Trust-based Mutual Authentication for Bootstrapping in 6LoWPAN

IPv6 over Low Power Wireless Personal Area Network (6LoWPAN) has emerged as a promising technology to realize ambient intelligence under the vision of the Internet of Things. Under most circumstances, it is imperative that security be addressed from bootstrapping to data transmission. In this paper, we propose a secure bootstrapping scheme that includes mutual authentication and trust evaluation to provide the first security measure for 6LoWPAN. The scheme is based on multi-hop cluster-tree hierarchical topology in which pairwise keys between neighboring nodes and trust paths to the base station (BS) are established at the same time. Mutual authentication that is based on pairing requires only the storage of one key and the exchange of IDs considering the computational complexity of public key algorithms and the frangibility of shared key protocols. Trust evaluation relies on multiple criteria to achieve security and energy efficiency and to balance the whole network. The BS also maintains a dynamic blacklist to prevent denial of service (DoS) attacks. Analysis shows that the proposed scheme is secure and scalable. The energy cost in terms of computation and communication as well as storage are also analyzed and compared to that of shared key protocols and public key algorithms through quantitative analysis.