In various scenarios, achieving security between IoT devices is challenging since the devices may have different dedicated communication standards, resource constraints as well as various applications. In this article, we first provide requirements and existing solutions for IoT security. We then introduce a new reconfigurable security framework based on edge computing, which utilizes a near-user edge device, i.e., security agent, to simplify key management and offload the computational costs of security algorithms at IoT devices. This framework is designed to overcome the challenges including high computation costs, low flexibility in key management, and low compatibility in deploying new security algorithms in IoT, especially when adopting advanced cryptographic primitives. We also provide the design principles of the reconfigurable security framework, the exemplary security protocols for anonymous authentication and secure data access control, and the performance analysis in terms of feasibility and usability. The reconfigurable security framework paves a new way to strength IoT security by edge computing.

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Due to the expectedly higher density of mobile devices and exhaust of radio resources, the fifth generation (5G) mobile networks introduce small cell concept in the radio access technologies, so-called Small Cell Networks (SCNs), to improve radio spectrum utilization. However, this increases the chance of handover due to smaller coverage of a micro base station, i.e., home eNodeB (HeNB) in 5G. Subsequently, the latency will increase as the costs of authenticated key exchange protocol, which ensures entity authentication and communication confidentiality for secure handover, also increase totally. Thus, this work presents a secure region-based handover scheme (ReHand) with user anonymity and fast revocation for SCNs in 5G. ReHand greatly reduces the communication costs when UEs roam between small cells within the region of a macro base station, i.e., eNB in 5G, and the computation costs due to the employment of symmetry-based cryptographic operations. Compared to the three elaborated related works, ReHand dramatically reduces the costs from 82.92% to 99.99%. Nevertheless, this work demonstrates the security of ReHand by theoretically formal proofs.

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