Resource Efficient Security Mechanism for Cloud of Things

Cloud of Things (CoT) relates to the convergence between Cloud Computing (CC) and the Internet of Things (IoT) and has significantly transformed the way services are delivered in the ubiquitous realm of devices. This integration has become essential because of the huge data being generated by IoT devices, requiring an infrastructure for storage and processing. Such infrastructure is provided by Cloud Computing services with massive space for data storage and exceptional platform to process complex data. IoT networks are vulnerable to multiple security breaches because of the growing usage of IoT devices in user personal systems. This leads to security and privacy threats that need to be addressed. IoT consists of resource limited devices which have feeble computing power, battery source and storage capacity. This paper addresses security issue by proposing usage of obfuscation and encryption techniques to scramble the data at IoT devices which is later on stored in encrypted form at the cloud server. The data at IoT devices is classified into highly critical or less critical and accordingly the appropriate technique between encryption and obfuscation is applied. The proposed mechanism is evaluated in terms of processing time for cryptographic operations at IoT devices. Evaluation results depict that the proposed mechanism is 1.17 times faster than [22] in terms of encryption and decryption times.