An enhanced handover authentication solution for 6LoWPAN networks

Abstract

The rapidly increasing scale of the Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) over Low Power Wireless Personal Area Networks (6LoWPAN) and the limitation of communication range emphasized the importance of handovers. The Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) was designed to manage the mobility of sensing nodes with limited resources, which has specified plenty of criteria to resolve mobility issues. However, there are still some issues regarding the security of mobility. In this paper, we proposed a more secure and efficient PMIPv6-based handover scheme compared with existing solutions. It was designed to ensure an efficient and secure roaming in 6LoWPAN networks. In this work, the initial authentication on a mobile node works based on a non-interactive zero-knowledge proof. And a session key chain established between the mobile node and the mobile access gateway is generated according to the direction of the node's movement. Therefore, when one node moves to a new domain, a full authentication on the node is not necessary so that secure and seamless handovers among different domains can be realized compared with other schemes. With this protocol, the handover of mobile devices among stations will be more seamless, efficient, and secure. The logic correctness of the proposed scheme is proved by Protocol Composition Logic (PCL). Besides that, the proposal was formally verified and evaluated in terms of performance, which shows that the proposed handover scheme in 6LoWPANs could not only enhance the security functionalities but also be computationally efficient.