CloudPush: Smart Delivery of Push Notification to Secure Multi-User Support for IoT Devices

Abstract

Internet of things (IoT) with a cloud server has become popular nowadays and it’s going to be used in almost every aspect of human life. All devices will be connected to the internet and can communicate with each other where cloud plays an import role in the IoT environment. However, often cloud-enabled IoT environments have potential security risks and do not have multi-user support. In this paper, we discuss an IoT push messaging framework named CloudPush framework consisting of a client application, IoT devices, and a cloud system. In this framework, IoT devices can work on an ad hoc network and send event notifications to the client applications through the cloud. We show that CloudPush framework has vulnerabilities while maintaining multiple user accounts between a client application and IoT device in the cloud. The client application can receive unintended and unauthorized notification messages due to the lack of managing multiple accounts properly in the cloud server. To ensure stability in this framework while sending push notifications through the cloud by IoT devices, we discuss potential vulnerabilities and their solutions in this paper. We demonstrate that the aggregated throughput of CloudPush framework is 12-15% better than IoTivity framework even though IoTivity does not support multi-user for an IoT resource and a client application. If IoT device’s events are sent to multiple client applications i.e. events are distributed among client applications, then the throughput of CloudPush framework increases to 12-25% compared with the IoTivity framework because the CloudPush framework runs optimized searching algorithm in cloud and scales event notifications in both cloud server and cloud push service layer. For a secured multi-user support, notification message data is encrypted that makes the CloudPush system 3-5% slower but still, it performs 9-12% better than the IoTivity framework.