Extended Diffie-Hellman Encryption for Secure and Efficient Real-Time Beacon Notifications

Every computing paradigm involving communication requires new security protocols employing cryptography. For example, the Internet gave rise to TLS/SSL, and Mobile Computing gave rise to End-to-End Encryption protocols. In this paper, we address an emerging IoT paradigm involving beacons attached to things and security protocols associated with this new configuration. Specifically, we address the “Beacon Notification Problem,” a critical IoT paradigm aimed at providing secure and efficient real-time notifications from beacons to their owners. Since the beacon notification problem has not yet been formally defined, we begin by inspecting natural requirements based on the operational setting and establishing correctness, security, and privacy definitions through the use of cryptographic games. To resolve the beacon notification problem, we propose a novel cryptographic tool we call XDHIES, which is a considerable extension of available Diffie-Hellman encryption schemes. We then show a new notification protocol built upon XDHIES and we prove that this cryptographic protocol is secure and private and successfully meets all the above problem's requirements.