Maximizing the Extensible Authentication Protocol Maximum Transfer Unit to Minimize the Authenticating Data Transmission in the IEEE 802.15.4 Networks

Securing Internet of Things is currently one of the most challenging tasks standing before the research community. Finding adequate combination of strong cryptography, lightweight computation and minimalistic data transmission with scarce energy resources and no maintenance times is very hard. This paper introduces new mechanism for IEEE 802.1X authentication scheme that has been previously extended for the IEEE 802.15.4 networks. The new solution has been designed to minimize the number of transmitted packets during the authentication process through maximization of the Extensible Authentication Protocol Maximum Transfer Unit. The results have been promising for the certificate based EAP Methods with reduction of around 10% of transferred packets for the EAP-TLS-RSA based methods and around 7% for the EAP-TLS-ECDSA based methods.