The Road to Privacy in IoT: Beyond Encryption and Signatures, Towards Unobservable Communication
Ralf C. Staudemeyer, Henrich C. Pöhls, Marcin Wójcik · 2018
Privacy requires more than just encryption of data before and during transmission. Privacy would actually demand hiding the sheer fact that communication takes place. This requires to protect meta-data from observation. We think that this feature is in particular useful and interesting for the Internet-of-Things. However, it requires strong cryptographic security mechanisms, like encryption of communication, to be in place. We motivate the need for strong privacy protection by highlighting privacy issues in a smart home use-case. We advance beyond encryption and discuss which existing techniques can be used to achieve unobservable communication. Then we describe the architecture needed to provide strong protection in this particular use-case. Lastly, we present the building blocks of the architecture we implemented so far on the Re-Mote sensor nodes running Contiki OS and sketch the computational and network overheads imposed by these techniques.