A design of the lightweight key management system for multi-level embedded devices

Abstract

Embedded devices often face security risks such as device loss, cracking, key disclosure and side-channel attacks. Owing to the relative meagreness characterising the availability of computing as well as storage resources, it might be said that embedded devices themselves have limited resources, and traditional key management solutions are thus not fully suitable for embedded device usage scenarios. In addition, embedded device key management also necessitates consideration of the dynamic changes of devices, such as device joining and withdrawal, and blacklist management and control. A lightweight key management scheme is proposed for multi-layer embedded devices, and the management and control problems of the device blacklist library are analysed and an optimisation scheme is proposed. Finally, the scheme of this paper is analysed in detail based on the aspects of security and resource overhead. Compared with the traditional key management scheme, the scheme designed in this paper can be better applied to the communication of embedded devices to meet the security requirements of embedded systems.