E-HIP: An Energy-Efficient OpenHIP-Based Security in Internet of Things Networks.

Peter Kaňuch,Dominik Macko

doi:10.3390/s19224921

Peter Kaňuch, Dominik Macko

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/s19224921

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Abstract

The rapidly growing segment of the Internet of Things (IoT) makes the security threats more prominent than ever. The research around communication security and cybersecurity in such networks is still a challenge, mainly due to the typically limited energy and computation resources of IoT devices. The strong security mechanisms require significant power and thus the energy wastage must be minimized. Optimized application-specific security protocols are commonly used to make the data transfer more efficient, while still offering a high level of security. The supported security features, such as confidentiality, integrity or authenticity, should not be affected by the optimization. Our work is focused on optimizing one of the existing security protocols for the use in the IoT area, namely the Host Identity Protocol (HIP). Based on the analysis of related works, we have identified multiple possibilities for optimization and combined some of them into the proposed E-HIP optimized protocol. For verification purpose, it has been implemented as a modification of the open-source OpenHIP library and applied on a communication between real hardware devices. The secured communication worked correctly. The resulting effect of the proposed optimization has been evaluated experimentally and it represents an increase in energy efficiency by about 20%. Compared to other HIP optimizations, the achieved results are similar; however, the proposed optimizations are unique and can be further combined with some of the existing ones to achieve even higher efficiency.

Highlights

An ever increasing number of interconnected devices, creating the Internet of Things (IoT) [1], raises big concerns, especially from the security point of view
It is a modification of an open-source implementation of the Host Identity Protocol (HIP) protocol, named OpenHIP (Source code: https://github.com/rektide/openhip, version: openhip-0.9) [23]
The experimental setup consisted of the Raspberry Pi 3 (RP) microcomputer with the Raspbian operating system, representing the IoT end device and the laptop computer, representing the cloud server

Summary

Introduction

An ever increasing number of interconnected devices, creating the Internet of Things (IoT) [1], raises big concerns, especially from the security point of view. Each HIP device has at least one host cryptographic identifier (it can have multiple identifiers), which enables to offer strong security features, such as authenticity, confidentiality, integrity and protection against various security threats (e.g., denial-of-service or man-in-the-middle attacks) [24]. These identifiers are not sent in the HIP messages but rather a 128-bit hash value is used, called Host Identity.

Results

Discussion

Conclusion