Multi-party Key Establishment for Resource-Constrained Devices

Abstract

As the number of IoT (Internet of Things) devices continues to grow, ensuring secure communication among them has become increasingly important. Traditional pairing schemes rely on centralized architectures, which are vulnerable to temporary or permanent failures due to operational malfunctions of their central hubs or gateways. To address these challenges, decentralized communication is essential. However, existing decentralized pairing schemes suffer from high pairing times and significant computational overhead. Given the diverse capabilities of IoT devices, ranging from high-performance edge devices to resource-constrained sensors, many of these schemes become impractical in real-world scenarios. Therefore, we require a lightweight pairing scheme. Our goal is to design a lightweight and decentralized group key establishment protocol that ensures strong security guarantees while remaining scalable and efficient. Our approach aims to reduce pairing time and computational complexity, making it suitable for a wide range of IoT applications, from smart homes to large-scale industrial networks. Our approach builds upon concepts from existing works like Asynchronous Ratcheting Tree [9] and Extending Joux’s Protocol to Multi Party Key Agreement [5], which focuses on decentralized, secure, and scalable group pairing scheme for dynamic environment.