lwEPSep: A Lightweight End-to-end Privacy-preserving Security Protocol for CTI Sharing in IoT Environments

The Internet of Things (IoT) is vulnerable to a wide range of security risks, which can be effectively mitigated by applying Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) sharing as a proactive mitigation approach. In realizing CTI sharing, it is of paramount importance to guarantee end-to-end protection of the shared information as unauthorized disclosure of CTI is disastrous for organizations using IoT. Furthermore, resource-constrained devices should be supported through lightweight operations. Unfortunately, the aforementioned are not satisfied by the Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS), which state-of-the-art CTI sharing systems mainly depends on. As a promising alternative to HTTPS, Ephemeral Diffie-Hellman over COSE (EDHOC) can be considered because it meets the above requirements. However, EDHOC in its current version contains several security flaws, most notably due to the unprotected initial message. Consequently, we propose a lightweight end-to-end privacy-preserving security protocol that improves the existing draft EDHOC protocol by utilizing previously shared keys and keying materials while providing ticket-based optimized re-authentication. The proposed protocol is not only formally validated through BAN-logic and AVISPA, but also proved to fulfill essential security properties such as mutual authentication, secure key exchange, perfect forward secrecy, anonymity, confidentiality, and integrity. Also, comparing the protocol’s performance to that of the EDHOC protocol reveals a substantial improvement with a single roundtrip to allow frequent CTI sharing.