Optimization of Two-way Authentication Protocol in Internet of Things

 Many use cases for Internet of Things (IoT) involve the collection and transmission of sensitive data. Yet, many deployments currently do not protect this data through suitable security schemes. We have developed an end-to-end security scheme build upon existing Internet standards, specifically the Datagram Transport Layer Security protocol (DTLS). By relying on an established standard existing implementations, engineering techniques and security infrastructure can be reused which enables easy security uptake from application developers.

YOUR task is to bring standard compliant security to very resource constrained sensor nodes in an end-to-end security architecture. Based on an existing implementation of a DTLS-based two-way authentication handshake, you will design and implement an efficient communication protocol (on transport layer) to optimize the transmission performance of existing two-way authentication protocol.

The idea of this thesis is to optimize the used cryptography by using Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC). The global goal is to reduce communication overhead, resource consumption, and the end-to-end latency of the handshake.

An evaluation of the performance, energy consumption, and resource efficiency of your security scheme completes your thesis.

Depending on thesis type and YOUR preferences the topic scope can be adjusted. Just come over and discuss with me.

Reference:

T. Kothmayr, C. Schmitt, W. Hu, M. Brünig, G. Carle: DTLS based security and two-way authentication for the Internet of Things; ELSEVIER, Ad Hoc Networks, Vol. 1, June 2013, pp 1–14.