skip to main content


Title: Deploying Robust Security in Internet of Things
Popularization of the Internet-of-Things (IoT) has brought widespread concerns on IoT security, especially in face of several recent security incidents related to IoT devices. Due to the resource-constrained nature of many IoT devices, security offloading has been proposed to provide good-enough security for IoT with minimum overhead on the devices. In this paper, we investigate the inevitable risk associated with security offloading: the unprotected and unmonitored transmission from IoT devices to the offloaded security mechanisms. An important challenge in modeling the security risk is the dynamic nature of IoT due to demand fluctuations and infrastructure instability. We propose a stochastic model to capture both the expected and worst-case security risks of an IoT system. We then propose a framework to efficiently address the optimal robust deployment of security mechanisms in IoT. We use results from extensive simulations to demonstrate the superb performance and efficiency of our approach compared to several other algorithms.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1461886
NSF-PAR ID:
10098771
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
2018 IEEE Conference on Communications and Network Security (CNS)
Page Range / eLocation ID:
1 to 9
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. Recent advancements in energy-harvesting techniques provide an alternative to batteries for resource constrained IoT devices and lead to a new computing paradigm, the intermittent computing model. In this model, a software module continues its execution from where it left off when an energy shortage occurred. Enforcing security of an intermittent software module is challenging because its power-off state has to be protected from a malicious adversary in addition to its power-on state, while the security mechanisms put in place must have a low overhead on the performance, resource consumption, and cost of a device. In this paper, we propose SIA (Secure Intermittent Architecture), a security architecture for resource-constrained IoT devices. SIA leverages low-cost security features available in commercial off-the-shelf microcontrollers to protect both the power-on and power-off state of an intermittent software module. Therefore, SIA enables a host of secure intermittent computing applications such as self-attestation, remote attestation, and secure communication. Moreover, our architecture provides confidentiality and integrity guarantees to an intermittent computing module at no cost compared to previous approaches in the literature that impose significant overheads. The salient characteristic of SIA is that it does not require any hardware modifications, and hence, it can be directly applied to existing IoT devices. We implemented and evaluated SIA on a resource-constrained IoT device based on an MSP430 processor. Besides being secure, SIA is simple and efficient. We confirm the feasibility of SIA for resource-constrained IoT devices with experimental results of several intermittent computing applications. Our prototype implementation outperforms by two to three orders of magnitude the secure intermittent computing solution of Suslowicz et al. presented at IGSC 2018. 
    more » « less
  2. Recent advancements in energy-harvesting techniques provide an alternative to batteries for resource-constrained IoT devices and lead to a new computing paradigm, the intermittent computing model. In this model, a software module continues its execution from where it left off when an energy shortage occurred. Enforcing security of an intermittent software module is challenging because its power-off state has to be protected from a malicious adversary in addition to its power-on state, while the security mechanisms put in place must have a low overhead on the performance, resource consumption, and cost of a device. In this paper, we propose SIA (Secure Intermittent Architecture), a security architecture for resource-constrained IoT devices. SIA leverages low-cost security features available in commercial off-the-shelf microcontrollers to protect both the power-on and power-off state of an intermittent software module. Therefore, SIA enables a host of secure intermittent computing applications such as self-attestation, remote attestation, and secure communication. Moreover, our architecture provides confidentiality and integrity guarantees to an intermittent computing module at no cost compared to previous approaches in the literature that impose significant overheads. The salient characteristic of SIA is that it does not require any hardware modifications, and hence, it can be directly applied to existing IoT devices. We implemented and evaluated SIA on a resource-constrained IoT device based on an MSP430 processor. Besides being secure, SIA is simple and efficient. We confirm the feasibility of SIA for resource-constrained IoT devices with experimental results of several intermittent computing applications. Our prototype implementation outperforms by two to three orders of magnitude the secure intermittent computing solution of Suslowicz et al. presented at IGSC 2018. 
