Midgar: Study of communications security among Smart Objects using a platform of heterogeneous devices for the Internet of Things

Abstract In last years, the Internet of Things has been a revolution in terms of applications and research. Currently, there are a great variety of nodes connected to each other to create different applications in areas, ranging from sport to business, inter alia. These applications compromise our private information about our bank accounts, health, and location. This makes us take safety measures to achieve a secure communication, where the interception of a message by a malicious user cannot compromise our privacy. This security encompasses a very broad concept that can be addressed in multiple ways. This work focuses on the techniques and cryptographic algorithms that can be used in the messages exchanged among the nodes to create secure Internet of Things networks in a way to protect our communications. In this article, we have used the Midgar platform to evaluate the different possibilities of traditional security techniques related to cryptography with the purpose of testing the different combinations to find a solution for the Internet of Things when it uses insecure protocols. Analysing the results to determine the best solution, in terms of costs and security, we concluded that the use the RSA, AES and SHA-3 algorithms are a real possibility to protect message privacy among smart objects. This combination offers the lowest consumption–security relation among all the combinations that we have tested in our evaluation.