Abstract
1- Introduction
2- Security of IoT devices
3- Cryptographic technologies and protocol standards for IoT
4- Comparison of cryptographic protocol standards for IoT
5- Conclusion and future research directions
References
Abstract
The Internet of Things (IoT) comprises physical/virtual networked objects that collect and exchange data with each other via the public Internet. As this exchange often takes place over public networks, many security attacks in an IoT environment are possible. First, we briefly review the security issues in the IoT environment. Next, we focus on recent cryptographic protocol standards that are in use or have been recommended for IoT devices to ensure secure communications. We also highlight the advantages and weaknesses of the several protocol standards for various IoT application scenarios including connected vehicles, health, smart home, and consumer appliances and devices. Finally, we discuss some challenges in the area of cryptographic protocol standards that still require to be addressed for IoT applications in the future.
Introduction
Recent advances in processors, storage, networking technologies, embedded systems along with improvements in software have covered the way for the new paradigm known as the Internet of Things (IoT). In IoT, many things with networking and processing capabilities communicate with each other locally or remotely using the Internet. In the IoT environment, a thing could be a virtual or physical object, a person or an animal attached with a unique identifier (i.e., device ID or IP address) [1]. A physical object may be a smartphone, sensor, camera, drone or vehicle, whereas a virtual object can be considered as an electronic ticket, book, wallet or agenda. In the future, it is expected that the majority of IoT devices will be smart in the sense that they can make decisions on their own. The IoT vision aims to provide direct merger of the physical world with Internet-connected computer based systems to improve efficiency and cost as well as minimize human involvement. Thus, the IoT ecosystem includes network users, computing systems and interconnected physical/virtual devices with sensing as well as actuating capabilities. IoT devices communicate with each other using the standard Internet communication protocol. The evolution of IoT in recent years continues to be shaped by research developments in various other fields such as smart sensors, Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID), and communication protocols [2]. Fig. 1 illustrates the basic three-layer architecture model of IoT which consists of three layers namely, sensing, network and application.