An Authentication Client Proxy mechanism for resource-constrained devices

The recent growth of Smart Grid and energy services introduced resource-constrained Internet communications devices such as smart meters, consumer electric devices, sensors, lighting devices and so on. In this paper, we propose a new proxy scheme designed for authentication and key establishment protocols for authenticating resource-constrained end-devices. The proposed scheme leverages key hierarchy in a way that the end-device can delegate the main protocol tasks of authentication and key establishment to the proxy and only a cryptographic and key management module including the root key of the key hierarchy needs to be retained by the end-device. The proposed scheme can reduce 70% and 28% of persistent storage for Class 1 and Class 2 memory-constrained devices, respectively. Also, the total memory reduction effect in the system consisting of a single proxy and multiple end-devices increases as the number of end-devices connected to one proxy increases.