APPLICATION LAYER IN TCP/IP
— Acts as interface between the applications and the underlying network
— Application layer protocols provide rules and formats that determine how data is
treated in the application layer
— The TCP/IP application layer performs the functions of the upper three layers of the
OSI model (Application, Presentation, Session)
— Common application layer protocols include: HTTP, FPT, TFPT, DNS
— Application layer protocols are used by both the source and destination devices
during a communication session
— The application layer protocols implemented on the source and destination host must
match
HYPERTEXT TRANSFER PROTOCOL (HTTP)
HTTP VS HTTPS
— HTTP + SSL (Secure Socket Layer) = HTTPS
APPLICATION LAYERS IN IoT NETWORKS
— Application layer usually employs HTTP to provide web service, but HTTP has high
computation complexity, low data rate, and high energy consumption
— Therefore, several lightweight protocols have been developed for the application layer
of IoT networks
LAYERS IN IoT NETWORK ARCHITECTURE
IoT APPLICATION LAYER PROTOCOLS
— CoAP: Constrained Application Protocol
— MQTT: Messages Queuing Telemetry Transport
— XMPP: Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol
— RESTful: Representational State Transfer
— AMQP: Advanced Message Queuing Protocol
— WebSocket: Computer Communications Protocol
— DDS: Data Distribution Service
— SMQTT: Secure MQTT
TCP VS UDP
IoT APPLICATION LAYER PROTCOLS
REQUEST/RESPONSE
PUBLISH / SUBSCRIBE
IoT APPLICATION LAYER PROTOCOLS
TLS / SSL
— SSL: Secure Sockets Layer originally developed by Netscape in the mid 1990s
— TLS: Transport Layer Security evolved from SSL 3.0, is a cryptographic protocol that
provides communications security over a computer network
TLS
— TLS is a protocol for establishing secure (Transport Layer) communications between
two parties, usually denoted as a Client and a Server
DTLS
— The Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) is the UDP-based version of TLS,
designed to provide end-to-end security association between two nodes
DISCUSSIONS
— What is the best choice for IoT application layer protocols?
Application Layer Protocols
CONSTRAINED APPLICATION PROTOCOL (CoAP)
— CoAP is an application layer protocol that is intended for use in resource-constrained
devices
— Basically, a CoAP is a Restful web transfer protocol for use with constrained network
— CoAP uses client/server model of approach same as HTTP
— It is designed especially for constrained networks with low overhead and energy
CoAP vs HTTP
— Unlike HTTP based protocols, CoAP operates over UDP instead of using complex
congestion control as in TCP.
— CoAP is based on REST architecture, which is a general design for accessing Internet
resources.
— In order to overcome disadvantage in constrained resource, CoAP need to optimize the
length of datagram and provide reliable communication.
— On one side, CoAP provides REST methods such as GET, POST, PUT, and
DELETE.
— On the other side, based on lightweight UDP protocol, CoAP allows IP multicast,
which satisfies group communication for IoT.
CoAP
— To compensate for the unreliability of UDP protocol, CoAP defines a retransmission
mechanism and provides resource discovery mechanism with resource description.
— CoAP is not just a simply compression of HTTP protocol.
— Considering low processing capability and low power consuming demand of restrained
resource, CoAP redesigned some features of HTTP to accommodate these limitations.
CoAP vs HTTP
FEATURES OF CoAP
— Designed especially for constrained networks
— CoAP operates over UDP
— Asynchronous message exchange
— Low header and parsing complexity
— URI and content-type support
— Simple proxy and caching capacities
— Optional resource discovery
— UPD transport with optional reliability supporting unicast/multicast requests
— Stateless HTTP-CoAP mapping, allowing proxy to provide access to CoAP resources
via HTTP and vice versa
— Security using Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS)
CoAP COMMUNICATION METHOD
— CoAP supports the basic methods of GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, which are easily
mapped to HTTP
o GET: The GET method retrieves the information of the resource identified by
the request URI.
o POST: The POST method is used to request the server to create a new
subordinate resource under the requested parent URI.
o PUT: The PUT method requests that the resource identified by the request URI
be updated or created with the enclosed message body.
o DELETE: The DELETE method requests that the resource identified by the
request URI be deleted.
EXAMPLE
MESSAGE LAYER MODEL
— Message Layer supports 4 types message:
o CON (Confirmable)
o NON (Non-confirmable)
o ACK (Acknowledgement)
o RST (Reset)
RELIABLE MESSAGE TRANSPORT
— Keep retransmission until get ACK with the same message ID (like 0x8c56)
— Using default time out and decreasing counting time exponentially when transmitting
CON
— If recipient fail to process message, it responses by replacing ACK with RST
UNRELIABLE MESSAGE TRANSPORT
— Transporting with NON type message
— It does not need to be ACKed, but has to contain message ID for supervising in case of
retransmission
— If recipient fail to process message, server replies RST
MESSAGE FORMAT
— CoAP is based on the exchange of compact messages that, by default, are transmitted
over UDP (i.e., each CoAP message occupies the data section of one UDP datagram)
— Message of CoAP uses simple binary format
— Message= fixed-size 4-byte header plus a variable-length Token plus a sequence of
CoAP options plus payload
— Ver: Version
— T: Message type (CON, NON, ACK, and RES)
— TKL: Token length
— Code: Request method (1-10) or Response Code (40-255)
— Message ID: 16-bit identifier for matching responses
— Token: Optional response matching token
CoAP SECURITY ANALYSIS
— CoAP is now becoming the standard protocol for IoT applications.
— Security is important to protect the communication between devices.
— DTLS is security method used in CoAP.
— There are three main elements when considering security, namely integrity,
authentication, and confidentiality.
— DTLS can achieve all of them.
— Unlike network layer security protocols, DTLS in application layer protect end-to-end
communication
— No end-to-end communication protection will make it easy for attackers to access to all
text data that passes through a compromised node
— DTLS also avoids cryptographic overhead problems that occur in lower layer security
protocols
SECURITY CHALLENGES IN CoAP
— In terms of security, CoAP is still under considerations and development due to several
challenges and debates.
— The biggest challenge is to keep the high performance while maintaining the security
standards and providing protection.
SUMMARY
— Application Layer in TPC/IP
— Application Layer in IoT Networks
— IoT Application Layer Protocols
— Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP)
— CoAP Security Analysis
