Secure Internet Of Things Communication Research Articles

Secure and efficient device‐to‐device communication in IoT: The DMBSOA‐enhanced MQTT protocol

AbstractThe Internet of Things (IoT) plays a crucial role in enhancing technology by facilitating data transfer, storage, control, and management across networks. Secure communication within IoT environments remains a significant challenge. This research aims to enhance IoT security by integrating Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) and MQTT‐Sensor Network (MQTT‐SN) protocols with the Dual Mutation‐Based Seagull Optimization Algorithm (DMBSOA). MQTT, known for its lightweight and dependable messaging, is widely used in the IoT community but is vulnerable to cyber‐attacks, particularly concerning privacy and authentication. DMBSOA, inspired by seagulls' foraging behavior, optimizes MQTT settings to enhance security, reliability, and performance. The proposed model dynamically adjusts key parameters such as transmission frequency, Quality of service (QoS) levels, and message size to improve energy consumption, throughput, end‐to‐end delay, and packet delivery ratio. A comprehensive system model is presented, comprising publisher, subscriber, and broker nodes, with security mechanisms integrated into the broker to ensure data integrity, authentication, and encryption. MQTT operates over Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), while MQTT‐SN uses User Datagram Protocol (UDP), catering to resource‐constrained devices and low‐power modes. The proposed technique attained throughput (68 kB), energy consumption (120 mJ), security level (96%), energy efficiency (98.80%), path loss (22 dB), end‐to‐end delay (35 ms), processing time (230 s) and packet delivery ratio (0.98). The DMBSOA‐optimized MQTT protocol demonstrates superior performance compared to these models, highlighting its potential to meet the evolving demands of IoT security. This research underscores the effectiveness of DMBSOA in enhancing MQTT protocol security and efficiency, providing a promising solution for secure IoT communication.

Exploring the fusion of lattice‐based quantum key distribution for secure Internet of Things communications

AbstractThe integration of lattice‐based cryptography principles with Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) protocols is explored to enhance security in the context of Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystems. With the advent of quantum computing, traditional cryptographic methods are increasingly susceptible to attacks, necessitating the development of quantum‐resistant approaches. By leveraging the inherent resilience of lattice‐based cryptography, a synergistic fusion with QKD is proposed to establish secure and robust communication channels among IoT devices. Through comprehensive Qiskit simulations and theoretical analysis, the feasibility, security guarantees, and performance implications of this novel hybrid approach are thoroughly investigated. The findings not only demonstrate the efficacy of lattice‐based QKD in mitigating quantum threats, but also highlight its potential to fortify IoT communications against emerging security challenges. Moreover, the authors provide valuable insights into the practical implementation considerations and scalability aspects of this fusion approach. This research contributes to advancing the understanding of quantum‐resistant cryptography for IoT applications and paves the way for further exploration and development in this critical domain.

Secure IoT Communication: Implementing a One-Time Pad Protocol with True Random Numbers and Secure Multiparty Sums

We introduce an innovative approach for secure communication in the Internet of Things (IoT) environment using a one-time pad (OTP) protocol. This protocol is augmented by incorporating a secure multiparty sum protocol to produce OTP keys from genuine random numbers obtained from the physical phenomena observed in each device. We have implemented our method using ZeroC-Ice v.3.7, dependable middleware for distributed computing, demonstrating its practicality in various hybrid IoT scenarios, particularly in devices with limited processing capabilities. The security features of our protocol are evaluated under the Dolev–Yao threat model, providing a thorough assessment of its defense against potential cyber threats.

Adaptive Approach to Anomaly Detection in Internet of Things Using Autoencoders and Dynamic Thresholds

The Internet of Things (IoT) represents a vast network of interconnected devices, from simple sensors to intricate machines, which collect and share data across sectors like healthcare, agriculture, and home automation. This interconnectivity has brought convenience and efficiency but also introduced significant security concerns. Many IoT devices, built for specific functions, may lack robust security, making them vulnerable to cyberattacks, especially during device-to-device communications. Traditional security approaches often fall short in the vast and varied IoT landscape, underscoring the need for advanced Anomaly Detection (AD), which identifies unusual data patterns to warn against potential threats. Recently, a range of methods, from statistical to Deep Learning (DL), have been employed for AD. However, they face challenges in the unique IoT environment due to the massive volume of data, its evolving nature, and the limitations of some IoT devices. Addressing these challenges, the proposed research recommends using autoencoders with a dynamic threshold mechanism. This adaptive method continuously recalibrates, ensuring relevant and precise AD. Through extensive testing and comparisons, the study seeks to demonstrate the efficiency and adaptability of this approach in ensuring secure IoT communications.

