A Needle in a Haystack: Finding a Suitable Lightweight IoT Authentication Protocol and Improving Its Usability

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) comprises of networked computing devices that can sense and even actuate. It has been widely used in many applications such as smart cities, smart factories, supply chains, smart grid, and precision health. One of the key challenges in practice is to find a suitable lightweight authentication protocol with concerns of security, performance, compatibility, and usability for resource-constrained IoT devices. Due to the lack of security standards for such IoT devices, it is challenging to choose a suitable authentication protocol in practice. For example, many lightweight authentication protocols provide theoretical security analyses, but practical feasibility is not discussed. The integration between a new protocol and the existing standards is non-trivial. It is hence important to develop a novel paradigm for comparing and selecting lightweight authentication protocols considering both theoretical and practical factors. In this paper, we first show the importance and challenges of finding suitable lightweight authentication protocols. Then, we demonstrate how such a paradigm can be built with DTLS, describing a methodology of selecting a protocol and integrating with industry-standard libraries. In our demonstration, the protocol implementation is conducted not only on resource-constrained devices but also based on OpenSSL libraries. The result shows the feasibility, though with difficulties, to integrate a strong security protocol with the existing standards.