Experimental Evaluation of End-to-End Security Protocols for the Internet of Everything

The Internet of Everything (IoE) includes inter-connected devices, processes, networks, and people. Within this framework, smart objects collect environmental data and transmit it across the IoE architecture. Smart objects are often resource-constrained, with limited bandwidth, battery, and processing capabilities. IoE applications require some degree of security, which will introduce communication overhead. This paper presents an evaluation of communication protocols for end-to-end security for smart devices in an IoE framework. The JOSE and COSE formats are evaluated and compared to non-secure serialization. Experiments carried out on a Raspberry Pi Zero W and showed that COSE has low overhead, nearly comparable to the non-secure formats. However, COSE is about 3 ms slower than JOSE for the smallest packet size at the transmitter, while the protocols have closer performances at the receiver. For larger packets, COSE becomes faster at both the receiver (>2 kB) and the transmitter (>20 kB). The experiments suggest that COSE, due to its small overhead, may be considered as a potential lightweight solution for end-to-end security in IoE applications where slight latency is acceptable, such as periodic sensor data collection in Industry 5.0 applications. It also demonstrates better scalability than JOSE for increasing payload sizes.