An Anonymization Protocol for the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to pervasively interconnect billions of devices, denoted as "smart objects", in an Internet-like structure, which will extend the current Internet, enabling new forms of interactions between objects based on social relationships. In such a scenario, security is a difficult and challenging task, and proper mechanisms should be defined without introducing too much protocol overhead and processing load. In particular, in this paper we focus on the anonymity of the communications and we propose a solution particularly suitable for such a constrained scenario. In the proposed solution IoT nodes form an Onion Routing anonymity network completely based on a datagram transport (e.g., over UDP). Confidentiality is completely enforced by the anonymity network and no other security protocols, such as IPSec or DTLS, are required. The proposed solution has been also implemented and tested.