Energy-efficient replica detection for resource-limited mobile devices in the internet of things

The forthcoming Internet of Things - an intelligent collaboration of resource-limited static/mobile devices that are embedded in the daily lives of users - poses new challenges to security and end-user privacy. One of the most challenging problems is how to thwart replica attacks. Once a device is captured physically by an attacker or contaminated by malicious code, it can be reprogrammed and the secret information inside can be duplicated into a large number of replicas that maliciously occupy the network and collect users private information without authorisation. In this study, the authors focus on studying the detection of replicas in mobile applications; which can consist of resource-limited static devices attached to mobile entities. Most existing solutions for detecting replicas have been designed for static devices, and cannot be immediately applied to mobile devices because of their unique properties, in particular, their node mobility. The authors present two efficient methods for detecting replicas in mobile devices. Through performance evaluations, they find that the proposed methods provide highly accurate replica detection with nearly zero detection errors. Furthermore, the distributed and cooperative strategy of the methods significantly reduces the energy required to detect replicas while providing faster replica detection than the existing solutions.