DNS/DANE Collision-Based Distributed and Dynamic Authentication for Microservices in IoT †

Abstract

IoT devices provide real-time data to a rich ecosystem of services and applications. The volume of data and the involved subscribe/notify signaling will likely become a challenge also for access and core networks. To alleviate the core of the network, other technologies like fog computing can be used. On the security side, designers of IoT low-cost devices and applications often reuse old versions of development frameworks and software components that contain vulnerabilities. Many server applications today are designed using microservice architectures where components are easier to update. Thus, IoT can benefit from deploying microservices in the fog as it offers the required flexibility for the main players of ubiquitous computing: nomadic users. In such deployments, IoT devices need the dynamic instantiation of microservices. IoT microservices require certificates so they can be accessed securely. Thus, every microservice instance may require a newly-created domain name and a certificate. The DNS-based Authentication of Named Entities (DANE) extension to Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) allows linking a certificate to a given domain name. Thus, the combination of DNSSEC and DANE provides microservices’ clients with secure information regarding the domain name, IP address, and server certificate of a given microservice. However, IoT microservices may be short-lived since devices can move from one local fog to another, forcing DNSSEC servers to sign zones whenever new changes occur. Considering DNSSEC and DANE were designed to cope with static services, coping with IoT dynamic microservice instantiation can throttle the scalability in the fog. To overcome this limitation, this article proposes a solution that modifies the DNSSEC/DANE signature mechanism using chameleon signatures and defining a new soft delegation scheme. Chameleon signatures are signatures computed over a chameleon hash, which have a property: a secret trapdoor function can be used to compute collisions to the hash. Since the hash is maintained, the signature does not have to be computed again. In the soft delegation schema, DNS servers obtain a trapdoor that allows performing changes in a constrained zone without affecting normal DNS operation. In this way, a server can receive this soft delegation and modify the DNS zone to cope with frequent changes such as microservice dynamic instantiation. Changes in the soft delegated zone are much faster and do not require the intervention of the DNS primary servers of the zone.

MUP: Simplifying Secure Over-The-Air Update with MQTT for Constrained IoT Devices

“…An improvement of the MUP update protocol will be the extension of the key roll-over of the public vendor key using DNSSec/DANE [37]. "myno " : " h t t p s :// www.…”

“…An update of the vendor key may be supported by the Update Server running on the edge. For the verification of the new vendor key, the Update Server may employ DNSSec/DANE [37,38].…”

Holochain-Based Secure and Energy Efficient IoT Network

“…A large number of solutions have been proposed, such as DNS-based dynamic authentication for microservices-based IoT [11], identity-based encryption [12] and mutual authentication with multi-factor [13]. In many cases, a combination of traditional cryptographic methods is made to achieve better results, i.e., three leading cryptographic technologies make up the backbone of the Holochain framework.…”

Computer Science and Information Technology Trends

“…[22] DNS/DANE Collision-Based Distributed and Dynamic Authentication for Microservices in IoT. [23] Applying Spring Security Framework and OAuth2 To Protect Microservice Architecture API. [24] Design of a micro-service based Data Pool for device integration to speed up digitalization.…”