Adaptation of n-out-of-n secret sharing scheme into IoT network

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) has become an established part of our daily lives by interconnecting billions of devices in diverse areas such as healthcare, smart home technologies, agriculture, etc. However, these devices are limited in memory, energy and computational capabilities. This creates a great potential for security issues to arise as being constrained prevents them from applying complex cryptographic algorithms. In this study, we propose a novel method to provide a low-cost and secure communication for constrained IoT devices. The proposed method is based on a n-out-of-n secret sharing scheme and mimicks the idea of visual cryptography in a digital set-up.Generally, when an IoT device communicates with an outer party, it establishes the communication by itself or through a mediary such as a central hub or gateway; which leads to single point of failure. Our proposed method aims for a distributed environment in which devices collaborate with each other and therefore divide the responsibility of sending a message into multiple devices, instead of just one device. Therefore, when a device plans on sending a message, all its neighbors send it on the behalf of this device. © 2023 IEEE.