Chapter 8 - Security for Smart Objects

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the communication aspects of smart object security, discusses the basics of smart object security and encryption, and reviews the security mechanisms in the IP architecture. Smart object security is an important issue as smart objects are used in situations where a security breach can have potentially disastrous results, as systems ranging from critical infrastructures to on-body and in-body systems are equipped with smart objects. Computer security consists of three properties that include confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Smart objects are physically distributed systems and are placed in physical locations where they can be tampered with. Thus the property of confidentiality must hold even for data stored on the smart object devices. For smart objects, integrity of the data is important as they can be used for a decision-making process that is external to the smart object network. For smart objects, which often use wireless radio communication, radio jamming is a threat to communication availability, which can be handled at the radio link layer and at higher layers. Network rerouting and secure channel hopping can also be used by a low-power radio to defend against jamming. To implement a security architecture, encryption is used to convert messages from plaintext into ciphertext, which is not readable by potential attackers. Several mechanisms for smart object communication security are available that include security models such as the resurrected duckling model that provide simple authentication and key distribution mechanisms and hardware-assisted encryption implementations that enable strong encryption support even for computationally constrained smart object microprocessors.