Chapter 4 - Security for a regional network platform in IoT

Abstract

A regional network is a platform to provide a variety of Internet of Things services with local connections for sensor data sharing. To secure such a regional network, we identify design requirements and then propose a new framework called the Proactive Distributed Authentication Framework (PDAF), which utilizes identity-based signatures and encryption as the basic security primitives. In PDAF, the devices utilize their identity-based signatures to enable mutual authentication among them without relying on a regional network key server (RNKS). As a result, after automatic trustworthy registration, the devices can perform distributed access authentication, mutual authentication, temporary registration and authentication, and handover authentication independent of the RNKS. We implemented PDAF and conducted experiments on a regional network. The results showed that identity-based cryptographic algorithms are suitable for use in securing regional networks, since the computation times are kept at the hundreds of milliseconds level.