Securing the Internet of Things Infrastructure - Standards and Techniques

The Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructure is a conglomerate of electronic devices interconnected through the Internet, with the purpose of providing prompt and effective service to end-users. Applications running on an IoT infrastructure generally handle sensitive information such as a patient’s healthcare record, the position of a logistic vehicle, or the temperature readings obtained through wireless sensor nodes deployed in a bushland. The protection of such information from unlawful disclosure, tampering or modification, as well as the unscathed presence of IoT devices, in adversarial environments, is of prime concern. In this paper, a descriptive analysis of the security of standards and technologies for protecting the IoT communication channel from adversarial threats is provided. In addition, two paradigms for securing the IoT infrastructure, namely, common key based and paired key based, are proposed

A gap analysis of Internet-of-Things platforms

We are experiencing an abundance of Internet-of-Things (IoT) middleware solutions that provide connectivity for sensors and actuators to the Internet. To gain a widespread adoption, these middleware solutions, referred to as platforms, have to meet the expectations of different players in the IoT ecosystem, including device providers, application developers, and end-users, among others. In this article, we evaluate a representative sample of these platforms, both proprietary and open-source, on the basis of their ability to meet the expectations of different IoT users. The evaluation is thus more focused on how ready and usable these platforms are for IoT ecosystem players, rather than on the peculiarities of the underlying technological layers. The evaluation is carried out as a gap analysis of the current IoT landscape with respect to (i) the support for heterogeneous sensing and actuating technologies, (ii) the data ownership and its implications for security and privacy, (iii) data processing and data sharing capabilities, (iv) the support offered to application developers, (v) the completeness of an IoT ecosystem, and (vi) the availability of dedicated IoT marketplaces. The gap analysis aims to highlight the deficiencies of today's solutions to improve their integration to tomorrow's ecosystems. In order to strengthen the finding of our analysis, we conducted a survey among the partners of the Finnish IoT program, counting over 350 experts, to evaluate the most critical issues for the development of future IoT platforms. Based on the results of our analysis and our survey, we conclude this article with a list of recommendations for extending these IoT platforms in order to fill in the gaps.Comment: 15 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, Accepted for publication in Computer Communications, special issue on the Internet of Things: Research challenges and solution

A Cognitive Framework to Secure Smart Cities

The advancement in technology has transformed Cyber Physical Systems and their interface with IoT into a more sophisticated and challenging paradigm. As a result, vulnerabilities and potential attacks manifest themselves considerably more than before, forcing researchers to rethink the conventional strategies that are currently in place to secure such physical systems. This manuscript studies the complex interweaving of sensor networks and physical systems and suggests a foundational innovation in the field. In sharp contrast with the existing IDS and IPS solutions, in this paper, a preventive and proactive method is employed to stay ahead of attacks by constantly monitoring network data patterns and identifying threats that are imminent. Here, by capitalizing on the significant progress in processing power (e.g. petascale computing) and storage capacity of computer systems, we propose a deep learning approach to predict and identify various security breaches that are about to occur. The learning process takes place by collecting a large number of files of different types and running tests on them to classify them as benign or malicious. The prediction model obtained as such can then be used to identify attacks. Our project articulates a new framework for interactions between physical systems and sensor networks, where malicious packets are repeatedly learned over time while the system continually operates with respect to imperfect security mechanisms

Secure Cloud-based IoT Water Quality Gathering for Analysis and Visualization

Water quality refers to measurable water characteristics, including chemical, biological, physical, and radiological characteristics usually relative to human needs. Dumping waste and untreated sewage is the reason for water pollution and several diseases to the living hood. The quality of water can also have a significant impact on animals and plant ecosystems. Therefore, keeping track of water quality is a substantial national interest. Much research has been done for measuring water quality using sensors to prevent water pollution. In summary, those systems are built based on online and reagent-free water monitoring SCADA systems in wired networks. However, centralized servers, transmission protocols, and data access can present challenges and disadvantages for those systems. This paper proposes a secure Cloud-based IoT water quality gathering architecture for water quality analysis and visualization to address the limitations of the current systems. The proposed architecture will send, analyze and visualize water quality data in the Cloud by utilizing specialized sensors and IoT-based gateways to capture water measurements (Dioxygen concentration, and temperature, among others). Then, they communicate securely to the Cloud-based server through a high-speed wireless network. We evaluated the performance of the proposed framework on a process-oriented approach to success metrics for cyberinfrastructures. The experiments were conducted in a laboratory and focused on network security and resiliency, the IoT prototype performance in dropping real-time data transmission, and remote access. The results demonstrate higher data collection and transmission effectiveness with minimal data loss and low energy usage over time. The accompanying cloud-based platform provided the flexibility needed for water quality monitoring and laboratory studies

Energy efficient secured cluster based distributed fault diagnosis protocol for IoT

The rapid growth of internet and internet services provision offers wide scope to the industries to couple the various network models to design a flexible and simplified communication infrastructure. A significant attention paid towards Internet of things (IoT), from both academics and industries. Connecting and organizing of communication over wireless IoT network models are vulnerable to various security threats, due to the lack of inappropriate security deployment models. In addition to this, these models have not only security issues; they also have many performance issues. This research work deals with an IoT security over WSN model to overcome the security and performance issues by designing a Energy efficient secured cluster based distributed fault diagnosis protocol (EESCFD) Model which combines the self-fault diagnosis routing model using cluster based approach and block cipher to organize a secured data communication and to identify security fault and communication faults to improve communication efficiency. In addition we achieve an energy efficiency by employing concise block cipher which identifies the ideal size of block, size of key, number of rounds to perform the key operations in the cipher