A Secure and Robust Scheme for Sharing Confidential Information in IoT Systems

• Main Authors: Bu, Lake, Isakov, Mihailo, Kinsy, Michel A
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 27-11-2019
• Subjects: Computer Science - Cryptography and Security
• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.1911.11934

Ad Hoc Networks, vol. 92, 2019 - Special Issue on Security of
IoT-enabled Infrastructures in Smart Cities In Internet of Things (IoT) systems with security demands, there is often a
need to distribute sensitive information (such as encryption keys, digital
signatures, or login credentials, etc.) among the devices, so that it can be
retrieved for confidential purposes at a later moment. However, this
information cannot be entrusted to any one device, since the failure of that
device or an attack on it will jeopardize the security of the entire network.
Even if the information is divided among devices, there is still the danger
that an attacker can compromise a group of devices and expose the sensitive
information. In this work, we design and implement a secure and robust scheme
to enable the distribution of sensitive information in IoT networks. The
proposed approach has two important properties: (1) it uses Threshold Secret
Sharing (TSS) to split the information into pieces distributed among all
devices in the system - and so the information can only be retrieved
collaboratively by groups of devices; and (2) it ensures the privacy and
integrity of the information, even when attackers hijack a large number of
devices and use them in concert - specifically, all the compromised devices can
be identified, the confidentiality of information is kept, and authenticity of
the secret can be guaranteed.