Internet of Things

5Security and Privacy in the IoT

The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to the Internet‐like structure of billions of interconnected “constrained” devices: with limited capabilities in terms of computational power and memory. These are often battery‐powered, thus raising the need to adopt energy‐efficient technologies. Among the most notable challenges that building interconnected smart objects brings about are standardization and interoperability. Internet Protocol (IP) is foreseen as the standard for interoperability for smart objects. As billions of smart objects are expected to appear and IPv4 addresses have mostly been used, IPv6 has been identified as a candidate for smart‐object communication.

The deployment of the IoT raises many security issues, arising from

• the very nature of smart objects: the use of cryptographic algorithms that are lightweight, in terms of processing and memory requirements;
• the use of standard protocols and the need to minimize the amount of data exchanged between nodes.

This chapter provides a detailed overview of the security challenges related to the deployment of smart objects. Security protocols at network, transport, and application layers are discussed, together with the lightweight cryptographic algorithms that it is suggested should be used instead of conventional resource‐hungry ones. Security aspects, such as key distribution and security bootstrapping, and application scenarios, such as secure data aggregation and service authorization, ...