Towards end-to-end data protection in low-power networks

Abstract

An important, emerging trend in the context of the Internet of Things (IoT) are low-power networks (LPNs), referring to networks that target devices with very limited access to energy sources. While there are several approaches that allow to comply to these novel power restrictions, none of them provide a sufficient level of security, in particular with respect to data protection. In this paper, we propose a data protection scheme that ensures end-to-end security from low-power devices to backend applications. It meets the technical constraints imposed by LPNs, while preserving data confidentiality and integrity. Our solution has been deployed on the water distribution network of the City of Antibes in France. The evaluation of the overhead introduced by the proposed data protection scheme shows promising results with respect to power (battery) consumption.