EN FR
EN FR


Section: Application Domains

Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is the network and application space formed by the millions of small, connected devices that are increasingly present in our daily lives, and by the servers, clouds, and apps that they communicate with. This includes not only consumer devices such as smartphones, household devices, and wearable technology, but also an increasinly large proportion of our fundamental civic infrastructure (as is reflected by the increasing attention given to Smart Cities).

The IoT is therefore a massive, pervasive, and highly heterogeneous distributed computing system; a system that is mostly unprotected and insecure. Many of the devices are simply too small and underpowered to run the conventional cryptosystems that are standard for internet communications: even a minimalist TLS stack will often overwhelm the resources available on some small platforms. These limitations include small memory size, limited battery power, and low computational capacity. Not only are these devices harder to defend, but they are also much easier to attack: for example, these devices are generally extremely physically accessible (they must be, to fulfil their purpose), but this makes them extremely vulnerable to side-channel attacks.

Nevertheless, strong cryptography is essential to the future of IoT, precisely because these systems are so pervasive in our everyday lives, both individually (in our homes) and collectively (in our cities, industries, and urban infrastructure). We need strong cryptography to protect the personal and industrial data that these devices collect, process, and transmit; but we also need strong cryptography to ensure that devices and services can identify and authenticate themselves and each other with confidence. It is not enough to simply put secure systems in place; we must also develop reliable software update mechanisms, tailored to the needs and challenges of the IoT space.

While these technical challenges have been met, to some extent, for symmetric cryptosystems (which means that we have reasonable means of encrypting data and ensuring its integrity), they pose a massive problem for implementers of asymmetric cryptosystems (including key exchange, signatures, identification, and authentication). Efficient asymmetric cryptosystems have long been a research focus for GRACE, and our expertise in elliptic curve cryptosystems is of particular relevance for IoT, since these cryptosystems typically require the fewest memory and bandwidth resources.

Looking towards the future, the massive contemporary research effort in postquantum cryptosystems has so far mostly yielded systems even less-suited to IoT than conventional asymmetric systems are. Nevertheless, there is some hope that postquantum security can be brought to some IoT devices, and we are hopeful that GRACE's strength in isogeny-based cryptography will have an impact here.