Towards an Efficient Datagram Transport Layer Security for Constrained Applications in Internet of Things

Abstract

The Internet of Things has profoundly modified the usual vision of protocols, particularly in terms of energy constraints. Low-power sensor networks are now one of the key enablers for the Internet of Things, where sensors will play a significant role in the future internet by collecting the surrounding context and environment information. Security is one of the most challenges in this type of network. The existing solutions proposed to secure communication in wireless networks are not suitable. The contribution of this paper is to reduce the cost of communication of the datagram transport layer security protocol DTLS and to improve the weakness of the cookies exchange in the handshake process against deny of service attacks. The proposed enhanced cryptography protocol is integrated into the constrained application protocol to reduce the cost in terms of messages and size taken by the security layer in each message. The evaluation of the proposed protocol is performed on the Contiki operating system, for the internet of things, and compared with the original version of the DTLS protocol. The results show that the enhanced DTLS protocol offers a good performance in comparison with the original version of the protocol in terms of packet overhead, handshake time duration, and energy consumption.
Copyright © 2016 Praise Worthy Prize - All rights reserved.