Enhanced Light-Weight Key Distribution Protocol to Secure from MITM Attack

摘要

The present invention relates to a lightweight key distribution protocol safe from a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack in an advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) environment. A gateway and a node generate a pair-wise key generation element and an integrity verification element, generate hash information using the integrity verification element and respective identification (IDs), concatenate the hash information with the ID and the pair-wise key generation element, exchange the concatenated result with each other, and generate a pair-wise key by using the received pair-wise key generation element and second pair-wise key generation element generated by themselves. A gateway concatenates the pair-wise key, which is generated by itself, with the hash information and the pair-wise key generation element received from the node, and transmits the concatenated result to the node. Then, the node concatenates the pair-wise key, hash information, and pair-wise key generation element, which are generated by itself, with one another, hashes the concatenated result, and compares the hashed result with transmitted information. When the compared results are the same, the node receives the pair-wise key generated by itself, transmits the generated hash information, which is formed to be used for verification, to the gateway, compares the hash information received by the gateway with the hash information generated by itself, and receives the pair-wise key generated by itself, when they are the same. According to the invention, even when the transmitted data is transmitted in a plain-text form, an attacker cannot be aware of the pair-wise key generation element. Therefore, the attacker cannot change the hash information for integrity verification. Furthermore, since only one pair-wise key generation element is transmitted, the attacker cannot generate the pair-wise key.