On Communication Privacy in the Internet of Things

Kouachi, Asma Iman (2021) On Communication Privacy in the Internet of Things. Doctoral thesis, Université de mohamed kheider biskra.

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Abstract

We tackle the problem of privacy breaching in IPv6 Low power Wireless Personal Area Networks (6LoWPAN)-based Internet of Things (IoT) networks where an attacker may be able to identify the communicating entities. We propose three contributions which are: (i) survey: we thoroughly expose the prime focus of the existing solutions on communication identifiers privacy in 6LoWPANs, clarifying the important information about: at which layer the solutions operate, based on which protocol, against which attack, for which application, based on simulations or real prototypes, which sensitive information or communication identifiers are protected, which Privacy-Preserving Technique (PPT) is used, and how long is the duration of the protection against privacy attacks. (ii) uOTA: based on the One Time Address (OTA) approach proposed for the traditional Internet, with a focus on low complexity, memory footprint, and energy consumption, uOTA uses just one IPv6 address to send or to receive one packet. (iii) ACFI which is based on: (1) anonymizing both IP and MAC addresses, as well as port number at the source host, using a random pseudonyming scheme, and (2) anonymizing the IP address and port number of the destination host, using a Tor-like network. We analysed the effect of the Tor entry node location on the performance of our solution in three different scenarios: the Tor entry node is located (a) inside the 6LoWPAN, (b) at the 6LBR gateway, or (c) completely outside the 6LoWPAN. Using Cooja simulator, we showed that our solutions (uOTA and ACFI) outperformed stateof-the-art solutions by making it more difficult to identify communication flows by improving the anonymity and unlinkability of the communicating entities without significantly affecting energy consumption, communication delay, and network bandwidth.

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