A Novel Secure Communication Scheme for ZigBee Mesh Network Based on Physical Unclonable Function

The existing ZigBee network secure communication protocols suffer from security defects and are not suitable for large-scale ZigBee mesh network. To handle the problems, this paper proposes a novel secure communication scheme for ZigBee mesh network based on physical unclonable function (PUF). Through the combination of certificateless public key cryptography (CL-PKC) on elliptic curve (EC) with PUF, the ZigBee devices in the proposed scheme do not need to store secret parameters. Besides, since the proposed scheme realizes mutual identity authentication and session key agreement without using bilinear pairing operations with high computational complexity, communication security of the scheme is ensured with low computation, storage, and communication overhead. It is proved that the proposed scheme can resist traditional external attacks such as replay attacks, man-in-the-middle attacks, and impersonation attacks, as well as physical attacks and replication attacks. The performance analysis results show that the proposed scheme has obvious advantages in security, communication overhead, and computation overhead, when compared with the existing benchmark methods.