ECMHP: ECC-based Secure Handshake Protocol for Multicasting in CCN-IoT Environment

Scalability, heterogeneity, energy efficiency, cost-effectiveness, robustness, interoperability, and low latency data transfer are some of the critical challenges posed by the Internet of Things in the modern era of the Internet. Content Centric Networks (CCN) and Named Data Networks (NDN) are some proposed solutions that can meet the abovementioned challenges. In-network caching, multicasting, content security, and decoupling of data from location are the significant advantages offered by the CCN. Despite the diverse benefits of CCN, it has to face some significant problems, such as how the key management and distribution are performed among the consumers and key managers efficiently, how the node-to-node communication occurs, and how to provide services to the neighboring nodes while saving resources, etc. This paper proposes an Elliptic Curve Cryptography-based secure communication protocol supporting broadcast/multicast IoT data. Push-based data generation and transfer, typical requirements of IoT devices, have been integrated with the proposed protocol. The proposed communication protocol has been compared with existing protocols regarding computation and communication overheads as well as functional and security features. The proposed protocol has been evaluated in AVISPA and NS3 simulators for security and efficiency, and it is found that the proposed protocol outperforms the existing protocols in all aspects.