S-CHIRP: Secure Communication for Heterogeneous IoTs with Round-Robin Protection

TL;DR

This paper presents S-CHIRP, a secure, decentralized communication protocol for heterogeneous IoT networks that ensures resilient peer-to-peer communication in resource-constrained, potentially adversarial environments, scalable to millions of devices.

Contribution

It introduces S-CHIRP, a novel round-robin based communication algorithm with security features, suitable for large-scale, resource-limited IoT swarms with resilience to node loss and entry.

Findings

Enables complete peer-to-peer communication in n rounds for n devices.

Resilient to node loss and re-entry, maintaining trust boundaries.

Scalable to millions of devices with minimal memory requirements.

Abstract

This work introduces CHIRP - an algorithm for communication between ultra-portable heterogeneous IoT devices with a type of round-robin protection mechanism. This algorithm is presented both in its basic form as well as in a secured form in order to secure and maintain trust boundaries and communication within specific groups of heterogeneous devices. The specific target application scenarios includes resource constrained environments where a co-located swarm of devices (adversarial in mission or objective) is also present. CHIRP, and its secured version (S-CHIRP), enables complete peer-to-peer communication of a $n$-agent network of devices in as few as n rounds. In addition to the n-round cycle length, the proposed communication mechanism has the following major properties: nodes communication is entirely decentralized, communication is resilient to the loss of nodes, and finally communication is resilient to the (re)-entry of nodes. Theoretical models show that even the secure implementation of this mechanism is capable of scaling to IoT swarms in the million device range with memory constraints in the < 10 MB range