SUMIT: Secure Unicast and Multicast Communication in Internet of Mobile Things

Abstract

An Internet of Mobile Things (IoMT) refers to an internetworked group of pervasive devices that coordinate their motion and task execution through frequent status and data exchange. An IoMT could be serving critical applications such as military reconnaissance, security surveillance, etc., and hence the authenticity, integrity and confidentiality of the transmitted data must be ensured. Yet, achieving the security goals is challenging due to the dynamic nature of the network topology, the constrained computational and communication resources, and the variety of packet traffic patterns among the nodes. This paper proposes an effective solution that leverages lightweight hardware primitives, specifically, Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs), to support secure communication in the network. The employed PUFs are used to generate peer-to-peer encryption keys to protect the data traffic among nodes and to the command center, while coping with the dynamic change of the network topology. Our solution efficiently supports both unicast and multicast communications. The proposed solution is validated through analysis and prototype implementation on an FPGA.