Lightweight Security Protocols for the Internet of Things

In this paper, a suite of lightweight security protocols for the Internet of Things (IoT) is presented. It comprises protocols for lightweight encryption, authentication as well as key management. The key management protocol is the application of our early work on information theoretically secure key management to IoT; it is computationally efficient and information-theoretically secure, and enables that every data item (file) is encrypted with its own random key. The security and computational efficiency of the proposed protocols are compared with those of IPsec, which is the most commonly used suite of network-layer security protocols in Internet based applications but not desirable, due to its computationally-intensive procedures, to IoT applications and cyber-physical systems (CPS) with resource and computation-capability constraints. The proposed security protocols can be employed in IoT and CPS applications, replacing the IPsec core algorithms or the whole IPsec suite, to achieve a higher level of security with a very low resource consumption that helps to maintain the system sustainability.