OnboardICNg: A secure protocol for on-boarding IoT devices in ICN

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is an emerging networking paradigm that focuses on content distribution and aims at replacing the current IP stack. Implementations of ICN have demonstrated its advantages over IP, in terms of network performance and resource requirements. Because of these advantages, ICN is also considered to be a good network paradigm candidate for the Internet-of-Things (IoT), especially in scenarios involving resource constrained devices. In this paper we propose OnboardICNg, the first secure protocol for on-boarding (authenticating and authorizing) IoT devices in ICN mesh networks. OnboardICNg can securely onboard resource constrained devices into an existing IoT network, outperforming the authentication protocol selected for the ZigBee-IP specification: EAP-PANA, i.e., the Protocol for carrying Authentication for Network Access (PANA) combined with the Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP). In particular we show that, compared with EAP-PANA, OnboardICNg reduces the communication and energy consumption, by 87% and 66%, respectively. © 2016 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM.