Ensuring Secure Communication from an IoT Edge Device to a Server Through IoT Communication Protocols

Abstract

The Internet of things (IoT) is seen as one of the next Internet revolutions. More and more IoT devices are connecting to the Internet. These devices sense the physical world and perform some tasks in response to events occurring. Such devices are identified through unique IP addresses and often have to send data which might be sensitive and confidential over the network. Thus, the security of the data packets sent by IoT devices over the Internet has to be considered. The Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) supports the RESTful HTTP functionalities and has been proposed specifically for IoT devices which are characterized by low processing power and energy. However, CoAP uses UDP protocol and must rely on the Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) and sometimes on IPSec for security. In this paper, the focus has been on the practical evaluation of the different mechanisms that can be used to secure data packets being sent by IoT devices, to ensure that communication from the IoT node to the cloud/server is not compromised; and data is encrypted ensuring full end-to-end security. The IoT technologies communication protocols considered are transport layer and application layer protocols HTTP, CoAP, and FTP. A testbed was implemented which allow connectivity between a resource-constrained device, namely a Raspberry Pi, and a cloud server. Using this test bed, the different communication protocols for IoT secure connectivity have been assessed.