Internet of Things Security Using Proactive WPA/WPA2

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a natural evolution of the Internet and is becoming more and more ubiquitous in our everyday home, enterprise, healthcare, education, and many other aspects. The data gathered and processed by IoT networks might be sensitive and that calls for feasible and adequate security measures. The work in this thesis describes the use of the Wi-Fi technology in the IoT connectivity, then proposes a new approach, the Proactive Wireless Protected Access (PWPA), to protect the access networks. Then a new end to end (e2e) IoT security model is suggested to include the PWPA scheme. To evaluate the solutions security and performance, rstly, the cybersecurity triad: con dentiality, integrity, and availability aspects were discussed, secondly, the solutions performance was compared to a counterpart e2e security solution, the Secure Socket Layer security. A small e2e IoT network was set up to simulate a real environment that uses HTTP protocol. Packets were then collected and analyzed. Data analysis showed a bandwidth e ciency increase by 2% (Internet links) and 12% (access network), and by 344% (Internet links) and 373% (access network) when using persistent and non-persistent HTTP respectively. On the other hand, the analysis showed a reduction in the average request-response delay of 25% and 53% when using persistent and non-persistent HTTP respectively. This scheme is possibly a simple and feasible solution that improves the IoT network security performance by reducing the redundancy in the TCP/IP layers security implementation.