Novel lightweight signcryption-based key distribution mechanisms for MIKEY

Multimedia Internet KEYing (MIKEY) is a standard key management protocol, used to set up common secrets between any two parties for multiple scenarios of communications. As MIKEY becomes widely deployed, it becomes worthwhile to not confine its applications to real-time or other specific applications, but also to extend the standard to other scenarios as well. For instance, MIKEY can be used to secure key establishment in the Internet of Things. In this particular context, Elliptic Curve Cryptography-based (ECC) algorithms seem to be good candidate to be employed by MIKEY, since they can support equivalent security level when compared with other recommended cryptographic algorithms like RSA, and at the same time requiring smaller key sizes and offering better performance. In this work, we propose novel lightweight ECC-based key distribution extensions for MIKEY that are built upon a previously proposed certificateless signcryption scheme. To our knowledge, these extensions are the first ECC-based MIKEY extensions that employ signcryption schemes. Our proposed extensions benefit from the lightness of the signcryption scheme, while being discharged from the burden of the public key infrastructure (PKI) thanks to its certificateless feature. To demonstrate their performance, we implemented our proposed extensions in the Openmote sensor platform and conducted a thorough performance assessment by measuring the energy consumption and execution time of each operation in the key establishment procedure. The experimental results prove that our new MIKEY extensions are perfectly suited for resource-constrained devices.