Enhance the security in smart home applications based on IOT-CoAP protocol

Nowadays, the improvement in technology is growing highly which makes the internet extended to everything such as temperature sensors. Such sensors require protocols to send and receive data such as the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP). Nevertheless, these protocols must be light, therefore, these sensors are restricted with energy however these light protocol must be secure also. In this paper, an enhancement on a CoAP protocol will be done by focusing on the message integrity, the authors will attempt to find the optimal hash function that can be added to the CoAP protocol in order of increasing the security without influencing the performance. Three types of hash function have been considered with the CoAP protocol, which are SHA-1, SHA224, and SHA256. The enhanced protocol has been evaluated using the Contiki OS simulation tool on a smart home application, and the results show that SHA 224 is the best hash algorithm according to the performance.