Security analysis and advancement in zigbee communication

Abstract

The rapid growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) has led to an increased demand for secure communication protocols. This has highlighted the importance of addressing vulnerabilities in protocols like Zigbee, one of the prominent communication protocols used in the IoT domain. The purpose of this thesis is to analyse the security weaknesses of Zigbee and propose enhancements to mitigate these vulnerabilities. This research was built upon many extensive studies conducted to examine the security of Zigbee, and it involved reviewing various literature sources that identified potential vulnerabilities in the Zigbee protocol. Additionally, different methods for exploiting these vulnerabilities were analysed to understand better how they can be addressed. Zigbee is built on top of IEEE 804.1 and utilizes Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) encryption with a strong 128-bit key. This cipher has been thoroughly tested and proven secure. However, this research revealed that the weak point lies in key transportation and management within Zigbee. To address this issue, the proposed enhancements in this thesis focus on reinforcing security during key transportation by implementing Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) encryption during the network joining process. This approach aims to securely protect the network key against unauthorized access or manipulation. The proposed solution is evaluated in terms of its computational, energy, and communication overhead. The results demonstrate that the suggested approach brings about minimal additional demand. This research contributes to IoT security by offering an enhanced approach to safeguarding Zigbee networks. This ultimately reinforces the safety measures for both IoT devices and secure data transmission.