Securing Multicast Group Communication in IoT-Enabled Systems

Abstract

Current trend is being extended from the traditional Internet to the small, cheap, and low-power Internet of Things (IoT) in which the objects are being equipped with a device having computation and communication capabilities. As a result, all these objects can be connected to the Internet and have the capability to communicate among each other. This connection infrastructure among the objects would face different types of malicious attacks. Hence securing these objects is a primary goal. There are a lot of security mechanisms available today, but most of them are quite heavy in terms of computation and communication. As the IoT objects have very limited resources and mostly run on battery power, it is difficult to embed intensive computations on these resource-constrained devices. Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) protocol has been standardized to work in cohesion with the CoAP protocol to provide security. But DTLS does not fit well for multicasting, though it is a quite common need for IoT environments. Indeed there are some adaptations for DTLS protocol to function in a multicast environment, but it consumes much communication and computation resources. We propose a mechanism called S-CPABE (Segregated Ciphertext Policy Attribute-Based Encryption) based on CPABE, particularly targeting the multicast needs and tailoring to the IoT framework. The novelty of S-CPABE lies on providing equivalent security as CPABE with reduced resource requirements at the low-power end devices. This mechanism perfectly meets the needs for secure multicast in an IoT environment and consumes much less resources as compared to DTLS.