On the feasibility of secure application-layer communications on the Web of Things

The availability of inexpensive sensing devices capable of wireless communications enables the design of exciting and new distributed sensing applications. The integration of such applications with the Internet will contribute to materialize a vision of a future Web that we nowadays describe as the Web of Things (WoT). Many security-related aspects are still open on how to address security for communications on the WoT, and that must be targeted before such applications can realistically be considered ready for deployment. We discuss the experimental evaluation of mechanisms proposed to secure end-to-end web communications with IPv6-capable sensing applications and devices, as such mechanisms may provide an important contribution towards the WoT. Our experimental evaluation study considers the impact of security on real sensing devices and requirements from sensing applications, allowing the identification of the limitations of current sensing platforms in supporting the proposed mechanisms.