Automatic Key Management Research Articles

Secure and energy-efficient smart building architecture with emerging technology IoT

With the advent of the Internet-of-Things (IoT), it is considered to be one of the latest innovations that offer interesting opportunities for different vertical industries. One of the most relevant IoT technology areas is smart construction. IoT operates in several sectors on a daily basis; implementation includes smart building, smart grids, smart cities, smart houses, physical defense, e-health, asset, and transportation management, but it is not restricted to this. Support from smart IoT buildings is an IoT-level, connected, and cost-effective system. Commercial space has major requirements in terms of comfort, accessibility, security, and energy management. Such requirements can be served organically by IoT-based systems. As the supply of energy has been exhausted and energy demand has risen, there has been a growing focus on energy usage and the maintenance of buildings. With the use of evolving IoT technology, we present a secure and energy-efficient smart building architecture. Every device is known by its unique address, and one of the key web transfer protocols is the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP). It is an application layer protocol that does not use protected channels for data transfer. Automatic key management, confidentiality, authentication, and data integrity are all features of the Datagram Transport Layer Protection (DTLS). To achieve energy efficiency, we propose a smart construction architecture that, through IoT, manages the performance of all technological systems. The results of the simulation show that the energy consumption is lowered by about 30.86% with the use of the CoAP in the smart building, which is less than the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport case (MQTT). This paper also aims to observe how to integrate the DTLS protocol with the Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA-256) using optimizations from the Certificate Authority (CA) to improve security.

Cooperative Demand Response Framework for a Smart Community Targeting Renewables: Testbed Implementation and Performance Evaluation

Demand response (DR) is emerging as the workhorse of achieving energy efficiency and reducing our carbon footprint, which persists as a major challenge amongst all the different energy-chain players, i.e., the utility providers, policy makers, consumers, and the technology sector. For instance, the Internet-of-Things (IoT) paradigm and network-enabled appliances/devices have escalated the expectations of what technology could do for the acceptance of DR programs. In this work, we design, deploy on a scalable pilot testbed, and evaluate a collaboration-based approach to the demand-side management of a community of electricity consumers that jointly targets green consumption. The design of the framework architecture is centralized via the so-called aggregator, which optimizes the demand scheduled by consumers along with their time frame preferences towards the maximization of the consumption of renewables. On the pilot, we opt for lightweight, yet efficient platforms such as Raspberry Pi boards, and evaluate them over a series of network protocols, i.e., MQTT-TLS and CoAP-DTLS, paying special attention to the security and privacy of the communications over Z-Wave, ZigBee, and WiFi. The experiments conducted are configured using two active Living Labs datasets from which we extract three community scenarios that vary according to the flexibility or rigidity of the appliances’ operation time frame demand. During the performance evaluation, processing and communication overheads lie within feasible ranges, i.e., the aggregator requires less than 2 s to schedule a small consumer community with four appliances, whereas the latency of its link to households’ controllers adds less than 100 ms. In addition, we demonstrate that our implementations running over WiFi links and UDP sockets on Raspberry Pi 4 boards are fast, though insecure. By contrast, secure CoAP (with DTLS) offers data encryption, automatic key management, and integrity protection, as well as authentication with acceptable overheads.

TinyIKE: Lightweight IKEv2 for Internet of Things

There is unanimous consensus that cyber security in the Internet of Things (IoT) is necessary. In cyber security, key establishment is one of the toughest problems. It is even more challenging in resource-constrained but Internet-connected IoT devices that use low-power wireless communication. A number of IoT communication protocols define cryptographic mechanisms for confidentiality and integrity services but do not specify key management. For example, IEEE 802.15.4, RPL, and object security all rely on external key management protocols. Due to the lack of automatic key management support, IoT devices either end up using preshared keys or no security at all. In this paper, we overcome these challenges and present TinyIKE, a lightweight adaptation of Internet Key Exchange version 2 (IKEv2) for the IoT. Using TinyIKE, we solve the key establishment problem for multiple IoT protocols using a single IKEv2-based solution. We implement TinyIKE for resource-constrained IoT devices that run the Contiki OS. The TinyIKE implementation supports full certificate-based IKEv2 that uses elliptic curve cryptography. In order to ensure the feasibility of TinyIKE in the IoT, we perform an extensive evaluation of TinyIKE using a setup consisting of real IoT hardware.

Simplifying key management in electronic fund transfer point of sale systems

In the letter we will consider some of the security problems that arise within a large electronic fund transfer point of sale (EFTPOS) system, paying particular attention to the difficulties of key management. In particular, we will introduce the concept of a transaction key which provides automatic key management at almost no extra cost.