International Association
for Cryptologic Research

We show that the key agreement scheme [IEEE Internet Things J., 9(12), 2022, 9918--9933] is flawed. In order to authenticate each other, all participants use message authentication code (MAC) to generate tags for exchanged data. But MAC is a cryptographic technique which requires that the sender and receiver share a symmetric key. The scheme tries to establish a new shared key by using an old shared key, which results in a vicious circle. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time to discuss such a flaw in the related literatures.