ECC based Authentication Approach for Secure Communication in IoT Application

Internet of Things (IoT) is an advanced applied science in recent years that enables communication among humans and smart components or among Internet-based components. Besides, IoT provides affiliation of physical and virtual elements that are fully controlled by different kinds of hardware, software, and interaction advancements. Though numerous methods of IoT offer many advantages to our day-to-day routine, it also possesses huge security weaknesses. The traditional methods are vulnerable to a huge range of attacks. Hence, establishing safe and effective security alternatives for the IoT environment remains as a main challenge and the major risk in this security solution is to transfer significant information in a secure manner. To address such limitations, an effective authentication approach named CHEK-based authentication methodology is devised for secure communication in IoT. The proposed authentication scheme consists of four steps and the authentication approach is developed by considering various security operations like hashing, encryption, secret key pairs, passwords, and so on. Moreover, the CHEK-based authentication scheme provides promising solution with minimum computational cost of 16.541 and minimum memory usage of 72.3MB.

A UAV-Assisted Secure Communication System by Jointly Optimizing Transmit Power and Trajectory in the Internet of Things

Secure communication technology has attracted more and more attention to improve the security of the Internet of Things (IoT). In this article, we discuss the maximum secrecy capacity problem for a mobile unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) assisted secure communication in IoT, where the UAV relays the covert information from the transmitter (Alice) to the legal receiver (Bob) without detection by an eavesdropper (Eve) though sharing the spectrum with the ground device-to-device (D2D) communications. Our design aims to maximize the sum secrecy capacity Bob received by optimizing the transmit power and the UAV’s trajectory jointly while guaranteeing that the normal communication behavior between ground D2D pairs is not affected. Therefore, we propose a jointly optimizing the transmit power and UAV trajectory algorithm (JOTUTA) based on the block coordinate descent (BCD) method. Specifically, we first transform the non-convex problem of transmit power based on a fixed UAV’s trajectory into a convex problem by D.C. (difference of two convex functions) programming. Secondly, we solve the problem of UAV’s trajectory optimization with given transmit power by the successive convex approximation (SCA) method. Experiments results show the effectiveness of JOTUTA and the advantages of improving the secrecy capacity are verified compared with existing work.

SecIoTComm: An Actor-Based Model and Framework for Secure IoT Communication.

Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystems are becoming increasingly ubiquitous and heterogeneous, adding extra layers of complexity to secure communication and resource allocation. IoT computing resources are often located at the network edge and distributed across many heterogeneous sensors, actuators, and controller devices. This makes it challenging to provide the proper security mechanisms to IoT ecosystems in terms of manageability and maintainability. In an IoT ecosystem, computational resources are naturally distributed and shareable among their constituency, which creates an opportunity to distribute heavy tasks to them. However, resource allocation in IoT requires secure and complex communication and coordination mechanisms, which existing ones do not adequately support. In this paper, we present Secure Actor-based Model for IoT Communication (SecIoTComm), a model for representing secure IoT communication. SecIoTComm aims to represent secure IoT communication properties and design and implement novel mechanisms to improve their programmability and performance. SecIoTComm separates the communication and computation concerns, achieving design modularity in building IoT ecosystems. First, this paper presents the syntax and operational semantics of SecIoTComm. Then, we present an IoT framework implementing the key concepts of the model. Finally, we evaluate the developed framework using various performance and scalability metrics.

