Evaluation of Resource-Aware HTTP/3 Proxies for Smuggling Resilience in IoT Environments

The growing integration of IoT devices into Edge and Fog infrastructures, alongside the increasing adoption of low-latency QUIC-based protocols like HTTP/3, has intensified the need for lightweight, resource-efficient security mechanisms to counter emerging threats such as request smuggling. Within this context, proxy-based architectures offer an optimal trade-off to strengthen network security while accommodating the limited computational capacity of IoT devices. In this direction, this paper presents a comprehensive experimental evaluation of the impact of different proxies for HTTP/3 services on resource usage when deployed on platforms such as the Raspberry Pi (RPi), considering diverse traffic patterns, operational conditions, and device configurations. The results highlight that proxies can achieve a promising balance between security and resource overhead, confirming their viability for integration into distributed IoT-based Edge and Fog networks.