Secure communication and firewall architecture for IoT applications

TLDR: A novel secure communication and firewall architecture suitable for IoT applications is proposed, based on the idea of off-loading computational load from IoT devices by introducing a server entity in the network, which is compared with the state of the art DTLS protocol defined by the IETF.

Abstract: Internet of Things (IoT) enables global connectivity to remote smart devices. This technology involves sensing, communication, and processing of real time data received from billions of connected devices with minimal human intervention. The exposure to the Internet and constraints in IoT devices, typically limited memory, low processing ability, and mostly battery based operations make them vulnerable to various attacks. These attacks include but are not limited to Denial of Service (DOS), Man-in-Middle(MIM), Sybil and flooding attacks. Security becomes vital in IoT applications as they are expected to interact with the physical world, especially in safety critical applications like health, defense, automobiles etc. The traditional security model for Internet applications is not suitable for IoT, as it is mostly non-realtime and non-safety critical. Further, end-nodes are not considered to be energy-constrained devices in this model. Therefore, it is important to have alternative solutions that provide meaningful security to IoT devices/applications. In this paper we propose a novel secure communication and firewall architecture suitable for IoT applications. It is based on the idea of off-loading computational load from IoT devices by introducing a server entity in the network. Further, we also discuss design of protocol, entity states and other implementation details. In the end, we compare our solution with the state of the art DTLS protocol (RFC 6347) defined by the IETF.