Assessment of energy consumption for information flow control protocols in IoT devices

In the IoT (Internet of Things), millions of devices are interconnected and devices support too poor computation resources to install enough security functions to protect from malicious accesses. Hence, devices have to be supported with access control mechanisms. The CBAC (Capability-Based Access Control) model is most useful to be as access control model for IoT devices because it is sufficient for each device to just check the capability of each access request. However, illegal and late information flows among devices and subjects occur. Types of IFC (Information Flow Control) protocols like the OI and TBOI protocols to prevent illegal and late types of information flows are proposed in our previous studies. A secure device supports the CBAC model and the IFC protocols. First, an EC (Energy Consumption) model is proposed to show how a secure device consumes the electric energy in this paper. By using the EC model, the IFC protocols are evaluated in terms of the energy consumed by secure devices. A secure device mostly consumes energy to check capability tokens of each access request. In the simulation, the energy consumed by secure devices to process access requests can be reduced by selecting only tokens required. About 69% and 73% of energy in the OI and TBOI protocols can be reduced by adopting the CTS (Capability Token Selection) algorithms, respectively.