Energy–Aware security protocol for IoT devices

Internet of Things (IoT) has permeated various aspects of modern life, from smart homes to factories and even gardens. In the coming years, number of IoT devices is expected to surpass that of computers, laptops, mobile phones, and tablets. However, many of these devices are small and operate on batteries, making energy efficiency a significant challenge. This challenge affects all aspects of IoT, including security. To address this issue, we present an adaptive security approach in this paper. Adaptive security involves adjusting the security level based on the level of threats and data context, rather than always assuming the worst-case scenario. This approach reduces energy consumption and is implemented in three parts: 1) Adapting the length of RSA public and private keys, where longer keys provide more security but consume more power. 2) Adapting the trust level between nodes based on the history of the transmitting node, where the receiving node decides whether to verify the correctness of the received messages or not. 3) Utilizing TrustChain, which is transactional verification method inspired by the blockchain concept.

We evaluated the performance of our proposed model through exhaustive simulation scenarios and experiments. Our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods, with the variable key length approach reducing energy consumption by 50%, the trust level approach reducing energy consumption by approximately 50%, and the TrustChain approach reducing energy consumption to 0.771 J, while the blockchain-based method consumed 2.955 J to verify transactions.