Secure Communication Protocol for Arduino-based IoT Using Lightweight Cryptography

We witness massive implementations of the Internet of Things (IoT) in smart homes, smart buildings, smart vehicles, smart wearables as well as Industry 4.0 initiatives. Along with the massive adoption, IoT security has become more important and crucial in this case. Arduino, as IoT hardware platform, also requires enhancements on its security to ensure that data it transmits and receives is secured and has not been tampered in any way. Transmitting of IoT data and telecommand in plaintext is not secure. Securing transmission using traditional block cipher is computationally intensive for embedded-systems with low memory and computing power like Arduino. This research proposes a novel lightweight security communication protocol that is lightweight enough to run on the Arduino platform. The proposed protocol shall be utilizing a lightweight key agreement scheme, the SPECK lightweight block cipher, and BLAKE2s hash function. This protocol is designed to support telemetry and telecommand by using publisher-subscriber, which also is aimed to be extensible but straightforward for future enhancements. This research shows that a secure IoT communication protocol can be designed and implemented on Arduino devices and another IoT platform running Arduino core such as the ESP32. The performance evaluation of this protocol in Arduino Mega shows that the INIT phase's average execution time is 26.83 milliseconds. The key agreement is 13.50 milliseconds, and the encryption-decryption of telemetry and telecommand messages requires 25 milliseconds execution time. The protocol performance evaluation in ESP32 has an average execution time for INIT phase 44.63 milliseconds. The key agreement phase, 13.90 milliseconds, and the encryption and decryption of telemetry and telecommand messages requires an execution time of 17.10 milliseconds.

Covert Communication for Cellular and X2U-Enabled UAV Networks with Active and Passive Wardens

Cellular and X2U-enabled UAV networks are a promising network paradigm to support constantly growing Internet of Things (IoT) applications in 5G and beyond wireless networks, wherein X2U includes the UAV-to-UAV (U2U) and ground IoT device-to-UAV (G2U) communications. However, such networks pose a significant challenge to secure wireless communications due to the open and broadcasting features of wireless channels. Covert communication is an attractive technique to hinder adversaries (i.e., wardens) from detecting the existence of data transmission for guaranteeing secure IoT communications. This article investigates the covert communication issue for a promising network scenario consisting of a BS, UAV swarm, multiple ground IoT devices and wardens. Especially, each UAV/ground IoT device can select cellular or X2U communication mode according to a flexible mode selection scheme which can cover the cellular network and ad hoc network as special cases by setting a bias factor. We design two types of wardens: active wardens who not only detect the legitimate transmission but also jet noise to interfere with legitimate signals, and passive wardens who only detect the legitimate transmission. Cooperative jamming technique is further employed to resist the attacks of wardens. Then, numerical results are provided to explore the effects of the flexible mode selection and the number of wardens on the covert performances like covert capacity and detection error probability. We finally present a vision for future research in the cellular and X2U-enabled UAV networks.

Multilevel authentication protocol for enabling secure communication in Internet of Things

AbstractThe Internet of Things (IoT) is the domain of interest for researchers with exponential growth in technology. This article develops an authentication protocol based on the Chebyshev polynomial, hashing function, session password, and encryption. The proposed authentication protocol is named as proposed Elliptic, Chebyshev, Session password, and Hash function (ECSH)‐based multilevel authentication. For authenticating the incoming user, there are two phases, registration and authentication. In the registration phase, the user is registered with the server and authentication center (AC), and the authentication follows, which is an eight‐step criterion. The authentication is duly based on the scale factor of the user and server, session password, and verification messages. The authentication at the eight levels assures the security against various types of attacks and renders secure communication in IoT with minimal communication overhead and packet loss. The performance is analyzed using black‐hole, and denial‐of‐service (DOS) attacks with 50 and 100 nodes in the simulation environment. The proposed ECSH‐based multilevel authentication acquired the maximal detection rate, PDR, and QoS of 15.2%, 35.7895%, and 26.4623%, respectively, for 50 nodes with DOS attacks. By contrast, the minimal delay of 135.922 ms is acquired in the presence of 100 nodes and DOS attacks.

