Securing the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) for the Internet of Things (IoT)

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) technology has become a hot topic over the last decade around the world. The availability of inexpensive components of IoT devices enables a wide range of applications and provide smart environments. These devices perform actuating and sensing tasks and identified through unique addresses. The IoT devices are connected to the Internet and expected to use the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) at the application layer as a main web transfer protocol. This protocol is a general protocol and does not provide secure channels for transferred data. One of the possible ways to provide security to this protocol is by using Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) protocol for authentication functionality as well as end-to-end security to protect the transmission of sensitive information. In this project, we provide a brief overview of the CoAP and DTLS protocols. We simulate the CoAP protocol without security using the Contiki operating system and then we simulate the DTLS protocol over CoAP. We make a comparison between the two experiments in terms of memory footprint and power consumption since these two factors are the most concern factors in constrained devices in any IoT environment.