Secure bootstrapping and header compression for IoT constrained networks

Security and interoperability are critical factors in Internet of Things (IoT) constrained networks in order to boost their fully integration with the Internet. In particular, secure bootstrapping and long headers compression, e.g., IPv6, are key procedures to enable end-to-end security associations with robust algorithms among cloud platforms and IoT devices. Nevertheless, few efforts are being dedicated to provide secure end-to-end authentication in IoT networks based on the prominent Low Power-Wide Area Network (LP-WAN) paradigm such as LoRaWAN. Thereby, this work discusses the security and interoperability requirements of these systems by means of a realistic use case, namely, smart-agriculture. In order to cope with the identified gaps, we present a novel solution based on the combination of the LP-WAN Static Context Header Compression (SCHC) scheme for IPv6/UDP/CoAP messages and Low-Overhead CoAP-EAP (LO-CoAP-EAP) bootstrapping. This enables the establishment of security association through IoT constrained links. Both protocols, which are two Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) proposals, are integrated and adapted to be compliant with the LoRaWAN architecture and its stringent communication restrictions. The results show the validity of our approach with different LoRaWAN configurations, which notably increases the robustness of the overall IoT infrastructure.