Quantum-Safe Secure IoT Gateway
REEBA ROSE R, SOWNDARYA D, THILAGAVATHI C, THAVAN P K
III-year ECE, Coimbatore Institute of Technology
DR. S. GEETHA, PROFESSOR, Coimbatore Institute of Technology
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The Internet of Things (IoT) is being used in many important areas where devices continuously collect and exchange information. In such environment, protecting the collected data is very important because an attacker may try to hack the data and use it unauthorised. Our project, Quantum-Safe Secure IoT Gateway, focuses on providing security for IoT devices using a simulated nuclear power-plant monitoring system to showcase a secure communication between an embedded system and the IoT Gateway.
In our system, five simulated IoT devices are used to represent different sensors that are used in a nuclear power plant: the reactor, cooling pump, radiation monitoring system, steam system, and environmental monitoring system. Each device produces different simulated sensor readings such as temperature, pressure, coolant flow, vibration, radiation level, steam, water level, and humidity. These readings are sent through MQTT, a lightweight communication protocol commonly used for IoT applications. Mosquitto is used as the MQTT broker to receive and manage the messages from the simulated devices. A secure IoT gateway is placed between the devices and the monitoring system. The main purpose of this gateway is to check whether the received data is coming from a registered device and whether the data has been changed during communication. To prepare the system for possible security threats from future quantum computers, we use Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC). The project uses ML-KEM-768 for establishing a shared secret key between the device and gateway, and ML-DSA-65 for creating and checking digital signatures. To check whether the security system works correctly, different attack situations were deliberately simulated. In a tampering attack, the sensor data was changed after the message was signed. The gateway detected the change because the digital signature was no longer valid and rejected the message. In a replay attack, an old message that had already been accepted was sent again. The gateway identified it using the message timestamp and replay-checking mechanism. An unknown or fake device attack was also tested by sending a message with an unregistered device identity, which was rejected by the gateway. The system also checks timestamps to prevent old or expired messages from being accepted.
After the security checks are completed, valid sensor data is sent to Adafruit IO for cloud monitoring. A Flask-based local dashboard, developed using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, which is used to store the secured data. Overall, the project demonstrates how a secure gateway can be used to protect IoT sensor communication between an embedded system and the IoT Gateway.
