Dynamic coefficient symmetric polynomial-based secure key management scheme for Internet of Things (IoT) networks

Background: With the extensive application and continuous expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT), the access of a large number of resource-limited nodes makes the IoT application face a variety of security vulnerabilities and efficiency limitations, and the operating efficiency and security of IoT are greatly challenged. Key management is the core element of network security and one of the most challenging security problems faced by wireless sensor networks. A suitable key management scheme can effectively defend against network security threats. However, among the key management schemes that have been proposed so far, most of them do not take into account the efficiency in terms of connectivity rate and resource overhead, and some of them even have security risks. Methods: In this article, based on the symmetric polynomial algorithm, a dynamic coefficient symmetric polynomial key management scheme is proposed to better solve the IoT security problem. In this scheme, the nodes’ IDs are mapped into the elements of the shared matrix M by the identity mapping algorithm, and these elements are used to construct polynomials P(x,y) to generate pairwise keys. The communicating nodes have their own coefficients of P(x,y) and thus have higher connectivity. Results: The overall performance evaluation shows that the scheme significantly improves the resilience against node capture and effectively reduces the communication and storage overheads compared to the previous schemes. Moreover, the scheme overcomes the λ-security of symmetric polynomial key management scheme, and is able to provide a large pool of polynomials for wireless sensor networks, facilitating large-scale application of nodes. © Copyright 2023 Liu and Luo