Lightweight serverless protocols for the internet of things. (Les protocoles de securite serverless legers pour l'internet des objets)
This thesis addresses the security and privacy challenges relevant to the resource constrained devices in the era of pervasive computing. Pervasive computing, a term coined by Schechter to describe the idea of computing services available anytime, anywhere and on demand, is characterized by seamless interactions between heterogeneous players in the Internet. This phenomenon allows intelligent chips, sensors or microcontrollers to be embedded into everyday objects to enable them generate, communicate and share information. Pervasive computing accelerates technological evolution by integrating small and resource constrained devices to the Internet arena, eventually opening doors to new services requiring seamless interactions and integrations with the existing technologies, infrastructures and services. The nature of the information generated, stored and shared by resource constrained devices may require proper security and privacy guarantees. Towards that end, the classical security solutions are not ideal candidates to solve the security and privacy challenges in pervasive systems for two reasons. First, classical security protocols require a lot of resources from the host devices while most of the pervasive devices have very strict resource constraints. Second, most classical security solutions work in a connected mode, which requires constant communication between devices and centralized servers for authentication and authorization purposes. However, pervasive devices may be working in isolated areas with intermittent network coverage and connectivity. Thus, it is ideal to come up with alternative solutions suitable for heterogeneous pervasive devices to smoothly interact, authenticate and securely share information. One of the suitable alternative solutions is the serverless protocols. The term "serverless protocol" refers to the mechanism of enabling centrally controlled devices to autonomously authenticate one another, or other heterogeneous devices, without an active participation of the centralized authentication or authorization servers. Serverless protocols prioritize on securing proximity communication between heterogeneous devices while optimizing on the little resources available. In this thesis, we tackle the challenges of pervasive systems by proposing lightweight and efficient serverless protocols for authenticating heterogeneous pervasive devices during proximity communication. Our proposed protocols derive their originality from the fact that they do not require the communicating parties to have prior relationships with each other, nor to have any previously shared authentication information with each other. Moreover, our proposed solutions incorporate context information to enforce automatic parameter expiry. This property is not supported by most of the earlier versions of the serverless protocol schemes, hence making them vulnerable to different attacks. Three novel contributions are proposed in this thesis. First, we propose a serverless lightweight mutual authentication protocol for heterogeneous devices. The first contribution includes a formal validation using the AVISPA tool. Second, we propose two complementing protocols using RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) as a core technology. The first protocol performs mass authentication between an RFID reader and a group of tags and the second protocol performs a secure search for a target tag among a group of tags. The second contribution includes two formal validations; one is done using the AVISPA tool and the other is done using the CryptoVerif tool. After a thorough study of serverless protocols, we propose our third contribution, a concise guide on how to develop secure and efficient serverless protocols relevant to the pervasive systems