Internet of Things (IoT), the newer generation of traditional wireless sensor network devices, offer wide variety of applications in various areas including military, medicine, home automation, remote monitoring, etc. Due to their wide usage and recent large-scale DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks using millions of these devices, security of these devices have become an important aspect to address. Additionally, security implementation needs to be power efficient considering the limited power resource available to these wireless devices. Since users, as well as attackers, can control or access IoT devices remotely using smartphone or a computer, any attack on these devices can result in disasters.

This thesis is directed towards development and implementation of a secure and power-efficient communication mechanism on these low-power devices. First, we performed a detailed analysis of the power consumption of these devices for different environment variables including temperature, lighting and location (in/outdoor), to understand effects of these parameters on device power consumption. Second, we proposed and implemented a novel security algorithm to detect and mitigate RPL (routing protocol layer) attacks in IoT networks. We evaluated changes in the behavior of IoT devices before and after the implementation of our proposed algorithm in terms of the change in battery life and power consumption. The proposed security implementation has the novel approach of using the RSSI (received signal strength indicator) tunneling to detect and mitigate RPL (routing protocol layer) attacks. Finally, we conducted experiments in simulation as well as on first generation real-world sensor nodes (Zolertia Z1 motes) to evaluate the power efficiency of our proposed algorithm. We conclude the thesis with insights on (a) the effect of interference present in the atmosphere on battery life, (b) security provided by the proposed algorithm, and (c) power-efficiency of the proposed security algorithm for IoT devices.