Device-Based Security to Improve User Privacy in the Internet of Things

• Published in: Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) Vol. 18; no. 8; p. 2664
• Main Authors: Belem Pacheco, Luis Alberto, Pelinson Alchieri, Eduardo Adilio, Mendez Barreto, Priscila América Solís
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland MDPI AG 14.08.2018; MDPI
• Subjects: Access control; Cloud computing; Computer architecture; Computer simulation; Control data (computers); Energy consumption; Fault tolerance; Internet of Things; Privacy; security and privacy; security and privacy; fault tolerance; Internet of Things; cloud computing
• ISSN: 1424-8220; 1424-8220
• DOI: 10.3390/s18082664

The use of Internet of Things (IoT) is rapidly growing and a huge amount of data is being generated by IoT devices. Cloud computing is a natural candidate to handle this data since it has enough power and capacity to process, store and control data access. Moreover, this approach brings several benefits to the IoT, such as the aggregation of all IoT data in a common place and the use of cloud services to consume this data and provide useful applications. However, enforcing user privacy when sending sensitive information to the cloud is a challenge. This work presents and evaluates an architecture to provide privacy in the integration of IoT and cloud computing. The proposed architecture, called - rivacy a quitecture for integrati n of internet of hings and loud computing, improves user privacy by implementing privacy enforcement at the IoT devices instead of at the gateway, as is usually done. Consequently, the proposed approach improves both system security and fault tolerance, since it removes the single point of failure (gateway). The proposed architecture is evaluated through an analytical analysis and simulations with severely constrained devices, where delay and energy consumption are evaluated and compared to other architectures. The obtained results show the practical feasibility of the proposed solutions and demonstrate that the overheads introduced in the IoT devices are worthwhile considering the increased level of privacy and security.