Distributed Group Key Management for Event Notification Confidentiality among Sensors

Abstract

There is an increasing involvement of the Internet of Things (IoT) in many of our daily activities, with the aim of improving their efficiency and effectiveness. We are witnessing the advent of smart cities, in which IoT is exploited to improve the management of a city's assets, as well as smart factories, where IoT is paving the way for the forth industrial revolution. These applications and many other ones imply several non-functional requirements to be satisfied by the adopted IoT solution, where security assumes paramount importance. Secure communications among the IoT nodes are strongly needed due to the use of wireless technologies that are easy to eavesdrop, in order to steal valuable information. Accordingly, confidentiality is a fundamental prerequisite, but the existing solutions based on transport-level encryption are ineffective, while the ones with application-level encryption may be too expensive in terms of energy consumption. In this work, we propose a series of solutions and methods to achieve confidentiality with end-to-end guarantees, by using group-based keys within the context of a clustered and distributed key management framework. We have implemented such solutions on top of TinyOS, and assessed their achievable quality by means of the TOSSIM simulator.