ABSTRACT
The Smart Home environment is made up of different objects that have sensing capabilities
and have the potential to interact with each other seamlessly. This brings a lot of
convenience to the control and monitoring of the surroundings around the home
environment. This reality is brought about as a result of the Internet of Things (IoT)
phenomenon. The potential benefits presented by IoT technologies around the Smart Home
environment can and are hampered by security issues that are yet to be resolved both at
the perception layer and the transmission layer.
The need to secure data collected around the home environment and the exchange of such
data among the smart objects is of paramount importance. The general limitation that
things in the Internet of Things suffer from is that of computational power and storage
space. Resource constrained devices hinder the application of robust security solutions that
conventional networking environment devices enjoy hence the need to look at the suitable
solutions that meet the resource basis of things in an optimal way. To realise this objective,
this research employed a constructivist paradigm, which guided the design of an artefact
that was tested under the guided framework of the design science research approach.
The focus on authentication as a security dimension has been motivated by its interweaved
nature into other security pillars. Authentication proves to be a primary security key
window in that if it fails to detect unauthorised access, all other security loopholes are
opened in the entire networked environment.
A simulated Smart Home environment that modelled critical application requirements for
Assisted Ambient Living (AAL) spaces and Energy Saving Solutions (ESS) was used to evaluate
the proposed lightweight authentication architecture’s efficiency, which was tested against
existing similar solutions around the same functionality. The lightweight authentication
architecture presented in this submission was tested using the SCYTHER tool, which allowed
verification, falsification and security testing by checking on various classes of attacks and
possible architecture behaviour. The architecture turned out secure for tested insider,
impersonation, replay and man-in-middle attacks, which were considered ideal as guided by
the Dolev-Yao model
The contribution of this research is its pragmatic approach to the security design for
constrained things in IoT that can operate with little to no human intervention – hence
unsupervised. Key findings from this work highlight two important aspects for proper
security advancement, which are identity management of things in the IoT space and the
scalability of using agent based models to reduce resource demands at the device level.
As an envisaged current and future relevance of this work, it may inform the security design
of authentication solutions in IoT application environments in ad hoc personal area network
setups and feed into the bigger vision of smart cities.
Gamundani, A (2021). A Lightweight Authentication Architecture for Unsupervised Internet of Things (IoT) in Smart Home Applications. Afribary. Retrieved from https://tracking.afribary.com/works/a-lightweight-authentication-architecture-for-unsupervised-internet-of-things-iot-in-smart-home-applications
Gamundani, Attlee "A Lightweight Authentication Architecture for Unsupervised Internet of Things (IoT) in Smart Home Applications" Afribary. Afribary, 09 May. 2021, https://tracking.afribary.com/works/a-lightweight-authentication-architecture-for-unsupervised-internet-of-things-iot-in-smart-home-applications. Accessed 10 Nov. 2024.
Gamundani, Attlee . "A Lightweight Authentication Architecture for Unsupervised Internet of Things (IoT) in Smart Home Applications". Afribary, Afribary, 09 May. 2021. Web. 10 Nov. 2024. < https://tracking.afribary.com/works/a-lightweight-authentication-architecture-for-unsupervised-internet-of-things-iot-in-smart-home-applications >.
Gamundani, Attlee . "A Lightweight Authentication Architecture for Unsupervised Internet of Things (IoT) in Smart Home Applications" Afribary (2021). Accessed November 10, 2024. https://tracking.afribary.com/works/a-lightweight-authentication-architecture-for-unsupervised-internet-of-things-iot-in-smart-home-applications