Lightweight CoAP-Based Bootstrapping Service for the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming increasingly important in several fields of industrial applications and personal applications, such as medical e-health, smart cities, etc. The research into protocols and security aspects related to this area is continuously advancing in making these networks more reliable and secure, taking into account these aspects by design. Bootstrapping is a procedure by which a user obtains key material and configuration information, among other parameters, to operate as an authenticated party in a security domain. Until now solutions have focused on re-using security protocols that were not developed for IoT constraints. For this reason, in this work we propose a design and implementation of a lightweight bootstrapping service for IoT networks that leverages one of the application protocols used in IoT : Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP). Additionally, in order to provide flexibility, scalability, support for large scale deployment, accountability and identity federation, our design uses technologies such as the Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP) and Authentication Authorization and Accounting (AAA). We have named this service CoAP-EAP. First, we review the state of the art in the field of bootstrapping and specifically for IoT. Second, we detail the bootstrapping service: the architecture with entities and interfaces and the flow operation. Third, we obtain performance measurements of CoAP-EAP (bootstrapping time, memory footprint, message processing time, message length and energy consumption) and compare them with PANATIKI. The most significant and constrained representative of the bootstrapping solutions related with CoAP-EAP. As we will show, our solution provides significant improvements, mainly due to an important reduction of the message length.