Giving IoT Services an Identity and Changeable Attributes

The Internet of Things (IoT) pervades our surroundings. It softwarizes our physical environments. Software controls devices that interface their physical environments. The IoT is often privacy, safety, and security critical. Consequently, it requires adequate mechanisms for securing its services. For reasons such as heterogeneity, complexity, and lack of deployment there is little research on IoT service security.Our work creates a base for IoT service security. We give IoT services secure identities and attributes. Using site-local X.509v3 certificates with short lifetimes, we show how service attributes can securely be changed at runtime. This enables enforcing security policies even on distributed, loosely coupled IoT nodes. Our central mechanisms are pinning certificates to service executables, and autonomously managing the short certificate lifetimes. We assess the resulting renewal traffic and power consumption.