Toward Secure and Efficient Communication for the Internet of Things

• Published in: IEEE/ACM transactions on networking 2019-04, Vol.27 (2), p.621-634
• Main Authors: Li, Xin, Wang, Minmei, Wang, Huazhe, Yu, Ye, Qian, Chen
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: authentication; Big Data applications; Chaining; cloud; Cloud computing; Communication; Cryptography; Data models; Decision analysis; Decision making; Detection; Digital signatures; Integrity; Internet of Things; IoT; partial sample-rate data retrieval; Sensors; Smart buildings; Storage capacity
• ISSN: 1063-6692; 1558-2566
• DOI: 10.1109/TNET.2019.2893249

Internet of Things has been widely applied in everyday life, ranging from transportation and healthcare to smart homes. As most IoT devices carry constrained resources and limited storage capacity, sensing data need to be transmitted to and stored at resource-rich platforms, such as a cloud. IoT applications need to retrieve sensing data from the cloud for analysis and decision-making purposes. Ensuring the authenticity and integrity of the sensing data is essential for the correctness and safety of IoT applications. We summarize the new challenges of the IoT data communication with authenticity and integrity and argue that existing solutions cannot be easily adopted to resource-constraint IoT devices. We present two solutions called dynamic tree chaining and geometric star chaining that provide efficient and secure communication for the Internet of Things. Extensive simulations and prototype emulation experiments driven by real IoT data show that the proposed system is more efficient than alternative solutions in terms of time and space.