Beyond the smart things: Towards the definition and the performance assessment of a secure architecture for the Internet of Nano-Things

During the last years, the interest in nano-technologies and nanoscale communications significantly growth in several application domains, such as healthcare, bio-medicine, agro-food, industry, and military/defense. Nano-scale devices are able to interact with each others, with existing communication networks and, ultimately, with the Internet. As a result, the well-known Internet of Things paradigm is extending its functionalities at the nano-scale, thus paving the way for the revolutionary Internet of Nano-Things concept, which goes beyond the already diffused "smart things" towards real application of 'smart nano-things - . In this context, many research initiatives are addressing the definition of efficient, secure, scalable, and reliable network architectures at the nano-scale. In order to provide a valuable step ahead of the current state of the art, the work presented herein investigates a novel methodology through which securing an Internet of Nano-Things architecture, by jointly offering the reliability of connected devices and the protection of transmitted data. From the communication perspective, the proposed approach leverages both molecular diffusion and electromagnetic-based communication schema. In such a hybrid approach, parameter settings and message exchange is properly devised to effectively achieve the aforementioned security services. Finally, the impact that security functionalities have on the performance of a reference Internet of Nano-Things scenario (i.e., expressed in terms of packet loss ratio, communication latencies, and message processing overhead) is evaluated through Nano-Sim and N3Sim tools. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.