Secured and Easy-to-Use NFC-Based Device Configuration for the Internet of Things

Public awareness regarding security aspects in the Internet of Things (IoT) is currently rising due to regular media presence of various IoT-related security breaches. One of the major weaknesses of IoT devices is the absence of appropriate mechanisms for firmware and configuration updates. In addition, improved security concepts often result in poor usability which discourages users from relying on these concepts. Therefore, in this paper, we present an easy-to-use NFC-based configuration approach for IoT devices that is secured by appropriate security measures in software and hardware. Since industrial usage of such a configuration approach entails different requirements than home usage, we present and compare three different configuration processes. The applicability of our approach is demonstrated by two prototypical implementations, as well as a detailed security analysis. We also show that the imposed overhead due to the implemented security measures is negligible for most configuration updates.