Abstract

In an internet of things (IoT) platform with a copious number of IoT devices and active variation of operational purpose, IoT devices should be able to dynamically change their system images to play various roles. However, the employment of such features in an IoT platform is hindered by several factors. Firstly, the trivial file transfer protocol (TFTP), which is generally used for network boot, has major security vulnerabilities. Secondly, there is an excessive demand for the server during the network boot, since there are numerous IoT devices requesting system images according to the variation of their roles, which exerts a heavy network overhead on the server. To tackle these challenges, we propose a system termed FLEX-IoT. The proposed system maintains a FLEX-IoT orchestrater which uses an IoT platform operation schedule to flexibly operate the IoT devices in the platform. The IoT platform operation schedule contains the schedules of all the IoT devices on the platform, and the FLEX-IoT orchestrater employs this schedule to flexibly change the mode of system image transfer at each moment. FLEX-IoT consists of a secure TFTP service, which is fully compatible with the conventional TFTP, and a resource-efficient file transfer method (adaptive transfer) to streamline the system performance of the server. The proposed secure TFTP service comprises of a file access control and attacker deception technique. The file access control verifies the identity of the legitimate IoT devices based on the hash chain shared between the IoT device and the server. FLEX-IoT provides security to the TFTP for a flexible IoT platform and minimizes the response time for network boot requests based on adaptive transfer. The proposed system was found to significantly increase the attack-resistance of TFTP with little additional overhead. In addition, the simulation results show that the volume of transferred system images on the server decreased by 27% on average, when using the proposed system.

Highlights

  • According to Gartner, over 20 billion internet-connected devices are expected to operate in 2020 [1]

  • To contribute toward strengthening the interoperability and dynamicity of internet of things (IoT) platforms, we suggest a method for transferring system images to IoT devices

  • To evaluate the performance of the framework proposed in this paper, we build a virtual IoT device based on QEMU to create an IoT platform and conduct experiments

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Summary

Introduction

According to Gartner, over 20 billion internet-connected devices are expected to operate in 2020 [1]. IoT devices is soaring [2], we predict that the total volume of system images that need to be transferred increases . This is why we think that the efficient use of network resource in an IoT platform is an important issue to deal with. A considerable number of research studies have been performed on reinforcing the dynamicity and interoperability of IoT platforms [4,5] These studies have suggested various meaningful ideas to efficiently make IoT devices perform new roles or actions beyond those defined during their initial deployment. As the number of IoT devices is increasing rapidly [2], the total volume of data that needs to be transferred in an IoT platform will increase

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