A Comprehensive Security Framework for Heterogeneous IoTs

Abstract

With Cisco estimating that 50 billion of Internet of Things (IoT) nodes will be connected to the Internet by 2020, the exponential growth of BGP routing tables and mobility issues will be the two major problems in the Internet.

Recently, the Locator Identifier Separation Protocol (LISP) has been proposed as an efficient approach for dealing with the problem of scalable Internet routing. Unfortunately, the anticipated advantage of using LISP as an overlay to support IoTs communications comes with serious security challenges. In IoTs, nodes will be communicating across different networking technologies which deploy different
security measures, such as authentication and encryption mechanisms. Such heterogeneity increases the attack surface and leaves IoTs’ nodes more susceptible to attacks.

This highlights the need for a unified security framework for heterogeneous IoTs. This paper provides an overview of our research to address some of the IoTs’ security challenges. It proposes a new Node-to-Node (N2N) authentication and key agreement protocol as part of a unified security framework. The underlying protocols of the proposed framework have been formally verified using Casper/FDR, a well-known model checker, and they have been proven to meet a number of desired security properties.

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