Funktionen

Green Security and diet-IPsec: Bringing Security on lightweight and constrained devices

Background and Motivation:
More and more communications technology is being embedded into our environment. Different types of devices in our buildings, vehicles, equipment and other objects have a need to communicate. It is expected that most of these devices will employ the Internet Protocol suite. The term "Internet of Things" denotes a trend where a large number of devices directly benefit
from communication services that use Internet protocols. Many of these devices are not primarily computing devices operated by humans, but exist as components in buildings, vehicles, and the environment. There will be a lot of variation in the computing power, available memory, communications bandwidth, and other capabilities between different types of these devices. With many low-cost, low-power and otherwise constrained devices, it is not always easy to embed all the necessary features.
As far as security is concerned, there are multiple ways applications can be secured. Applications can be secured at the IP layer with IPsec for example. At the transport layer applications can benefit from TLS or DTLS. This is especially the case with HTTPS for example. Some other applications can use an application layer security like DNSSEC for example.

Objective of the Thesis:
In this thesis we are more concerned at comparing and position minimal implementation of IPsec and TLS/DTLS. The design part of this internship is to design the minimal IPsec/DTLS/TLS protocols. For clarity we will call these protocols diet-IPsec, diet-TLS and diet-DTLS. Comparison and position includes a description and evaluation of the state machines of these two protocols. This diet-TLS, diet-IPsec and diet-DTLS may be implemented and there performances tested over a network of captors. The most common language to make these implementation run is C.

This thesis is involved in IETF work lwg, 6lowpan Working Group, tests and implementations will lead to paper publications in conferences.

Remark:
This thesis will require the student to interact with multiple teams within Orange and with other companies and communities.

Supervisor:
Prof. Dr. Dieter Kranzlmüller

Requirements:
Security architectures, C

Duration: 6 months

Contact:
Dr. Michael Schiffers, Oettingenstr. 67, Room E 003 (Ground Floor), Tel. 2180-9164
Daniel Migault, Orange/France Telecom