Compressed and distributed host identity protocol for end-to-end security in the IoT

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), as a key part of the Internet of Things (IoT), allow the representation of the dynamic characteristics of the physical world in the Internet's virtual world. Thus, sensor nodes are henceforth considered as Internet hosts and may act freely as web clients or servers. Undoubtedly, security and end-users privacy issues rise and become more severe in the IoT, due to the asymmetric nature of the communications between sensor nodes and the ordinary Internet hosts. Many solutions propose to use the classical IP-based security protocols for IoT, after adapting them to WSN's constraints by either messages compression or computational-load distribution techniques. In this paper we propose a 6LoWPAN (IPv6 over Low power Wireless Personal Area Networks) compression model for HIP (Host Identity Protocol) header, as well as, an adapted distribution scheme of the computational load in HIP's key agreement process. For an extreme lightweight end-to-end security, we propose to combine both compression and distribution models for HIP in WSNs side, in the IoT. The partial evaluation results show that the proposed protocol, named compressed and distributed HIP (CD-HIP), is more adapted than the standard HIP, while introducing minor header communication overhead.