Secure IoT Communications Using HARQ-Based Beamforming for MISOSE Channels

In this article, we consider physical-layer security (PLS) of the Internet-of-Things (IoT) communications based on hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) protocols in multiple-input single-output single-eavesdropper (MISOSE) channels. Owing to the reciprocity of wireless channels, a negative acknowledge frame can be used to obtain the channel state information (CSI) from a source with multiple antennas to an IoT destination device, and this CSI of a legitimate link is used for beamforming for the next transmission round (TR). Therefore, a higher secrecy rate can be expected from retransmissions with beamforming based on the CSI as compared to the first TR without CSI. To evaluate the secrecy throughput under time-invariant and time-varying channels, connection and secrecy outage probabilities (OPs) are derived. By exploiting the characteristics of the OPs, we suggest an approximated secrecy throughput. We then consider the optimization of the approximated secrecy throughput considering the rate parameters for legitimate and eavesdropping links. With an alternating optimization approach, an algorithm to find convergent system parameters, i.e., the rates for legitimate and eavesdropping links, is proposed. Moreover, an asymptotic analysis with the large number of transmit antennas indicates an interesting behavior of the secrecy rate with regard to the number of TRs. The analytical results are verified by rigorous numerical simulations and they can serve as a useful guideline to those involved in the design of secure IoT communication systems with HARQ in MISOSE channels.

A secure and efficient authentication and data sharing scheme for Internet of Things based on blockchain

Internet of Things (IoT) is a network convergence of multiple intelligent devices and advanced technologies aiming at connecting and exchanging data over the Internet. IoT is extensively applied in consumer, commercial, industrial, infrastructure and military spaces. With the prevalence of IoT applications, security issues such as identity authenticity and data privacy are increasingly become critical concerns. Authentication and confidential data sharing are the important measures towards secure IoT communication and applications. Blockchain is a burgeoning technology supporting for efficient authentication and secure data sharing. A secure and accountable data transmission scheme based on blockchain has been proposed by Hong et al. recently. But this scheme has security weaknesses of impersonation attack, man-in-the-middle attack, replay attack, denial of service attack (DoS) and key compromise attack. Thus we put forward an improved scheme to overcome the identified security flaws. Our scheme is provably secure and performance analysis shows that our scheme reduces 15.34% computation costs and 40.68% communication costs compared with Hong et al.’s scheme. Meanwhile, we also compare our scheme with other three recent and related researches, which finally indicates that our scheme realizes a well tradeoff between security and efficiency.

WITHDRAWN: A novel RSS based light weight digital certificate and key generation scheme for coherent communication of IoT devices

The Internet-of-Things (IoT) will connect different types of cyber physical systems that are supported by different wireless transmission technologies, e.g., Wi-Fi, ZigBee, etc. However, the security protocols of those wireless technologies cannot be implemented to support seamless and secure IoT communications. Moreover, security protocols need to be light-weighted since some IoT devices have limited computation resources. In this research work, we propose a light weight physical-layer security-based authentication and key generation scheme The Internet-of-Things (IoT) will connect different types of cyber physical systems that are supported by different wireless transmission technologies, e.g., Wi-Fi, ZigBee, etc. However, the security protocols of those wireless technologies cannot be implemented to support seamless and secure IoT communications. Moreover, security protocols need to be light-weighted since some IoT devices have limited computation resources. In this research work, we propose a light weight physical-layer security-based authentication and key generation scheme to bridge different transmission technologies in IoT communications. In the studied scenario, a group certificate is generated based on physical-layer information, i.e., Received Signal Strength (RSS) for all legitimate IoT devices in a network. The group certificate is to support mutual authentication between any pair of IoT devices within the network. Furthermore, the proposed scheme also generates a session key for the authenticated pair of IoT devices for other purposes of security features. The proposed scheme also addresses the issue of access control for new IoT devices with a short-term session key generation process. Security analysis is provided to show the efficacy of the proposed scheme against eavesdropping and replay attacks. A tested based experiment is conducted to further demonstrate the RSS based value generation and distribution.

