Securing human‐to‐thing interactions in the Internet of Things with asymmetric and selective mechanism

Abstract

Ensuring security for communications, services, devices, and end‐users has been and continues to be a major concern in today's Internet. Recently, with the growing research advances toward the realization of the Internet of Things (IoT), security concerns are expected to rise substantially. This is due to the fact that a sheer number of tiny wireless and smart devices, handling personal and contextual data, will be connected permanently to the Internet. The connected things are henceforth able to interact autonomously with each other and with their users. This paper focuses on Human‐to‐Thing (H2T) interactions that are necessary in many important IoT applications, namely E‐healthcare, connected home, smart cities, and so on. Such a communication style is characterized by many technological and material heterogeneities, which exposes the connected (and already constrained) things to Denial of Service (DoS) threats and makes security more challenging. This paper addresses the security issue with H2T communications and presents an asymmetric‐selective mechanism to guarantee effective protection of such communication style while ensuring good resilience against DoS attacks. The assessment results show the efficiency of our proposal.