A Novel Communication Method for Constrained Iot Devices

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming an established part of life by interconnecting billions of devices in diverse areas such as healthcare, smart homes, industries, etc. However, these devices are limited in memory, energy and computational capabilities. Being constrained prevents them from applying complex cryptographic encryption algorithms which leads to lack of security and therefore lack of privacy. As a solution, we propose a novel secret sharing scheme based on underlying protocols of visual cryptography to provide a low-cost and secure communication method for constrained IoT devices. Generally, when a device wants to communicate with an outer party, it does so by itself or by using a mediary such as a central hub or gateway; which leads to single point of failure. As a solution, we propose a method where devices collaborate each other and therefore divide the responsibility into multiple, instead of one. We propose two different models: n-out-of-n and k-out-ofn. In the first model, there is a complete graph where every device is connected to each other. Instead of the original sender, every other device work collaboratively to communicate with the outer party. In the second model, the network is realized as an n-regular graph where a single node has n number of neighbors, which collaborates with each other and here the responsibility is divided into n devices. Results show that this scheme is applicable to constrained devices.