IEEE SENSORS JOURNAL, VOL. 15, NO. 5, MAY 2015 2577
Proposed Security Mechanism for XMPP-Based
Communications of ISO/IEC/IEEE 21451
Sensor Networks
Longhua Guo, Jun Wu, Member, IEEE, Zhengmin Xia, and Jianhua Li
Abstract—The ISO/IEC/IEEE 21451 standards provide the
communication and information models to facilitate the access
of smart sensor to a network. ISO/IEC/IEEE 21451-1-4 standard
aims to propose a solution using extensible messaging and
presence protocol (XMPP) to transport message over sensor
networks. Ensuring security of communications over XMPP is
one of the most important issues in ISO/IEC/IEEE21451-1-4
sensor networks. In this paper, we propose a security mech-
anism that deals with the requirements of authentication,
integrity, confidentiality, nonrepudiation, and access control. The
XMPP-based communications in ISO/IEC/IEEE 21451 sensor
networks utilize the username/password security token as
well as integrated publish/subscribe (pub/sub) and role-based
access control technologies. Based on the proposed mechanism,
ISO/IEC/IEEE 21451 messages are exchanged based on the
pub/sub model using an extended security simple object access
protocol over XMPP until released. An instance is the model
based on ISO/IEC/IEEE 21451-1-4 to secure the XMPP-based
communication in sensor network. The result supports the feasi-
bility of the security mechanism for XMPP-based ISO/IEC/IEEE
21451 sensor networks.
Index Terms— Extensible messaging and presence
protocol (XMPP), ISO/IEC/IEEE 21451, publish/subscribe
(pub/sub), sensor networks.
I. INTRODUCTION
I
N RECENT YEARS, sensor networks have attracted and
been wildly applied in the fields such as military, disas-
ter relief, medical treatment, environment monitoring and so
on [1]–[3]. A variety of sensors based on different standards
have inhibited development of sensor [4]–[6], which hampers
the wide application of smart sensor networks. To address
this, the group of smart sensor interface standards called IEEE
1451 is established by the Instrumentation and Measurement
Society’s Sensor Technology Technical Committee TC-9 of the
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) [7].
Manuscript received July 31, 2014; revised November 14, 2014; accepted
November 15, 2014. Date of publication December 2, 2014; date of current
version March 11, 2015. This work was supported in part by the Doctoral
Scientific Fund Project through the Ministry of Education, China, under
Grant 20130073130006 and in part by the National Natural Science Foun-
dation of China under Grant 61401273 and Grant 61431008. The associate
editor coordinating the review of this paper and approving it for publication
was Prof. Shabana Urooj. (Corresponding author: Jun Wu.)
The authors are with the Shanghai Key Laboratory of Integrated
Administration Technologies for Information Security, School of Electronic
Information and Electrical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University,
Shanghai 200240, China (e-mail: staring@sjtu.edu.cn; junwuhn@sjtu.edu.cn;
zhengminxia@sjtu.edu.cn; lijh888@sjtu.edu.cn).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/JSEN.2014.2373388
With IEEE 1451, manufacturers’ independent common com-
munication protocol can be adopted in sensor network [8].
In last decade, a lot of sensor network systems are pro-
posed based on IEEE 1451 [8]–[10]. However, IEEE 1451
doesn’t support the latest communication protocols such as
eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP), Hyper-
text Transfer Protocol (HTTP), Simple Network Manage-
ment Protocol (SNMP) and so on which cannot meet the
latest requirements of the communications of smart sensors.
Kang Lee, Chairman of the IEEE Instrumentation and
Measurement Society’s Technical Committee on Sensor
Technology, and other related researchers are working on
the establishment of ISO/IEC/IEEE 21451 (a new vision of
IEEE1451) which provides an application model to facilitate
access of transducers to a network [11]–[17]. The support
of protocols such as XMPP, HTTP, Web services, SNMP
and so on makes it available for smart sensors to com-
municate between different latest communication protocols
under the standard specified in ISO/IEC/IEEE 21451. As an
open protocol with simple interface and interconnected archi-
tecture, XMPP is extensively employed in the communica-
tion of distributed applications. With the characteristics of
instant messaging and scalability, the use of XMPP in sensor
network helps to eliminate communication barriers caused by
different networked interconnections and telecommunication
technologies. Extensions to XMPP developed by The XMPP
Standards Foundation (XSF) form a series of standards cen-
tered around XMPP Extension Protocols (XEPs) [18]–[23].
Under the leadership of William Miller, a lot of works focus on
ISO/IEC/IEEE 21451-1-4 Standard which defines a communi-
cation model using XMPP to transport ISO/IEC/IEEE 21451
sensor network messages [24].
Nowadays, some existing works have focused on
advanced technologies and applications of ISO/IEC/IEEE
21451 [25], [26]. Security of XMPP based communications
of the sensor networks organized by this new standard is a
significant issue deserving research. As a matter of fact, it is
very important to secure XMPP based communications in the
sensor networks based on ISO/IEC/IEEE 21451 standards,
which needs to satisfy the authentication, integrity, confi-
dentiality, non- repudiation and access control requirements.
In ISO/IEC/IEEE 21451-1-4, some of Internet of Things (IoT)
XEPs are listed. For example, XEP-0324 describes architecture
for efficient provisioning of services, access rights and
user privileges in the IoT [20]. To control the access right,
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