A Storage Centric Approach to Authentication on Internet of Things
Yosr BOUMAIZA, Hakan Aydın, Sedat Görmüş · 2018 2nd International Symposium on Multidisciplinary Studies and Innovative Technologies (ISMSIT) · 2018
Nowadays, the Internet of Things (IoT) is among the most important topics of research. It is essentially an interconnection of a great number of small devices over the Internet. These small devices are generally equipped with low power radios and suffer from numerous constraints, notably limited memory, limited power, and low computational capacity. Developing security mechanisms for such Internet enabled low power networks pose a real challenge. Authentication and access control are significant and critical functionalities in the context of IoT to permit secure communication between devices. For the IoT, it is not possible to carry out directly the classic security countermeasures since most of the existing mechanisms are designed for devices with higher computational capacity as compared to IoT devices. Security in IoT is often bootstrapped with the aid of cryptographic key distribution amongst devices. In this case, one of the greatest research challenges is to assure secure key storage via sensors taking their limited resources into account. This paper introduces an enhancement of the existing secure bootstrapping mechanism of the standard IETF 6TiSCH protocol in which a distributed data storage is used for the management of the authentication keys. With this distributed approach, the objective is to minimize the communication overhead of the IETF 6TiSCH authentication mechanism, enable an efficient authentication process and enhance energy efficiency of the network through holding the authentication parameters at the edge of the IoT network.