WITHDRAWN: Symmetric cryptography for secure communication in IoT

Abstract In science and innovation, material engineering is a diverse set of things or conceptual patterns, including postulates, research techniques, theories and criteria on what cnidarians improvements to an area. Smart devices are made by smart materials as well as smart materials made by such as carbon, fibre and graphene. Smart devices are interconnected to transfer the data. Graphene is one of the material to use in smart healthcare over IoT. Graphene's distinctive characteristics, its low energy consumption and the potential to sustain intense data speeds, can make it attractive in many modern IoT applications. The Internet of Things (IoT) is an evolving world-view in which the devices around us are interconnected to provide smooth, fast and efficient communication and contextual amenities. In the IoT, due to the limitless number of devices, each device cannot be authenticated in a short time. Similarly, receiving their authentication request at the same moment is hard. Therefore it is necessary to have a safe and efficient authentication system that authenticates devices in the context of resource-restricted IoT at once. This paper presents a novel and efficient cryptography based authentication over some advanced matrix techniques for the IoT which verifies the authenticity of the devices taking part in the communication.

Directional Modulation With Precise Legitimate Location Using Time-Modulation Retrodirective Frequency Diversity Array for Secure IoT Communications

Designing energy-efficient security techniques for Internet of Things (IoT) networks is particularly vital due to its limited battery capacity and the flow of information via broadcasting. In this article, we propose retrodirective frequency diversity array (RDFDA) based on directional modulation (DM) concept in a time-modulated way to enhance security in IoT. Different from the existing IoT security, in the proposed scheme, the prior knowledge of the intended receivers’ location is not required for the transmitter and no need of channel state information. Leveraging on this feature, we design time controlling switch sequences, which require a single radio frequency chain. To facilitate the DM operation in the proposed RDFDA, the connecting–disconnecting switching functionality for each element branch needs to be judiciously selected. Furthermore, we give insights on how the useful messages can be leaked along the eavesdropper (Eve) direction when an outage has occurred as well as Eve error detectability by analyzing the following metrics such as secrecy outage probability, Eve detecting error probability, and leakage rate of noncolluding Eves. Other metrics, such as secrecy energy efficiency, economic efficiency, and cost efficiency were also analyzed. We give numerical results to disclose the proposed scheme achievements.

Internet of Things: A Secure Cloud-based MANET Mobility Model

Connected devices such as Smart Home Automation Gateway, Smart Air Conditioners, Smart Hubs, Smart Thermostat, Color Changing Smart Lights, Smart Mobile phones, Smart Watches and Smart Tablets, etc. are omnipresent in our everyday lives and are becoming a valuable tool with wireless networking features using different wireless protocols commonly used. Access points allow interactions between users within an Internet of Things ecosystem infrastructure. These smart devices are automatically connected, and a network is formed by themselves. However, there are many challenges throughout this established network of its own for secure communication. Security has been perceived as a popular barrier to adopting the cloud model of internet realism. The storage and resource management may be in the cloud environment is a distributed structure that places the world in a raised situation with many concerns over its weaknesses, security risks and difficulties. Different participation parties have broadened those issues depending on the viewpoint and goal of each party. The author primarily addresses the causes of challenges and difficulties related to security, reliability, privacy and availability of services from the Cloud point of view. Connectivity Security has been identified as one of cloud computing's most critical issues where resolving such an issue would result in constant growth in the use and popularity of cloud computation. The purpose of this study is to build a mobile ad hoc network mobility model framework using cloud computing to provide secure Internet of Things communication between smart devices. The major contribution relates a new methodology to ensure secure communication with the 5G network of smart devices using the internet. The approach uses a desired study's accurate and effective simulation and can be applied in an Internet of Things structure. This research would create a new connectivity architecture to address the problem of secure communication between smart devices in 5G networking.

Internet of Things: A Secure Cloud-based MANET Mobility Model

Connected devices such as Smart Home Automation Gateway, Smart Air Conditioners, Smart Hubs, Smart Thermostat, Color Changing Smart Lights, Smart Mobile phones, Smart Watches and Smart Tablets, etc. are omnipresent in our everyday lives and are becoming a valuable tool with wireless networking features using different wireless protocols commonly used. Access points allow interactions between users within an Internet of Things ecosystem infrastructure. These smart devices are automatically connected, and a network is formed by themselves. However, there are many challenges throughout this established network of its own for secure communication. Security has been perceived as a popular barrier to adopting the cloud model of internet realism. The storage and resource management may be in the cloud environment is a distributed structure that places the world in a raised situation with many concerns over its weaknesses, security risks and difficulties. Different participation parties have broadened those issues depending on the viewpoint and goal of each party. The author primarily addresses the causes of challenges and difficulties related to security, reliability, privacy and availability of services from the Cloud point of view. Connectivity Security has been identified as one of cloud computing's most critical issues where resolving such an issue would result in constant growth in the use and popularity of cloud computation. The purpose of this study is to build a mobile ad hoc network mobility model framework using cloud computing to provide secure Internet of Things communication between smart devices. The major contribution relates a new methodology to ensure secure communication with the 5G network of smart devices using the internet. The approach uses a desired study's accurate and effective simulation and can be applied in an Internet of Things structure. This research would create a new connectivity architecture to address the problem of secure communication between smart devices in 5G networking.

