Lightweight secure key establishment to create a secure channel between entities in a crowdsourcing environment

Abstract

The concept of crowdsourcing uses shared intelligence to solve complex tasks through group collaboration. Crowdsourcing involves gathering information and opinions from participants who submit their data, or solutions, over the Internet using a specific program. Given that the communication environment for crowdsourcing platforms is the Internet, there is a significant opportunity for attackers to compromise the confidentiality and integrity of information and violate participants’ privacy. Despite the great benefits of crowdsourcing, concerns about security and privacy are growing and require attention. Unfortunately based on our knowledge, the schemes presented to preserve security and privacy in crowdsourcing are susceptible to security and privacy attack and have a high computational and communication overhead. Therefore, they are not appropriate for crowdsourcing environments. This paper presents an ultra-lightweight authentication and key establishment protocol based on hash functions. This protocol meets all security requirements, is invulnerable to known attacks, and imposes a very low network overhead. The security of the proposed scheme has been formally proved, depicting the resistance of the proposed scheme to different types of possible attacks. In addition, the robustness of the proposed scheme against potential attacks has been proven through Scyther’s automatic software validation tool. The performance evaluation ultimately demonstrated that the proposed protocol incurs significantly reduced computational and communication costs compared to previous schemes and is very suitable for the crowdsourcing environment.