Towards Secure Communications in Heterogeneous Internet of Things

Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications in the Internet of Things (IoT) which are built over the wireless spectrum can easily be intercepted or eavesdropped by adversaries. While there are various solutions for enhancing the security of communications in IoT, they may incur significant overhead to the network. In this paper, we introduce several security methods at the communication protocol level, in which are based on the Constraint Application Protocol (CoAP), Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS), and Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). Additionally, we introduce a light-weight M2M communicating integrity approach with CoAP and bloom filter, as well as the decentralized Virtual Private Network (VPN). Via extensive performance evaluation, we validate the efficacy of our approach with respect to the impact on the overall network performance of the heterogeneous Internet of Things (HIoT) and provide some recommendations when our approach is adopted.