PIVOT

The emerging Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to host billions of devices that regularly report sensor readings by using long or short range radio channels. Generated content items and also collateral metadata are not well protected today because (i) channel encryption is commonly intercepted at gateways, (ii) identifiers reveal communication partners and contexts, and (iii) cryptographic protection embedded in the low-end transmission infrastructure remains too weak to resist attacks. In the current IoT, sensing sources lose control over their data often even before it reaches its destinations.

Core concept and innovation: Naming protected content

In PIVOT, we start from two fundamental observations. First, a privacy-friendly IoT requires to protect content objects by themselves, in addition to commonly deployed channel encryption. Content disclosure can thus be attributed to designated receivers. Second, names can serve as the principle interface to access IoT data, eliding source identities. Hence, individual end point identifiers will disappear from public Internet metadata.

The innovation in PIVOT is to address the prevalent privacy and security issues in IoT by proposing content object security principles that build on privacy-friendly names, while remaining globally and seamlessly interoperable between IoT devices regardless of networks to which they may connect.

Goals and ambitions: Privacy-friendly object security in the constrained IoT

PIVOT will focus on four core goals:

1. A crypto framework for privacy-friendly service primitives on constrained IoT devices.
2. Protocols that integrate decentralized object security.
3. Minimal trust anchor provisioning on IoT devices to enable object security.
4. Multi-stakeholder name management that preserves privacy requirements and generates, allocates, and resolves names globally—regardless of the IoT applications or networks.

A demonstrator based on RIOT will verify our solutions in constrained IoT networks such as LoRaWAN.

PIVOT follows the perspective of “immediate action is required”. This implies that we will extend existing architectures and protocol standards conjoined with standardization bodies, while introducing new first-hand primitive where necessary. Our ambitious roadmap will allow for incremental deployment of the PIVOT solutions, which is the most promising path to quick adoption.