Julia: fast and secure key agreement for IoT devices

ABSTRACTEven the most resource-constrained IoT devices need to communicate securely. In order to establish a secure channel, key agreement between the communicating parties is used. Today's key agreement protocols require at least three scalar multiplications in the handshake to achieve mutual authentication, forward and backward secrecy, and protection against key-compromise impersonation. As this is a computationally heavy operation, resource-constrained devices benefit from a lower number of scalar multiplications. In this paper we present Julia Key Agreement (JKA), a protocol that satisfies the aforementioned security properties using two scalar multiplications, and thus saves both time and energy. In addition, we define an optimized JKA that only requires a single scalar multiplication for a particular use case.