Securing the Insecure Link of Internet-of-Things Using Next-Generation Smart Gateways

Since low-cost IoT devices have limited computing resources and are often unable to guarantee sufficient security, it is imperative to ensure secure communication between IoT gateways and cloud. In this paper, we propose a flow-level adaptive mobile VPN solution specifically tailored for IoT ecosystems, called AdamVPN, which adapts its configuration dynamically at runtime in order to improve IoT gateway's application-level throughput while conforming to the security and privacy guarantees simultaneously. Our deployment experiments in both Wi-Fi and cellular environments demonstrate that AdamVPN significantly improves throughput by 2.75×-3.0× for Wi-Fi and 1.8×-2.16× for cellular networks when compared to OpenVPN.