E-Lithe: A Lightweight Secure DTLS for IoT

Internet of Things (IoT) has emerged as a new paradigm which aims to connect millions of devices that communicate and exchange data amongst each other. However, this communication between devices makes IoT vulnerable to security threats. Different security solutions have been proposed for constrained IoT devices such as Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) integrated with Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS). However, DTLS is computationally expensive for constrained devices. Furthermore, it is vulnerable to the Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. This research aims to propose an enhanced and lightweight DTLS for constraint IoT devices named as Enhanced Lightweight DTLS for IoT (E-Lithe). The enhancement to the proposed E-Lithe is made by adding the concept of a Trusted Third Party (TTP) for the pre-exchange of secret keys. This TTP makes the DTLS resilient against DoS attacks. Furthermore, to make the proposed DTLS lightweight, a compression scheme called Next Header Compression (NHC) is used. To implement the proposed E-Lithe, Contiki OS with Cooja simulator is used. We evaluate the performance of E-Lithe and the results reveal that the proposed E-Lithe outperforms the existing approaches in terms of three parameters, i.e., power consumption, packet size and running time.