Baseline functionality for security and control of commodity IoT devices and domain-controlled device lifecycle management

TL;DR

This paper proposes a foundational framework and protocols for secure device management and key control in commodity IoT environments, addressing onboarding, ongoing management, and decommissioning.

Contribution

It introduces a baseline architecture and illustrative protocols for secure IoT device management, emphasizing the importance of unified key management support.

Findings

Framework architecture for secure IoT device management

Illustrative protocols demonstrating baseline functionality

Highlights the need for efficient key management in IoT

Abstract

The emerging Internet of Things (IoT) drastically increases the number of connected devices in homes, workplaces and smart city infrastructures. This drives a need for means to not only ensure confidentiality of device-related communications, but for device configuration and management---ensuring that only legitimate devices are granted privileges to a local domain, that only authorized agents have access to the device and data it holds, and that software updates are authentic. The need to support device on-boarding, ongoing device management and control, and secure decommissioning dictates a suite of key management services for both access control to devices, and access by devices to wireless infrastructure and networked resources. We identify this core functionality, and argue for the recognition of efficient and reliable key management support---both within IoT devices, and by a unifying external management platform---as a baseline requirement for an IoT world. We present a framework architecture to facilitate secure, flexible and convenient device management in commodity IoT scenarios, and offer an illustrative set of protocols as a base solution---not to promote specific solution details, but to highlight baseline functionality to help domain owners oversee deployments of large numbers of independent multi-vendor IoT devices.