Hierarchical Heterogeneous Ant Colony Optimization-Based Approach to Generate Efficient Minimal Boolean Expressions for Rekeying in Authentication of IoT Devices

In today’s digital world, multiple digital devices are connected to the Internet with the help of IoT devices. An efficient scheme for access control is essential to safeguard IoT data from tampering and unauthorized access. Access control in a group is accomplished by generating a group key which is shared among a device’s group and its current subscribers. This enables the device to encrypt its data, and only the subscribers can decrypt it. Maintaining an efficient group key management technique in an active IoT environment remains a challenge because of the rekeying process. Thus, a competent group key mechanism must be introduced to reduce the overhead in group rekeying. To minimize the storage and overhead in group rekeying in a dynamic IoT environment, a hierarchical heterogeneous ant colony optimization Boolean expression evolver (HHACOBXE) algorithm is proposed to generate an efficient minimal Boolean expression. This approach has an ant manager at Level 2 that identifies the efficient minimal Boolean expression. The working ant agents at level 1 generate a minimal Boolean expression using an ACO-based approach and return the corresponding Boolean expression to the level 2 ant agent. The level 2 ant agent identifies the minimal Boolean expression having minimum keys. HHACOBXE identifies the best solution from a pool of minimal Boolean expressions obtained by a group of working ant agents. The advantage of the HHACOBXE algorithm is that the computational and storage overheads for IoT devices and servers are minimal compared to the existing group rekeying methods.