OSCAR: Object security architecture for the Internet of Things

Abstract

Abstract-Billions of smart, but constrained objects wirelessly connected to the global network require novel paradigms in network design. New protocol standards, tailored to constrained devices, have been designed taking into account requirements such as asynchronous application traffic, need for caching, and group communication. The existing connection-oriented security architecture is not able to keep up-first, in terms of the supported features, but also in terms of the scale and resulting latency on small constrained devices. In this paper, we propose an architecture that leverages the security concepts both from content-centric and traditional connection-oriented approaches. We rely on secure channels established by means of (D)TLS for key exchange, but we get rid of the notion of the "state" among communicating entities. We provide a mechanism to protect from replay attacks by coupling our scheme with the CoAP application protocol. Our object-based security architecture (OSCAR) intrinsically supports caching and multicast, and does not affect the radio duty-cycling operation of constrained objects. We evaluate OSCAR in two cases: 802.15.4 Low Power and Lossy Networks (LLN) and Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication for two different hardware platforms and MAC layers on a real testbed and using the Cooja emulator. We show significant energy savings at constrained servers and reasonable delays. We also discuss the applicability of OSCAR to Smart City deployments.

Delegated Authenticated Authorization for Constrained Environments

“…An interesting approach for confidentiality-protecting data from a constrained device relieves the device completely from authorization decisions by using an out of band mechanism to hand out decryption keys only to authorized recipients [16]. If integrity protection is also desired, this approach requires a public key operation per update (on the source) and per access (on the receiver), which may be too expensive for constrained devices.…”

On perspective of security and privacy-preserving solutions in the internet of things

“…Authentication and key establishment solutions for IoT have been investigated in papers such as [13], [14] and [15]. Hummen et al [16] deal with the constraints of IoT objects and processing the certificate-based DTLS handshakes.…”

“…Nevertheless, the solution is based on Certificate Authority (CA) and authentication takes more than 8 s on TelosB sensor nodes. Vucinic et al [14] present an object-based security architecture solution that provides confidentiality and authenticity in IoT. The solution called OSCAR is based on Elliptic curve cryptography public key operations (ECDSA signatures) and AES in the Counter with CBC-MAC mode (AES-CCM).…”

“…These cryptographic primitives and operations are employed in many IoT security solutions. For example, AES is used for data encryption in the DTLS protocol [10], the Lithe-DTLS protocol [11] and the OSCAR solution [14]. Random number generator and hash functions are used for secret key derivation functions and are employed in many authentication and key establishment protocols.…”

Internet of things for remote elderly monitoring: a study from user-centered perspective

“…Therefore, satisfying security requirements such as data authenticity, data confidentiality and access control are essentials in IoT-based systems (Sicari et al 2015). In this regard, various models or schemes have been introduced to ensure security in the IoTbased systems; e.g., Vucinic et al (2015) propose a model (OSCAR) for end-to-end security in the IoT systems, Moosavi et al (2016) also present an end-to-end security scheme for mobility enabled healthcare IoT systems and Neisse et al (2015) offer a model to provide security for data protection in IoT systems.…”