REST-ful CoAP Message Authentication

Abstract

One core technology for implementing and integrating the architectural principles of REST into the Internet of Things (IoT) is CoAP, a REST-ful application protocol for constrained networks and devices. Since CoAP defaults to UDP as transport protocol, the protection of CoAP-based systems is realised by the adoption of DTLS, a transport-oriented security protocol for datagrams. This is, however, in many cases not a sufficient safeguard, since messages in distributed systems -- as obtained, e.g., by the adoption of REST -- are commonly transported via multiple intermediate components. This induces the need for message-oriented protection means supplementing transport security for IoT scenarios with high security demands.This paper approaches an important part of this requirement by introducing a REST-ful CoAP message authentication scheme. The overarching goal of this work is, though, to establish a message-oriented security layer for CoAP. Here, specific challenges are stemming from the architectural style REST and the resource-restrictiveness of IoT networks and devices. The present contribution reaches this goal for authentication by proposing a REST-ful CoAP message signature generation and verification scheme.