eeDTLS: Energy-Efficient Datagram Transport Layer Security for the Internet of Things

Abstract

In the fast growing world of the Internet of Things (IoT), security has become a major concern. Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) is considered to be one of the most suited protocols for securing the IoT. However, computation and communication overheads make it very expensive to implement DTLS on resource-constrained IoT sensor nodes. In this work, we profile the energy costs of DTLS 1.3, using experimental models for cryptographic computations and radio-frequency (RF) communications. Based on this analysis, we present eeDTLS, a low-energy variant of DTLS, that provides the same security strength as DTLS, but has lower energy requirements. By employing a combination of packet size reduction and optimized handshake computations, eeDTLS can provide up to 45% energy savings in a typical IoT use case. eeDTLS can be implemented in conjunction with any low-energy IoT RF protocol, and the proposed energy models and protocol optimizations can also be used to improve the energy efficiency of custom IoT security architectures.