Toward Green Access Management for IoT Environments Using eBPF

With IoT (Internet of Things) becoming more common and widely used, users’ data is getting more exposed to different networks. One of the challenges raised by this situation is to keep the data safe while delivering it to the intended consumers over the network without any security issues. Using firewalls to control access to the data within or across the network can be a reasonable solution. However, traditional firewalls require a large amount of processing power; thus, they consume a lot of energy. A significant portion of the power is used to copy the packets between different environments and allocate various resources to the packets. In this paper, we use eBPF to create a firewall that processes packets as low as possible in the network stack. This eliminates the need to copy packets multiple times for dropped or redirected packets. We also provide comparisons between traditional firewalls like iptables and an eBPF-based firewall in terms of consumed energy and time. We also discuss why eBPF-based firewalls are more suitable when it comes to IoT.

I. Introduction (Use Heading 1)

IoT is a growing field. With its growth comes the increase in data traffic related to IoT. As IoT devices access more critical user data, the need for managing and hardening this access becomes increasingly obvious [1]. Nowadays, homes have IoT devices embedded within them, granting access to a variety of sensitive data, including things like voice recordings of a room or a detailed map of the house. It’s worth mentioning that if the data were stored on a single device without the need for transferring the data between devices, there wouldn’t be many concerns about the safety of the data. However, this is not the case. Most of the time, devices and users need to transfer potentially critical data. Considering that over 20 billion IoT devices, including but not limited to cameras and voice recorders, will be connected to networks, the security of user data and the management of data access seem like serious challenges [2]. While encryption is a good way to keep the data safe during transfer, the lack of control over the data traversal path or receivers suggests that we need other mechanisms to manage the data flows in the data plane [3]. In enterprise networks, managing data access within the network is often accomplished through the use of firewalls. However, in IoT, the environment is somewhat different, and traditional firewalls are not the best solution for controlling network access [4].