The internet of things (IoT) is a concept that is revolutionizing our daily lives along with different areas of industry. All existing objects will be connected to the internet. All the possibilities offered by IoT are very promising. However, setting up these architectures poses various problems. The exponential increase in devices is a challenge to the current internet architecture and represents a major security weakness of the internet of things. Indeed, securing these devices poses a significant security challenge. Thus, the emergence of the internet of things requires the design and deployment of new solutions. In this chapter, the authors propose content-centric networking (CCN) as a potential alternative networking solution for the IoT. The authors show that the implementation of CCN architecture in IoT can address several IoT requirements including security challenges.
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Today, the Internet is gradually becoming a Hyper Network formed by a multitude of physical objects, programs (algorithms, software) and data (Big Data, linked data…) called “Internet of things” (IoT). The term Internet of Things does not yet have any standard definitions, which is explained by the youth of this concept in full mutation. The term was invented by Kevin Ashton (1999) with the development of the technology era. The advances in technology have led the British Kevin Ashton to imagine a world where advanced levels of connectivity engendered automation in all areas and in all aspects of life. He, the father of internet of things, founded the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the same year, dedicated to the design of connected objects by RFID and other wireless sensors networks. Since 2000, many connected objects can be observed. LG invents the connected refrigerator that still exist until today. In 2005, appeared the Nabaztag, a connected rabbit working with voice recognition and quickly becomes the icon of connected objects. IoT applications range from smart homes and Vehicles without driver to automated traffic control for traffic in the smart city, and even pacemakers that send and receive information, and can be adjusted remotely according to the needs of the patient. Two major families of technologies play an essential role in the development of the Internet of Things; wireless communication technologies and RFID identification systems.
Soon every device we own and nearly all existing objects will be connected to the Internet. By 2020, According to an estimate, over 50 billion devices will be connected to a vast network (See Figure 1): The Internet of Things, a novel paradigm that transforms the physical objects around us to an information ecosystem that rapidly change our way of life. It will offer an almost unlimited number of services (health, sport, wellness…) that it will be possible to customize according to economic factors, context, usage and individual specifics. However, many challenges slow down the deployment of IoT. Security and privacy are the key challenges facing the development of the internet of things.
Figure 1. Number of connected devices
In fact, things are very diverse. All objects in the real world can be regarded as things ranging from RFID tags, cars, robots, fridges, mobile phones, to shoes, plants, watches, and so on. These kinds of Things must be ideally protected against spyware, malware, Trojan, and all intrusions that threaten privacy. This exponential increase in devices is the fundamental security weakness of the Internet of Things. Furthermore, this boost is a problem to the present Internet architecture, where connectivity is founded on host-to-host communication. Connecting billions of devices, this way requires an equal amount of allocated IP addresses and implies the need of additional resolution systems to translate application level requests into IP addresses. Today, the IPv4 protocol is hampered by major limitations such as the exhaustion of the public IPv4 address space managed by the Internet Assigned Number Authority (IANA), which requires the design and deployment of new solutions, hence the need for the transition to the IPv6 protocol offering new features. Despite its ability to handle a huge amount of IP addresses, IPv6 has not been developed to meet the requirements of the Internet of things. In fact, some arguments against the use of IPv6 in IoT have been exposed.