An IoT Crypto Gateway for Resource-Constrained IoT Devices

One of the biggest challenges for the Internet of Things (IoT)-Security is to implement high-end asymmetric cryptography while at the same time meeting the requirements of IoT devices due to their constrained resources. Instead of reducing the security level (e.g., by employing lightweight cryptographic primitives), this paper presents a work-in-progress project and specifies the overall architecture of an IoT cryptographic gateway “IoT crypto gateway”, which sits in-between attached IoT devices and the cloud. The gateway communicates with the cloud implementing the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol over a TLS (Transport Layer Security) connection employing up-to-date asymmetric cryptography at a high security level. On the other hand, the gateway allows the IoT devices to connect to the network by implementing MQTT over the Quick UDP Internet Connections (QUIC) protocol, which is at the moment still being developed by IETF. Since on transport layer, the gateway is fully transparent, the (logical) TLS connection in QUIC between the IoT devices and the gateway may save time, power and computation on the IoT device’s side without compromising security. Keywords–gateway; IoT; TLS; QUIC; MQTT.