A security gateway application for End-to-End M2M communications

•The SGA is first proposed to improve the GA of the ITU-T M2M service layer in the IoT reference model;•Secure Exchange Key scheme is used among smart devices and SGA server for secure E2E M2M communication in IoTs;•Lightweight symmetric key cryptographic negotiation function is first proposed;•The proposal functions of the SGA in this paper are suitable to be a new standard interface because their meet the basic security requirements of the M2M service layer.

M2M (Machine-to-Machine) communication for the Internet of Things (IoTs) system is considered to be one of the major issues in future networks. Considering the characteristics of M2M networks in IoTs systems, traditional security solutions are not able to be applied to E2E (End-to-End) M2M networks because the M2M network itself is vulnerable to various attacks. We consider security aspects for M2M communications and then propose a security gateway application (SGA) including the lightweight symmetric key cryptographic negotiation function, secure E2E M2M key exchange generation function and secure E2E M2M messages delivery function. The proposal of the SGA is newly suggested to improve the gateway application (GA) of the ITU-T M2M service layer in the IoTs reference model. We prove that it could prevent various attacks via the theoretical security analyses. Therefore, it could meet the basic security requirements of the M2M service layer.