Securing Device-to-Cloud Interactions in the Internet of Things Relying on Edge Devices

The Internet of Things (IoT) is not a traditional network, and this is the reason why it presents new and unique challenges such as identification, addressing, naming, authentication or authorization of constrained devices. Edge approaches rely on distributed platforms at the network edge serving as a bridge between the physical world (things and data sources, often very constrained devices) and the IoT-cloud services (digital services offered from full-resource servers in the cloud, often not real-time and bandwidth-consuming). The main contributions of this work are the specification of a new event-driven addressing approach for IoT relying on edge-centric delegation of authorization which appropriately adapts and extends the well-known OAuth 2.0 specification for the IoT and a novel approach for naming constrained devices in large scale scenarios that does not depend on the application domain or on the deployment and implementation details. Furthermore, the definition of the Enrolment and Action flows solving the most important challenges arising in the considered scenario: enrolment at the edge device, name-oriented networking, authentication, and authorization using access control tokens as a mechanism for transferring access rights from one agent (edge device) to another (constrained device).