skip to main content


Title: CATComp: A Compression-aware Authorization Protocol for Resource-efficient Communications in IoT Networks
The Internet of Things (IoT) devices exchange certificates and authorization tokens over the IEEE 802.15.4 radio medium that supports a Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU) of 127 bytes. However, these credentials are significantly larger than the MTU and are therefore sent in a large number of fragments. As IoT devices are resource-constrained and battery-powered, there are considerable computations and communication overheads for fragment processing both on sender and receiver devices, which limit their ability to serve real-time requests. Moreover, the fragment processing operations increase energy consumption by CPUs and radio-transceivers, which results in shorter battery life. In this article, we propose CATComp -a compression-aware authorization protocol for Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) and Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) that enables IoT devices to exchange smallsized certificates and capability tokens over the IEEE 802.15.4 media. CATComp introduces additional messages in the CoAP and DTLS handshakes that allow communicating devices to negotiate a compression method, which devices use to reduce the credentials’ sizes before sending them over an IEEE 802.15.4 link. The decrease in the size of the security materials minimizes the total number of packet fragments, communication overheads for fragment delivery, fragment processing delays, and energy consumption. As such, devices can respond to requests faster and have longer battery life. We implement a prototype of CATComp on Contiki-enabled RE-Mote IoT devices and provide a performance analysis of CATComp. The experimental results show that communication latency and energy consumption are reduced when CATComp is integrated with CoAP and DTLS.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1642078 1351038 1952090 1723768
PAR ID:
10301198
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
IEEE Internet of Things Journal
ISSN:
2372-2541
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. null (Ed.)
    The Host Identity Protocol (HIP) has emerged as the most suitable solution to uniquely identify smart devices in the mobile and distributed Internet of Things (IoT) systems, such as smart cities, homes, cars, and healthcare. The HIP provides authentication methods that enable secure communications between HIP peers. However, the authentication methods provided by the HIP cannot be adopted by the IoT devices with limited processing power because of the computation-intensive cryptographic operations involved in hash generation, signature validation, and session key establishment. Moreover, IoT devices cannot utilize the HIP as is to communicate securely in the low power and lossy networks as there is a considerable communication overhead, such as packet fragmentation and reassembly, for exchanging certificates over a lossy link. Additionally, the use of static host identifiers makes IoT devices vulnerable to cyber espionage and user-targeted attacks. In this article, we propose an authentication scheme, P-HIP, that protects the identity privacy of an IoT device by enabling the device to compute and use unique host identifiers from networks to networks and sessions to sessions. To make the HIP suitable for resource-constrained IoT devices, P-HIP provides methods that unburden IoT devices from computation-intensive operations, such as modular exponentiation, involved in authentication and session-key exchange. Additionally, P-HIP minimizes the communication overheads for exchanging certificates in lossy networks. We implement a prototype of P-HIP on Contiki enabled IoT that shows P-HIP can reduce computation costs, communication overheads, and the session-key establishment time when used by low-powered devices in a lossy network. 
    more » « less
  2. Recent advancements in energy-harvesting techniques provide an alternative to batteries for resource constrained IoT devices and lead to a new computing paradigm, the intermittent computing model. In this model, a software module continues its execution from where it left off when an energy shortage occurred. Enforcing security of an intermittent software module is challenging because its power-off state has to be protected from a malicious adversary in addition to its power-on state, while the security mechanisms put in place must have a low overhead on the performance, resource consumption, and cost of a device. In this paper, we propose SIA (Secure Intermittent Architecture), a security architecture for resource-constrained IoT devices. SIA leverages low-cost security features available in commercial off-the-shelf microcontrollers to protect both the power-on and power-off state of an intermittent software module. Therefore, SIA enables a host of secure intermittent computing applications such as self-attestation, remote attestation, and secure communication. Moreover, our architecture provides confidentiality and integrity guarantees to an intermittent computing module at no cost compared to previous approaches in the literature that impose significant overheads. The salient characteristic of SIA is that it does not require any hardware modifications, and hence, it can be directly applied to existing IoT devices. We implemented and evaluated SIA on a resource-constrained IoT device based on an MSP430 processor. Besides being secure, SIA is simple and efficient. We confirm the feasibility of SIA for resource-constrained IoT devices with experimental results of several intermittent computing applications. Our prototype implementation outperforms by two to three orders of magnitude the secure intermittent computing solution of Suslowicz et al. presented at IGSC 2018. 
    more » « less
  3. Recent advancements in energy-harvesting techniques provide an alternative to batteries for resource-constrained IoT devices and lead to a new computing paradigm, the intermittent computing model. In this model, a software module continues its execution from where it left off when an energy shortage occurred. Enforcing security of an intermittent software module is challenging because its power-off state has to be protected from a malicious adversary in addition to its power-on state, while the security mechanisms put in place must have a low overhead on the performance, resource consumption, and cost of a device. In this paper, we propose SIA (Secure Intermittent Architecture), a security architecture for resource-constrained IoT devices. SIA leverages low-cost security features available in commercial off-the-shelf microcontrollers to protect both the power-on and power-off state of an intermittent software module. Therefore, SIA enables a host of secure intermittent computing applications such as self-attestation, remote attestation, and secure communication. Moreover, our architecture provides confidentiality and integrity guarantees to an intermittent computing module at no cost compared to previous approaches in the literature that impose significant overheads. The salient characteristic of SIA is that it does not require any hardware modifications, and hence, it can be directly applied to existing IoT devices. We implemented and evaluated SIA on a resource-constrained IoT device based on an MSP430 processor. Besides being secure, SIA is simple and efficient. We confirm the feasibility of SIA for resource-constrained IoT devices with experimental results of several intermittent computing applications. Our prototype implementation outperforms by two to three orders of magnitude the secure intermittent computing solution of Suslowicz et al. presented at IGSC 2018. 
    more » « less
  4. We propose and implement Directory-Based Access Control (DBAC), a flexible and systematic access control approach for geographically distributed multi-administration IoT systems. DBAC designs and relies on a particular module, IoT directory, to store device metadata, manage federated identities, and assist with cross-domain authorization. The directory service decouples IoT access into two phases: discover device information from directories and operate devices through discovered interfaces. DBAC extends attribute-based authorization and retrieves diverse attributes of users, devices, and environments from multi-faceted sources via standard methods, while user privacy is protected. To support resource-constrained devices, DBAC assigns a capability token to each authorized user, and devices only validate tokens to process a request. 
    more » « less
  5. IEEE 802.15.4-based wireless sensor-actuator networks have been widely adopted by process industries in recent years because of their significant role in improving industrial efficiency and reducing operating costs. Today, industrial wireless sensor-actuator networks are becoming tremendously larger and more complex than before. However, a large, complex mesh network is hard to manage and inelastic to change once the network is deployed. In addition, flooding-based time synchronization and information dissemination introduce significant communication overhead to the network. More importantly, the deliveries of urgent and critical information such as emergency alarms suffer long delays, because those messages must go through the hop-by-hop transport. A promising solution to overcome those limitations is to enable the direct messaging from a long-range radio to an IEEE 802.15.4 radio. Then messages can be delivered to all field devices in a single-hop fashion. This article presents our study on enabling the cross-technology communication from LoRa to ZigBee using the energy emission of the LoRa radio as the carrier to deliver information. Experimental results show that our cross-technology communication approach provides reliable communication from LoRa to ZigBee with the throughput of up to 576.80 bps and the bit error rate of up to 5.23% in the 2.4 GHz band. 
    more » « less