HybridEdge: A Lightweight and Secure Hybrid Communication Protocol for the Edge-Enabled Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) and edge-assisted networking infrastructures are capable of bringing data processing and accessibility services locally at the respective edge rather than at a centralized module. These infrastructures are very effective in providing a fast response to the respective queries of the requesting modules, but their distributed nature has introduced other problems such as security and privacy. To address these problems, various security-assisted communication mechanisms have been developed to safeguard every active module, i.e., devices and edges, from every possible vulnerability in the IoT. However, these methodologies have neglected one of the critical issues, which is the prediction of fraudulent devices, i.e., adversaries, preferably as early as possible in the IoT. In this paper, a hybrid communication mechanism is presented where the Hidden Markov Model (HMM) predicts the legitimacy of the requesting device (both source and destination), and the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) safeguards the reliability of the transmitted data over a shared communication medium, preferably through a secret shared key, i.e., $\lambda$, and timestamp information. A device becomes trusted if it has passed both evaluation levels, i.e., HMM and message decryption, within a stipulated time interval. The proposed hybrid, along with existing state-of-the-art approaches, has been simulated in the realistic environment of the IoT to verify the security measures. These evaluations were carried out in the presence of intruders capable of launching various attacks simultaneously, such as man-in-the-middle, device impersonations, and masquerading attacks. Moreover, the proposed approach has been proven to be more effective than existing state-of-the-art approaches due to its exceptional performance in communication, processing, and storage overheads, i.e., 13%, 19%, and 16%, respectively. Finally, the proposed hybrid approach is pruned against well-known security attacks in the IoT.