Secure Low Latency Communication for Constrained Industrial IoT Scenarios

Abstract

The emerging Internet of Things (IoT) promises value-added services for private and business applications. However, especially the industrial IoT often faces tough communication latency boundaries, e.g., to react to production errors, realize human-robot interaction, or counter fluctuations in smart grids. Simultaneously, devices must apply security measures such as encryption and integrity protection to guard business secrets and prevent sabotage. As security processing requires significant time, the goals of secure communication and low latency contradict each other. Especially on constrained IoT devices, which are equipped with cheap, low-power processors, the overhead for security processing aggregates to a primary source of latency. We show that antedated encryption and data authentication with templates enables IoT devices to meet both, security and low latency requirements. These mechanisms offload significant security processing to a preprocessing phase and thus decrease latency during actual transmission by up to 75.9 %. Thereby they work for well-established security-proven standard ciphers.