ACE of Spades in the IoT Security Game: A Flexible IPsec Security Profile for Access Control
It addresses access control security for constrained IoT devices, but is incremental as it builds on the existing ACE framework.
This paper introduces the ACE IPsec profile to enable secure IPsec channel establishment for access control in resource-constrained IoT devices, with an open-source implementation tested on the Zolertia Firefly platform showing it is affordable and deployable.
The Authentication and Authorization for Constrained Environments (ACE) framework provides fine-grained access control in the Internet of Things, where devices are resource-constrained and with limited connectivity. The ACE framework defines separate profiles to specify how exactly entities interact and what security and communication protocols to use. This paper presents the novel ACE IPsec profile, which specifies how a client establishes a secure IPsec channel with a resource server, contextually using the ACE framework to enforce authorized access to remote resources. The profile makes it possible to establish IPsec Security Associations, either through their direct provisioning or through the standard IKEv2 protocol. We provide the first Open Source implementation of the ACE IPsec profile for the Contiki OS and test it on the resource-constrained Zolertia Firefly platform. Our experimental performance evaluation confirms that the IPsec profile and its operating modes are affordable and deployable also on constrained IoT platforms.