IMPLEMENTATION OF KATAPAYA BASED PAYLOAD ENCRYPTION ACROSS IOT APPLICATION LAYER PROTOCOLS

Abstract

Securing application layer data in Internet of Things (IoT) systems continues to be a challenging problem because of limited system resources of devices, protocol heterogeneity, and the variety of devices at deployment scale. While transport-layer security mechanisms are widely adopted Technologies TLS and conditionally DTLS, the handshake overhead, memory footprint and the computational complexity of those algorithms may limit usability in reduced energy environments. As a result, there is growing interest in lightweight protocol-independent security mechanisms that need not alter existing protocol stacks.

This work presents a comprehensive system-level study about the applicability of KaTaPaYa based lightweight encryption algorithm for securing payloads in popular IoT application protocols namely MQTT, CoAP and HTTP. The proposed approach applies KaTaPaYa encryption at the application payload layer before the protocol encapsulation so that the protocol headers, control fields and message semantics are not affected. Through experimental evaluation, the payload transformation behavior, protocol compliance, transmission integrity, computational overhead and observable security characteristics such as entropy and avalanche effect are studied.

Experimental results show that successful transmission and processing of KaTaPaYa encrypted payloads are achieved by applying KaTaPaYa encryption across all the evaluated protocols; protocol violations and rejections of messages are not encountered. The results prove that the suggested method is a protocol agnostic black-box that augments payload confidentiality while ensuring compatibility with the system. This work describes KaTaPaYa based encryption as a practical supplement of the existing IoT security mechanisms and also contributes to system oriented security engineering research.