An enhanced DTLS protocol for Internet of Things applications

The main objective of the work is to enhance and optimize the performance of the Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) network for Constrained Application CoAP in Internet of Things. So two mechanisms were designed which lead to the higher performance and the efficiency of the protocol DTLS. Our contribution in this paper is to reduce the cost of communication of the DTLS protocol and improve the weakness of cookies exchange in the handshake process in order to counter DoS attacks. The proposed enhanced DTLS protocol is integrated inside the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) to reduce the cost in terms of messages and size taken by the security layer in each message. The proposed protocol is performed on Contiki operating system for the Internet of Things, and compared with original DTLS for CoAP. The simulation results lead to better performance of the proposed protocol in terms of packet overhead, handshake time processing, and energy consumption.