A Holistic Analysis of Internet of Things (IoT) Security: Principles, Practices, and New Perspectives

Abstract

Driven by the rapid escalation of its utilization, as well as ramping commercialization, Internet of Things (IoT) devices increasingly face security threats. Apart from denial of service, privacy, and safety concerns, compromised devices can be used as enablers for committing a variety of crime and e-crime. Despite ongoing research and study, there remains a significant gap in the thorough analysis of security challenges, feasible solutions, and open secure problems for IoT. To bridge this gap, we provide a comprehensive overview of the state of the art in IoT security with a critical investigation-based approach. This includes a detailed analysis of vulnerabilities in IoT-based systems and potential attacks. We present a holistic review of the security properties required to be adopted by IoT devices, applications, and services to mitigate IoT vulnerabilities and, thus, successful attacks. Moreover, we identify challenges to the design of security protocols for IoT systems in which constituent devices vary markedly in capability (such as storage, computation speed, hardware architecture, and communication interfaces). Next, we review existing research and feasible solutions for IoT security. We highlight a set of open problems not yet addressed among existing security solutions. We provide a set of new perspectives for future research on such issues including secure service discovery, on-device credential security, and network anomaly detection. We also provide directions for designing a forensic investigation framework for IoT infrastructures to inspect relevant criminal cases, execute a cyber forensic process, and determine the facts about a given incident. This framework offers a means to better capture information on successful attacks as part of a feedback mechanism to thwart future vulnerabilities and threats. This systematic holistic review will both inform on current challenges in IoT security and ideally motivate their future resolution.