ESCI-AKA: Enabling Secure Communication in an IoT-Enabled Smart Home Environment Using Authenticated Key Agreement Framework

Smart home environments are a vital component of the larger ecosystem within smart cities, aiming to revolutionize residential living through the integration of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and advanced technologies. However, ensuring robust security and preserving privacy in these interconnected ecosystems present significant challenges. During the monitoring and controlling tasks in the smart home environment, diverse commands are exchanged between the IoT device and the user over the public Internet. The public Internet is open and vulnerable to various security attacks, which can corrode the monitoring and controlling operation of the smart home. In addition, conventional security algorithms are inappropriate for IoT devices deployed in the smart home. However, various pernicious security attacks are equally efficacious in the resource-limited smart home environment. Thus, various authenticated encryption schemes are proposed to enable security services in resource-constricted smart home environments. This paper presents a lightweight and efficient authentication framework for a smart home environment by leveraging the features of an authenticated encryption scheme and the hash function called “ESCI-AKA”. ESCI-AKA checks the authenticity of the user at the local device and exchanges three messages among the user, gateway, and smart embedded device for establishing a secure channel for indecipherable communication by setting a session key. In addition, we corroborate the security of the established session key through the random oracle model and informal security analysis. Moreover, the Scyther tool is employed for the security validation of ESCI-AKA. Finally, the performance comparison of ESCI-AKA and other eminent security frameworks explicates that ESCI-AKA requires low computational and communication costs while providing robust security features.