Enhancing End-to-End Communication Security in IoT Devices Using Model Driven Engineering

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) has transformed the way software and hardware interact, enabling users to control devices remotely. In environments like smart homes, offices, and industrial setups, diverse sensors generate large amounts of data, raising significant security concerns during transmission. Cloud-based systems enhance efficiency and cost-effectiveness but also introduce authentication and authorization vulnerabilities. While past studies addressed specific system issues, this research proposes a model-driven framework to tackle encryption challenges at the application layer, ensuring data integrity during device communication. The absence of a generic security-related solution that could be tailored to the specific needs of any IOT network configuration increased the overall effort of making the system secure since every time you need to devise a solution that solves the security concerns. Therefore, this research advocates for an End-to-End encryption metamodel for message communication through the application layer, safeguarding messages from unauthorized alterations by third parties. End-to-end encryption standards ensure that the data as well as the processed information travelling between different components of the network is not visible to any third party. With the introduction of metamodel for security and by creating profiles, we extend a generic model by adding domain-specific properties and constraints to tailor it for specialized security-related concerns. The proposed framework IoT developers to input data details and model the encryption-decryption process, ensuring data integrity during communication. This model can be used by the developers working with IoTs to simply put the details of the data and they can model an encrypted IOT network by ensuring data integrity while it is being communicated. By providing an atomic view of IoT network configuration, the proposed framework incorporates the robust security mechanism so that any network can be verified mapping with respect to the meta-model and thus executed in a live environment ensuring the data sensing, transmitting, and then transferring into pieces of information is safe throughout the way. Using Node-Red as a proof of concept, a case study was implemented to validate the efficacy of encoding and decoding processes.