IoT Sentinel: Automated Device-Type Identification for Security Enforcement in IoT

With the rapid growth of the Internet-of-Things (IoT), concerns about the security of IoT devices have become prominent. Several vendors are producing IP-connected devices for home and small office networks that often suffer from flawed security designs and implementations. They also tend to lack mechanisms for firmware updates or patches that can help eliminate security vulnerabilities. Securing networks where the presence of such vulnerable devices is given, requires a brownfield approach: applying necessary protection measures within the network so that potentially vulnerable devices can coexist without endangering the security of other devices in the same network. In this paper, we present IOT SENTINEL, a system capable of automatically identifying the types of devices being connected to an IoT network and enabling enforcement of rules for constraining the communications of vulnerable devices so as to minimize damage resulting from their compromise. We show that IOT SENTINEL is effective in identifying device types and has minimal performance overhead

Using RF Transmissions from IoT Devices for Occupancy Detection and Activity Recognition

IoT ecosystems consist of a range of smart devices that generated a plethora of Radio Frequency (RF) transmissions. This provides an attractive opportunity to exploit already-existing signals for various sensing applications such as e-Healthcare, security and smart home. In this paper, we present Passive IoT Radar (PIoTR), a system that passively uses RF transmissions from IoT devices for human monitoring. PIoTR is designed based on passive radar technology, with a generic architecture to utilize various signal sources including the WiFi signal and wireless energy at the Industrial, Scientific and Medical (ISM) band. PIoTR calculates the phase shifts caused by human motions and generates Doppler spectrogram as the representative. To verify the proposed concepts and test in a more realistic environment, we evaluate PIoTR with four commercial IoT devices for home use. Depending on the effective signal and power strength, PIoTR performs two modes: coarse sensing and fine-grained sensing. Experimental results show that PIoTR can achieve an average of 91% in occupancy detection (coarse sensing) and 91.3% in activity recognition (fine-grained sensing)