose a new GKA scheme that satisfies all the requirements above. The proposed scheme leverages smart contracts to alleviate the computational and storage overheads on IoT devices induced by cryptographic functions. It also brings the advantage of asynchronism such that offline devices will be able to compute the group key once they are online.