TLS-Level Security for Low Power Industrial IoT Network Infrastructures

Abstract

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) enables communication services between machinery and cloud to enhance industrial processes e.g. by collecting relevant process parameters or providing predictable maintenance. Since the data is often origin from critical infrastructures, the security of the data channel is the main challenge, and is often weakened due to limited compute power and energy availability of battery-powered sensor nodes. Lightweight alternatives to standard security protocols avoid computationally intensive algorithms, however, they do not provide the same level of trust as established standards such as Transport Layer Security (TLS). In this paper, we propose an IIoT network system that enables a secure end-to-end IP communication between ultra-low-power sensor nodes and cloud servers. It provides full TLS support to ensure perfect forward secrecy by using hardware accelerators to reduce the energy demand of the security algorithms. Our results show that the energy overhead of the TLS handshake can be significantly reduced to enable a secure IIoT infrastructure with a reasonable battery lifetime of the edge devices.