Enabling Secure Data Exchange through the IOTA Tangle for IoT Constrained Devices

Internet-of-Things (IoT) and sensor technologies have enabled the collection of data in a distributed fashion for analysis and evidence-based decision making. However, security concerns regarding the source, confidentiality and integrity of the data arise. The most common method of protecting data transmission in sensor systems is Transport Layer Security (TLS) or its datagram counterpart (DTLS) today, but exist an alternative option based on Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) that promise strong security, ease of use and potential for large scale integration of heterogeneous sensor systems. A DLT such as the IOTA Tangle offers great potential to improve sensor data exchange. This paper presents L2Sec, a cryptographic protocol which is able to secure data exchanged over the IOTA Tangle. This protocol is suitable for implementation on constrained devices, such as common IoT devices, leading to greater scalability. The first experimental results evidence the effectiveness of the approach and advocate for the integration of an hardware secure element to improve the overall security of the protocol. The L2Sec source code is released as open source repository on GitHub.