LiKe: Lightweight Certificateless Key Agreement for Secure IoT Communications

Certificateless public-key cryptography (CL-PKC) schemes are particularly robust against the leakage of secret information stored on a trusted third party (TTP). These security features are particularly relevant for Internet of Things (IoT) domains, where the devices are typically preconfigured with secret keys, usually stored locally on the TTP for following maintenance tasks. Despite some contributions already proposed for the adoption of CL-PKC schemes in constrained IoT devices, current solutions generally require high message overhead, are computationally demanding, and place a high toll on the energy budget. To close this gap, we propose LiKe, a lightweight pairing-free certificateless key agreement protocol suitable for integration in the latest ZigBee 3.0 protocol stack and constrained IoT devices. LiKe is an authenticated key agreement protocol characterized by: 1) ephemeral cryptographic materials; 2) support for intermittent connectivity with the TTP; 3) lightweight rekeying operations; and 4) robustness against impersonation attacks, even when information stored on the TTP is leaked. LiKe has been thoroughly described, and its security properties have been proved via formal tools. Moreover, we have implemented and tested it on real IoT devices, in networks with up to 11 nodes-the source code has been released as an open source. Results are striking: on the OpenMote-b hardware platform, LiKe requires a total time of 3.259 s to establish session keys on each participating device, and at most 0.258% of the overall battery capacity, emerging as a lightweight and energy-friendly solution. Finally, comparisons with competing solutions do show the superior quality and viability of our proposal.

Self-healing group key distribution protocol in wireless sensor networks for secure IoT communications

The Internet of Things(IoT) aims to collect a large amount of data and exchange them over wireless networks by connecting billions of perception objects. Security becomes essential for IoT since unreliable wireless networks often create insecure connections. To ensure the group communication security and improve the communication efficiency, self-healing group key distribution (SGKD) protocols are introduced for unreliable wireless networks. In such scheme, lost session keys can be recovered from the current broadcast messages by the group members, instead of requiring the missing key updating messages to be retransmitted by the group manager. A lot of access-polynomial-based SGKD (AP-SGKD) protocols have been proposed. Unfortunately, almost all of them have secure problems. This paper proposes a new AP-SGKD protocol using double chains and access polynomial. The new protocol is the first AP-SGKD protocol which satisfies all basic security properties with optimal storage requirement. In addition, we propose a method to trade off the session key recovering time for less communication cost. The simulation results show that the new scheme can be applied to Zigbee network since it has a good performance on security, storage efficiency and communication efficiency.

Towards Secure IoT Communication with Smart Contracts in a Blockchain Infrastructure

The Internet of Things (IoT) is undergoing rapid growth in the IT industry, but, it continues to be associated with several security and privacy concerns as a result of its massive scale, decentralised topology, and resource-constrained devices. Blockchain (BC), a distributed ledger technology used in cryptocurrency has attracted significant attention in the realm of IoT security and privacy. However, adopting BC to IoT is not straightforward in most cases, due to overheads and delays caused by BC operations. In this paper, we apply a BC technology known as Hyperledgder Fabric, to an IoT network. This technology introduces an execute-order technique for transactions that separates the transaction execution from consensus, resulting in increased efficiency. We demonstrate that our proposed IoT-BC architecture is sufficiently secure with regard to fundamental security goals i.e., confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Finally, the simulation results are highlighted that shows the performance overheads associated with our approach are as minimal as those associated with the Hyperledger Fabric framework and negligible in terms of security and privacy.