Internet of Things: Security in the Keys

Security threats may hinder the large scale adoption of the emerging Internet of Things (IoT) technologies. Besides efforts have already been made in the direction of data integrity preservation, confidentiality and privacy, several issues are still open. The existing solutions are mainly based on encryption techniques, but no attention is actually paid to key management. A clever key distribution system, along with a key replacement mechanism, are essentials for assuring a secure approach. In this paper, two popular key management systems, conceived for wireless sensor networks, are integrated in a real IoT middleware and compared in order to evaluate their performance in terms of overhead, delay and robustness towards malicious attacks.