Lithe: Lightweight Secure CoAP for the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) enables a wide range of application scenarios with potentially critical actuating and sensing tasks, e.g., in the e-health domain. For communication at the application layer, resource-constrained devices are expected to employ the constrained application protocol (CoAP)...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE sensors journal Vol. 13; no. 10; pp. 3711 - 3720
Main Authors: Raza, Shahid, Shafagh, Hossein, Hewage, Kasun, Hummen, Rene, Voigt, Thiemo
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: New York IEEE 01.10.2013
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Subjects:
6LoWPAN
CoAP
CoAPs
Compressing
Computer information security
Computer Science
Computer Science with specialization in Computer Communication
datavetenskap
Datavetenskap med inriktning mot datorkommunikation
Devices
DTLS
Encoding
Energy consumption
Headers
Internet
Internet of Things
IoT
Payloads
Protocols
Security
Sensors
Studies
Tasks
TCP-IP
ISSN:1530-437X, 1558-1748, 1558-1748
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:The Internet of Things (IoT) enables a wide range of application scenarios with potentially critical actuating and sensing tasks, e.g., in the e-health domain. For communication at the application layer, resource-constrained devices are expected to employ the constrained application protocol (CoAP) that is currently being standardized at the Internet Engineering Task Force. To protect the transmission of sensitive information, secure CoAP mandates the use of datagram transport layer security (DTLS) as the underlying security protocol for authenticated and confidential communication. DTLS, however, was originally designed for comparably powerful devices that are interconnected via reliable, high-bandwidth links. In this paper, we present Lithe-an integration of DTLS and CoAP for the IoT. With Lithe, we additionally propose a novel DTLS header compression scheme that aims to significantly reduce the energy consumption by leveraging the 6LoWPAN standard. Most importantly, our proposed DTLS header compression scheme does not compromise the end-to-end security properties provided by DTLS. Simultaneously, it considerably reduces the number of transmitted bytes while maintaining DTLS standard compliance. We evaluate our approach based on a DTLS implementation for the Contiki operating system. Our evaluation results show significant gains in terms of packet size, energy consumption, processing time, and network-wide response times when compressed DTLS is enabled.
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ISSN:1530-437X
1558-1748
1558-1748
DOI:10.1109/JSEN.2013.2277656