A Survey on Certificate-Less Public Key Encryption for Authentication in a Smart IoT-Based LoRaWAN

Abstract

Key management and authentication are the two key components to make sure that the entities involved in communication process in Internet of Things (IoT) operate securely. Due to architectural as well as operational differences between a conventional network and an IoT network, protocols and techniques used in a traditional key management are not well-suited for IoT. Mutual authentication is one of the critical task to achieve in an IoT network as the entities are spread across wide area with limited memory capacity and battery power. This can be achieved with the implementation of certificate-less public-key cryptography (CL-PKC) in IoT. Many recent researches have been carried out about Long Range (LoRa) and Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) which are newly developed communication architectures focusing on communication over long-distance constrained with low-power factors and thus can be used in an IoT environment with utter efficiency and accuracy. Due to the nature of operations in Long Range Wide Area Network, the authentication method should be light-weight and easy to execute without adding much over-head to the network, which is why a certificate-less public key encryption for mutual authentication can be used. This survey aims to build a ground for research towards authentication algorithm with the certificate-less public-key cryptography (CLPKC) technique in a smart IoT-based LoRaWAN