Network-layer security for the Internet of Things using TinyOS and BLIP

The design of standard communications and security mechanisms for resource-constrained sensing applications and devices may provide an important contribution for its integration with the Internet and consequently towards the realization of what we nowadays identify as the Internet of Things. This vision will only be realizable if appropriate security mechanisms are available, and in this context we target the design and experimental evaluation of security mechanisms for communications at the network-layer with sensing devices (smart objects) using the standard IPv6 protocol. Our work proposes and evaluates the usage of new compressed security headers for the network layer with smart objects. We implement and evaluate what is, as far as we know, the first proposal of security at the network layer experimentally evaluated using the TinyOS operating system and its networking stack. As we verify in the course of our evaluation study, various scenarios employing network-layer secure communications involving smart objects are feasible, particularly when security mechanisms are designed to benefit from cross-layer interactions that allow the optimization of expensive cryptographic operations. Copyright (C) 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.