Optimal Selection of IPsec-Based Security Mechanisms in Resource Constrained IoT Environment

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) is a modern-day technology that supports many different applications such as smart cities, e-health, and smart homes. However, the specific IoT nature of connecting various heterogeneous devices complicates the implementation of conventional security mechanisms. In this work, a device-based security approach has been proposed to assign optimal security mechanisms to the set of heterogeneous IoT devices based on their available resources and the system requirements. To achieve the proposed approach, the security overhead equation was formulated to include 3 parameters: RAM usage, energy consumption and throughput. A hardware implementation was used to measure these parameters and to calculate the security overhead for the tested security profiles. The Pareto frontline was used to select the optimal security mechanism that minimizes the security overhead per device while maximizing the system requirement. The selection algorithm was tested in a simulation of 50 heterogeneous devices that ran 30 security profiles.