Secure Data Transportation With Software-Defined Networking and k-n Secret Sharing for High-Confidence IoT Services

Internet of Things (IoT) has become a critical infrastructure in smart city services. Unlike traditional network nodes, most of the current IoT devices are constrained with limited capabilities. Moreover, frequent changes in the network status (e.g., nodes turns into the sleep mode to save battery) make it even more difficult to set up a stable, secure transmission among smart city IoT devices. On the one hand, these weaknesses make the IoT more vulnerable to attacks, such as data eavesdropping, which can monitor, tamper, and obtain the transporting data. On the other hand, the high-confidence smart city service strongly relies on the security of data transporting among the IoT devices, e.g., data being tempered would reduce the reliability of smart city services and data being monitored or stolen would infringe the privacy of smart city services. Toward high-confidence smart city IoT services, we proposed an approach to secure the data transportation among the smart city IoT devices, which combines a k-n secret-sharing mechanism and software-defined networking (SDN) technique to securely transport IoT data. Specifically, the data are transported by multiple routes calculated by the SDN controller adaptively. Data safety is guaranteed by the all-or-nothing feature of the k-n secret-sharing mechanism. Two SDN-based transmission strategies, which leverage the SDN's advantages on network management, and scheduling, are applied to overcome the challenges of the unstable network state in IoT. Extensive experiments conducted from many aspects show that the proposed approach can remarkably reduce the attack success rate with reasonable and acceptable overhead.