Tightening Up Security In Low Power Deterministic Networks

The unprecedented pervasiveness of IoT systems is pushing this technology into increasingly stringent domains. Such application scenarios become even more challenging due to the demand for encompassing the interplay between safety and security. The IEEE 802.15.4 DSME MAC behavior aims at addressing such systems by providing additional deterministic, synchronous multi-channel access support. However, despite the several improvements over the previous versions of the protocol, the standard lacks a complete solution to secure communications. In this front, we propose the integration of TAKS, an hybrid cryptography scheme, over a standard DSME network. In this paper, we describe the system architecture for integrating TAKS into DSME with minimum impact to the standard, and we venture into analysing the overhead of having such security solution over application delay and throughput. After a performance analysis, we learn that it is possible to achieve a minor impact of 1% to 14% on top of the expected network delay, depending on the platform used, while still guaranteeing strong security support over the DSME network.