SLAE6: Secure and Lightweight Authenticated Encryption Scheme for 6LoWPAN Networks

The emergence of the Internet of things is highly related to the development of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and their evolving protocols, such as Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) over Low-Power Wireless Personal Area Networks (6LoWPAN). Providing security within a sensor network, including achieving authentication between WSN nodes, is critical. The node and the server create an encryption session key for future communications. Therefore, developing a lightweight and efficient authentication and key establishment (AKE) scheme is imperative. Symmetric cryptographic and public key-based AKE methods have been developed to address these issues. Nevertheless, some known attacks and large communication and computational overheads remain as problems for the developed solutions. This study proposes a secure and lightweight authenticated encryption scheme for 6LoWPAN (SLAE6) that uses a lightweight hash function and an authenticated encryption primitive, known as ACE, to enable the AKE process to occur securely. SLAE6 is effective in dealing with computing and communication complexities while simultaneously withstanding well-known attacks. First, SLAE6 validates the authenticity of information from sensor networks (SNs) and then establishes a secret key between an SN and the server to guarantee security. The proposed system is proven reliable on the basis of the Canetti-Krawczyk and Dolev-Yao threat models. In addition, SLAE6 is logically demonstrated to be exact through Burrows-Abadi-Needham logic. Compared with other schemes, SLAE6 is lightweight, efficient, and requires less bandwidth and shorter execution time.