T-HIBE: A Novel Key Establishment Solution for Decentralized, Multi-Tenant IoT Systems

The Internet of Things (IoT) devices has evolved considerably in the past few years and is expected to grow exponentially in the next decade. This exponential growth makes key management in an IoT ecosystem very challenging. Traditional IoT systems are often centralized and grouped into an ecosystem. However, this type of centralized architecture is not always compatible with practical IoT deployments. This paper proposes T-HIBE, a secure key establishment and agreement solution for a decentralized multi-tenant IoT system with multiple security domains. T-HIBE relies on principles of identity-based cryptography for key transport between intra and inter-domain devices while avoiding the inherent key-escrow problem. Furthermore, we have demonstrated our proposed architecture on an ARM Cortex-M4 microcontroller and evaluated the performance to show that T-HIBE does not have a significant energy and performance cost.