A DTLS Abstraction Layer for the Recursive Networking Architecture in RIOT

Abstract

On the Internet of Things (IoT), devices continuously communicate with each other, with a gateway, or other Internet nodes. Often devices are constrained and use insecure channels for their communication, which exposes them to a selection of attacks that may extract sensitive pieces of information or manipulate dialogues for the purpose of sabotaging. This paper presents a new layer in the RIOT networking architecture to seamlessly integrate secure communication between applications using DTLS. The layer acts as a modular abstraction layer of the different DTLS implementations, enabling swapping of the underlying implementation with just a few lines of code. This paper also introduces credman, a new module to manage credentials used for (D)TLS connections.