Efficient HIP-based approach to ensure lightweight end-to-end security in the internet of things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging and promising paradigm that can be considered as an extension of the Internet to interconnect all kinds of smart objects around us to provide a pervasive (or ubiquitous) information access. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), as a vital component of the IoT, allow the representation of the dynamic characteristics of the real world in the Internet's virtual world. Thus, sensor nodes are henceforth considered as Internet hosts and, may act as web servers or clients. The maturity of the Internet of Things is arguably linked to communications security and end-users privacy protection. However, the material and technological heterogeneity as well as the asymmetric nature of the communications between the sensor nodes and the classical Internet hosts are making security a challenging problem. In this context, many recent works focus on leveraging IP-based security protocols for IoT, after adapting them to WSN's constraints commonly by messages compression or by computational-load distribution techniques. In this paper we propose a 6LoWPAN (IPv6 over Low power Wireless Personal Area Networks) compression for the header of HIP (Host Identity Protocol) packets, as well as, an adapted distribution scheme of security computational load in HIP Base EXchange (HIP-BEX). To achieve extremely lightweight end-to-end (E2E) security, we combine both proposed compression and distribution models for HIP in WSN's side, in the IoT. The evaluation results show clearly that the proposed solution, named Compressed and Distributed HIP (CD-HIP), is sufficiently energy efficient with a slight security establishment delay, and a good level of compatibility with the standard HIP.