CoAP-based request-response interaction model for the internet of things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a broad vision that incorporate real-wold devices from everyday life. These objects coordinate with each other to share the information gathered from phenomena of interest. IoT is a broad term and has attain popularity with the integration of Cloud Computing and Big Data. The partnership among these technologies is revolutionizing the world in which we live and interact with different devices. On the down side, there are lot of speculations and forecasts about the scale of IoT products expected to be available in the market. Most of the products are vendor-specific and as such are not interoperable. They lack a unified standard and are not compatible with each other. Another major issue with these products is the lack of secured features. Albeit, IoT devices are resource-rich, however, they are not capable to communicate in absence of embedded sensor nodes. The presence of resource-constrained sensors in the core of each IoT device make it resource-starving and as such require extremely lightweight but secured algorithms to combat various attacks and malevolent entities from spreading their malicious data. In this paper we aim to propose an extremely lightweight mutual handshaking algorithm for authentication. The proposed scheme verifies the identity of each participating device because establishing communication. Our scheme is based on client-server interaction model using Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP). A 4-byte header, extremely lightweight parsing complexity and JSON based payload encryption make it a lightweight scheme for IoT objects. The proposed scheme can be used as an alternative to DTLS schemes, the one common nowadays for IoT objects.