A Secure and Lightweight IoT Device Remote Monitoring and Control Mechanism Using DNS

Abstract

Many reports predicted that the number of connected IoT (Internet of Things) devices will reach to billions in the next several years, accordingly, how to securely and effectively manage, monitor and control them becomes a critical problem. In conventional IoT solutions, direct SSL/TLS based HTTP connections to IoT devices with high overhead are required and encryption is not considered due to low computing capability and memory capacity of IoT devices. In this paper, we propose an integrated mechanism using DNS (Domain Name System) to accomplish the objective. In the proposed mechanism, names or IDs of IoT devices are managed by DNS server and the monitoring and control are conducted by the collaboration of DNS name resolution, DNS dynamic update and DNS zone transfer. Considering the security and privacy protection, the status and control command for IoT devices described in the corresponding DNS TXT records will be encrypted and TSIG (Transaction SIGnatures) will be used for authentication to restrict the clients allowed to monitor and control the IoT devices.