A low-overhead approach for self-sovereign identity in IoT
This addresses the challenge of secure and efficient identity management for IoT devices in resource-limited environments, representing an incremental improvement over existing proxy-based approaches.
The paper tackled the problem of enabling self-sovereign identity for IoT agents in constrained networks by proposing a low-overhead mechanism, resulting in a reduction of identity metadata size by almost four times and security overhead by up to five times.
We present a low-overhead mechanism for self-sovereign identification and communication of IoT agents in constrained networks. Our main contribution is to enable native use of Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) and DID-based secure communication on constrained networks, whereas previous works either did not consider the issue or relied on proxy-based architectures. We propose a new extension to DIDs along with a more concise serialization method for DID metadata. Moreover, in order to reduce the security overhead over transmitted messages, we adopted a binary message envelope. We implemented these proposals within the context of Swarm Computing, an approach for decentralized IoT. Results showed that our proposal reduces the size of identity metadata in almost four times and security overhead up to five times. We observed that both techniques are required to enable operation on constrained networks.