Research Area: Internet of Things
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a fast growing and rapidly evolving field. Everyday objects from smart home appliances (e.g. toasters and refrigerators) to health monitoring products (e.g. pacemakers and blood pressure monitors), to minuscule sensors and actuators, are being redesigned to be able to transfer data over a network. The connection of billions of these new objects to the Internet will cause a dramatic increase in the amount of shared data, which will simultaneously introduce a plethora of security risks. Understanding how to secure the data being sent over IoT links is necessary for the IoT paradigm to succeed. A popular data transfer protocol connecting IoT devices is the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP). We used an open-source implementation of CoAP along with Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) to implement secure data transfer between IoT devices. We studied the impact of DTLS on CoAP in the real IoT testbed we have developed using resource-constrained IoT devices and open-source software. Our tests showed that utilizing a CoAP-DTLS implementation with a symmetric key cipher suite resulted in noticeable performance costs. A secure connection with DTLS over CoAP used approximately 10 percent more energy than an unsecure connection. In addition, our latency tests revealed over a 100 percent increase in average latency time for secure messages compared to when no encryption is used. We also highlight some of the implementation challenges encountered while developing a real IoT testbed for secure experimentation.
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Author(s) Name: Farhan Siddiqui, Jake Beley, Sherali Zeadally, Grant Braught
Journal name: Internet of Things
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Publisher name: ELSEVIER
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iot.2019.100093
Volume Information: Volume 14, June 2021, 100093
