A Secure Authentication and Access Control Scheme for CoAP-based IoT

Abstract

The rapid and exponential deployment of Internet of things (IoT) that is connected to the Internet has created an internet of vulnerabilities. The successful deployment in different domains of IoT depends on securing the communications in the IoT ecosystem. With the limited resources that these IoT devices have, it's a very challenging task to provide the necessary security measures for such devices. Many application protocols are used in IoT ecosystem. Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP), however, is one of the most used protocols in the e-health system. CoAP in itself does not provide any security measures. In this paper, we propose an enhancement to CoAP to make it provide such necessary security element. We propose a security mechanism to support Authentication and Access Control scheme for CoAP (AAC-CoAP). The results show that the proposed AC enhancement improved the security of IoT devices. In addition, it shows that the CPU calculation time as well as execution time have improved significantly.