Enhanced Datagram Transport Layer Security Protocol for IoT Environment
Noor Ul Arfeen, Institute of Computer Sciences and Information Technology (ICS/IT), The University of Agriculture Peshawar, Pakistan.
Javed Iqbal Bangash, Institute of Computer Sciences and Information Technology (ICS/IT), The University of Agriculture Peshawar, Pakistan.
Salman Ahmed, Secured IoT Devices Lab, University of Engineering & Technology, Peshawar, Pakistan.
Waseem Ullah Khan, Secured IoT Devices Lab, University of Engineering & Technology, Peshawar, Pakistan.
Lala Rukh, Institute of Computer Sciences and Information Technology (ICS/IT), The University of Agriculture Peshawar, Pakistan.
Corresponding Author:
Waseem Ullah Khan (waseem@uetpeshawar.edu.pk)
Abstract:
The Internet of Things (IoT) technology is rapidly growing by connecting billions of devices to other devices and to the Internet. In the coming years, IoT is likely to be regularly interwoven into our environment, and the humans will be totally dependent on this technology for convenience and an easy mode of living. There is currently no standard protocol for securing communication among them. IoT devices are resource constrained devices having limited computing power and memory. Due to constrained nature, these IoT devices are at the cost of a greater risk of data loss, security breaches and misuse. Conventional cyber security protocols developed for computing devices and networks cannot be easily deployed on IoT devices. A web transfer protocol i.e., Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) had been standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), which is specially designed for constrained networks, similar in functionalities to HTTP. To provide security to CoAP communication, the Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) protocol used. To start a secure communication, the DTLS first implement handshake process to establish secure session and negotiate same cipher suites. However, DTLS is vulnerable to DoS attacks. During the handshake mechanism, the DTLS cookie exchange process failed to handle the DoS attacks. In this paper, an enhanced DTLS Handshake authentication mechanism is proposed by reducing the possibility of DoS attacks. The results evaluated in terms of handshake time, energy efficiency and elapsed time. In order to simulate the proposed mechanism, simulation is performed using the Cooja simulator and Contiki-NG operating system.
Keywords:
Internet of Things (IoT); Security; CoAP; DTLS; Contiki NG; Cooja