Securing the internet of everything through adaptive and resource-efficient mechanisms

The Internet of Everything (IoE) is the intelligent connection of people, process, data and things. In addition to machine-to-machine communications as facilitated in traditional networks and the Internet of Things, IoE enables machine-to-people and technology-assisted people-to-people interactions. An IoE local network may comprise various devices, including resource-constrained devices such as sensors, actuators, and embedded and wearable devices. The protection of such a network (and the data collected by and transmitted between network devices) against security attacks is highly challenging. First, the devices may be deployed in open environments without physical protection. More severely, the security protocols developed for traditional computer networks are ineffective or even inapplicable due to the resource-constrained nature of the end devices in IoE. In this article, we discuss the security challenges and requirements for data communications between IoE devices. We show that a suite of security protocols developed recently may provide an adaptive and resource-ef-ficient solution to IoE security.