DTLS & COAP Based Security For Internet of Things Enabled Devices
D. UthayaSinthan, Merlin Balamurugan - · 2013
The Internet of Things (IoT) enables a wide range o f application scenarios with potentially critical actuating and sensing function, e.g., in the e-heal th domain. For communication at the application layer, resourceconstrained devices are expected to employ the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) that is current ly being standardized at the IETF. To protect the transmissi on of sensitive information, secure CoAPmandates the use of Datagram TLS (DTLS) as the underlying security protocol for authenticated and confidential communicati on. DTLS, however, was originally designed for comparably powerful devices that are interconnected via rel iable, high bandwidth links. In this work, we present Lithe ‐ a n integration of DTLS and CoAP for the IoT. With Lithe, we additionally propose a novel DTLS header compression scheme that aims to significantly reduce the ener gy consumption by leveraging the 6LoWPAN standard. Most importantly, our proposed DTLS header compression scheme does not compromise the end-to-end security properties provided by DTLS. At the same time, it considerably reduces the number of transmitted byte s while maintaining DTLS standard compliance. We evaluate our approach based on a DTLS implementation for the Contiki operating system. Our evaluation results s how significant gains in terms of packet size, energy c onsumption, processing time, and network-wide response times when compressed DTLS is enabled.