CoSMT-LC: Secure Collaborative Marine Traffic Management Using Lightweight Cryptography

Demand for IoT-based technologies for port management and vessel tracking has grown due to the swift digitalisation of maritime operations. However, numerous of the existing marine security frameworks in use today are still ineffective as they require a lot of computing and storage power and lack the ability to safeguard against threats including replay, impersonation, key compromise, and insider attacks. To overcome these limitations, CoSMT-LC enables secure, economical, and biometric-assisted mutual authentication through the integration of elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), fuzzy extractors, and hash-based authentication. The robustness of the proposed protocol is verified through the Real-Or-Random (ROR) model and the Scyther verification tool. Implementation results using the MIRACL SDK show that CoSMT-LC reduces computational cost by 42.6% and communication overhead by 38.4% compared with leading protocols, providing a secure and scalable foundation for future maritime traffic management systems.