A Formally Validated Authentication Algorithm for Secure Message Forwarding in Smart Home Networks

The many devices connected in smart homes increase the attack surfaces from which adversaries can invade the network. In addition, majority of these smart devices have numerous vulnerabilities that can be exploited to wreck havoc in smart homes. As such, a myriad of security schemes have been presented based on technologies such as bilinear pairing operations, public key infrastructure, blockchains and elliptic curve cryptosystems. However, some of these protocols are not robust against conventional smart home attacks. In addition, some of the deployed techniques inadvertently result in excessive processing at the smart devices. It is, therefore, imperative that provably secure protocols be developed to offer efficiency and sufficient protection to the exchanged packets. In this paper, an elliptic curve symmetric key-based algorithm for secure message forwarding is presented. Formal security verification is executed using the Burrows–Abadi–Needham (BAN) logic which demonstrates strong mutual authentication and session negotiation among the communicating entities. In addition, the informal security analysis carried out shows the robustness of this scheme under the Canetti–Krawczyk threat model. Moreover, it is relatively efficient in terms of storage, communication, energy and computation requirements. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.