Securing IoT communications: at what cost?

IoT systems use wireless links for local communication, where locality depends on the transmission range and include many devices with low computational power such as sensors. In IoT systems, security is a crucial requirement, but difficult to obtain, because standard cryptographic techniques have a cost that is usually unaffordable. We resort to an extended version of the process calculus LySa, called IoTLySa, to model the patterns of communication of IoT devices. Moreover, we assign rates to each transition to infer quantitative measures on the specified systems. The derived performance evaluation can be exploited to establish the cost of the possible security countermeasures.