DTLS & COAP Based Security For Internet of Things Enabled Devices

The Internet of Things (IoT) enables a wide range of application scenarios with potentially critical actuating and sensing function, e.g., in the e-health domain. For communication at the application layer devices are expected to employ the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) that is currently being standardized at the IETF. To protect the transmission of sensitive information, secure CoAPmandates the use of Datagram TLS (DTLS) as the underlying security protocol for authenticated and confidential communication. DTLS, however, was originally designed for comparably powerful devices that are interconnected via reliable, high bandwidth links. In this work, we present Lithe ? an integration of DTLS and CoAP for the IoT. With Lithe, we additionally propose a novel DTLS header compression scheme that aims to significantly reduce the energy consumption by leveraging the 6LoWPAN standard. Most importantly, our proposed DTLS header compression scheme does not compromise the end-to-end security properties provided by DTLS. At the same time, it considerably reduces the number of transmitted bytes while maintaining DTLS standard compliance. We evaluate our approach based on a DTLS implementation for the Contiki operating system. Our evaluation results show significant gains in terms of packet size, energy consumption, processing time, and network-wide response times when compressed DTLS is enabled.