    more » « less
  3. Cyber foraging techniques have been proposed in edge computing to support resource-intensive and latency-sensitive mobile applications. In a natural or man-made disaster scenario, all cyber foraging challenges are exacerbated by two problems: edge nodes are scarce and hence easily overloaded and failures are common due to the ad-hoc hostile conditions. In this paper, we study the use of efficient load profiling and migration strategies to mitigate such problems. In particular, we propose FORMICA, an architecture for cyber foraging orchestration, whose goal is to minimize the completion time of a set of jobs offloaded from mobile devices. Existing service offloading solutions are mainly concerned with outsourcing a job out of the mobile responsibility. Our architecture supports both mobile-based offloading and backend-driven onloading i.e., the offloading decision is taken by the edge infrastructure and not by the mobile node. FORMICA leverages Gelenbe networks to estimate the load profile of each node of the edge computing infrastructure to make proactive load profiling decisions. Our evaluation on a proof-of-concept implementation shows the benefits of our policy-based architecture in several (challenged disaster) scenarios but its applicability is broad to other IoT-based latency-sensitive applications. 
    more » « less
  4. In prior work, researchers proposed an Internet of Things (IoT) security and privacy label akin to a food nutrition label, based on input from experts. We conducted a survey with 1,371 Mechanical Turk (MTurk) participants to test the effectiveness of each of the privacy and security attribute-value pairs proposed in that prior work along two key dimensions: ability to convey risk to consumers and impact on their willingness to purchase an IoT device. We found that the values intended to communicate increased risk were generally perceived that way by participants. For example, we found that consumers perceived more risk when a label conveyed that data would be sold to third parties than when it would not be sold at all, and that consumers were more willing to purchase devices when they knew that their data would not be retained or shared with others. However, participants’ risk perception did not always align with their willingness to purchase, sometimes due to usability concerns. Based on our findings, we propose actionable recommendations on how to more effectively present privacy and security attributes on an IoT label to better communicate risk to consumers 
    more » « less
  5. The Internet of Things (IoT) is a network of sensors that helps collect data 24/7 without human intervention. However, the network may suffer from problems such as the low battery, heterogeneity, and connectivity issues due to the lack of standards. Even though these problems can cause several performance hiccups, security issues need immediate attention because hackers access vital personal and financial information and then misuse it. These security issues can allow hackers to hijack IoT devices and then use them to establish a Botnet to launch a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. Blockchain technology can provide security to IoT devices by providing secure authentication using public keys. Similarly, Smart Contracts (SCs) can improve the performance of the IoT–blockchain network through automation. However, surveyed work shows that the blockchain and SCs do not provide foolproof security; sometimes, attackers defeat these security mechanisms and initiate DDoS attacks. Thus, developers and security software engineers must be aware of different techniques to detect DDoS attacks. In this survey paper, we highlight different techniques to detect DDoS attacks. The novelty of our work is to classify the DDoS detection techniques according to blockchain technology. As a result, researchers can enhance their systems by using blockchain-based support for detecting threats. In addition, we provide general information about the studied systems and their workings. However, we cannot neglect the recent surveys. To that end, we compare the state-of-the-art DDoS surveys based on their data collection techniques and the discussed DDoS attacks on the IoT subsystems. The study of different IoT subsystems tells us that DDoS attacks also impact other computing systems, such as SCs, networking devices, and power grids. Hence, our work briefly describes DDoS attacks and their impacts on the above subsystems and IoT. For instance, due to DDoS attacks, the targeted computing systems suffer delays which cause tremendous financial and utility losses to the subscribers. Hence, we discuss the impacts of DDoS attacks in the context of associated systems. Finally, we discuss Machine-Learning algorithms, performance metrics, and the underlying technology of IoT systems so that the readers can grasp the detection techniques and the attack vectors. Moreover, associated systems such as Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) are a source of good security enhancement for IoT Networks. Thus, we include a detailed discussion of future development encompassing all major IoT subsystems. 
    more » « less