Securing IoT Devices with In-Hop Encryption

Abstract

In this modern age, Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming part of our lives incautiously. The ease of monitoring and performing our tasks remotely has made this technology inescapable. Accessing IoT devices over the insecure network possess confidentiality threats to the private as well sensitive information. Communication can be intercepted in the absence of any proper access control and security mechanisms. Plain data traffic at the public network remains enticement for the hackers and bad actors. The problem with the conventional security methods is that they are not well suited for IoT environment. There are multitudinous factors involves which causes the security of IoT technology unattainable. So, there is need to introduce and implement a confidentiality control framework reconcilable for the IoT devices in the network. The solution is to scramble the information coming out the private IoT network, no plain traffic will pass through the public network. This solution is implemented to provide data confidentiality over the insecure media. In the implementation, custom build encryption module is deployed at the local router which encrypts the IoT network data traffic when rules are applied. The network traffic is segregated by the rules. At the client end, there is decryption module with the corresponding rules. The encrypted communication between client and server with the help of standard traffic capturing tool has been verified. The solution can be deployed at any standard OpenWrt firmware’s router which is mostly used in the wireless routers. Some practical application test cases have also been demonstrated. The performance evaluation of the solution shows the minimum delay and lags with the sufficient network throughput in encryption mode.