SEDIMENT: An IoT-device-centric Methodology for Scalable 5G Network Security

Advances in wireless networking, such as 5G, continue to enable the vision of the Internet of Things (IoT), where everything is connected, and much data is collected by IoT devices and made available to interested parties (i.e., application servers). However, events such as botnet attacks (e.g., [1]) demonstrate that there are important challenges in this evolution. In this paper we consider the problem of scalable and secure data publication from IoT devices, with included mechanisms that help towards device attacks prevention and detection. We propose SEDIMENT, a system and methodology which look more specifically at problems that arise in a network with a broad variety of devices, some of which have limited resources and some of which were designed for a less hostile environment. SEDIMENT uses a combination of software root of trust, remote attestation and resource-efficient cryptography, to build a system that scales across heterogeneous computing platforms. It allows for devices that range from battery-powered devices that are intended to operate for long periods up to server-class machines without power constraints. SEDIMENT provides a secure application layer that can be used for common communication paradigms such as publish-subscribe while following zero-trust principles in both protecting the end hosts from the network and other end hosts, as well as protecting the network from the end hosts.