LAUSR

Abstract An increase in the number of wireless and C-IoT device increases the dependency on the cellular infrastructure. Further, the integration of cellular technologies with IoT leads to challenges like network insecurity and data integrity. Although LTE has very strong data security and authentication mechanism it is not suitable for interoperability in a heterogeneous network. This limitation can be overcome with the development of a multilayer adaptable security protocol. In this paper, we present a three-level LTE based C-IoT architecture and identify the security issues and solutions for this architecture. The proposed Multilevel Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol (ML-AKA) is developed to secure communication in a multilevel IoT architecture. This proposed protocol is authenticated and validated by the Automatic Validation of Internet Security Protocol Application (AVISPA) and Automatic Cryptography Protocol Verifier (ProVerif) tools. The simulation result shows that ML-AKA is secured against different forms of system attacks. In terms of communication overhead, ML-AKA is more efficient than other existing D2D security protocols.