sensors Article FLEX-IoT: Secure and Resource-Efficient Network Boot System for Flexible-IoT Platform Keon-Ho Park 1,† , Seong-Jin Kim 1,† , Joobeom Yun 1 , Seung-Ho Lim 2,* and Ki-Woong Park 1,* 1 Department of Computer and Information Security, and Convergence Engineering for Intelligent Drone, Sejong University, Seoul 05006, Korea;
[email protected] (K.-H.P.);
[email protected] (S.-J.K.);
[email protected] (J.Y.) 2 Division of Computer Engineering, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Yongin 17035, Korea * Correspondence:
[email protected] (S.-H.L.);
[email protected] (K.-W.P.); Tel.: +82-2-6935-2453 (K.-W.P.) † These authors contributed equally. Abstract: In an internet of things (IoT) platform with a copious number of IoT devices and active variation of operational purpose, IoT devices should be able to dynamically change their system images to play various roles. However, the employment of such features in an IoT platform is hindered by several factors. Firstly, the trivial file transfer protocol (TFTP), which is generally used for network boot, has major security vulnerabilities. Secondly, there is an excessive demand for the server during the network boot, since there are numerous IoT devices requesting system images according to the variation of their roles, which exerts a heavy network overhead on the server. To tackle these challenges, we propose a system termed FLEX-IoT. The proposed system maintains a FLEX-IoT orchestrater which uses an IoT platform operation schedule to flexibly operate the IoT devices in the platform. The IoT platform operation schedule contains the schedules of all the IoT devices on the platform, and the FLEX-IoT orchestrater employs this schedule to flexibly change the mode of system image transfer at each moment.