Applying Lightweight Elliptic Curve Cryptography ECC to Smart Energy IoT Platforms Based on the CoAP Protocol

Abstract

AbstractNowadays, Morocco has adhered to a policy aimed at modernizing its cities in terms of smart city and green city to improve the quality of life, protect the environment, and compete with the world’s major cities in this promising field. In this perspective, our current work revolves around the innovation of smart cities via new technologies of interconnection between objects and man in maximum respect that possible of the environment and especially the air quality.The rate of innovation in creating smart cities will make it feasible to bring IoT technology into cities development. In this article, we develop a smart and secure IoT platform to monitor and control the energy consumption of any area in a smart city. From this, we used the CoAP and MQTT application protocols for data transfer from the Smart meters to the webserver. So, to optimize the performance of our platform, we’re going to explore several topologies, including: STAR, TREE, MESH and CLUSTER. Ultimately, to overcome existing limitations related to key management and data transformation security by CoAP and MQTT protocols in each topology, we proposed an effective and secure communication protocol to establish a secure session key between IoT devices and the remote server, using the elliptical curve cryptography (ECC/SHA256) that we compared with another RSA/SHA256 (Rivest–Shamir–Adleman) communication protocol in terms of execution time and memory consumption to see the suitability and performance of the platform and infer the best secure topology in our smart city.KeywordsSmart citySmart gridCoAPMQTTInternet of Things (IoT)ECC/SHA256RSA/SHA256Security