A Two-Mode, Adaptive Security Framework for Smart Home Security Applications

Abstract

With the growth of the Internet of Things (IoT), the number of cyber attacks on the Internet is on the rise. However, the resource-constrained nature of IoT devices and their networks makes many classical security systems ineffective or inapplicable. We introduce TWINKLE, a two-mode, adaptive security framework that allows an IoT network to be in regular mode for most of the time, which incurs a low resource consumption rate, and to switch to vigilant mode only when suspicious behavior is detected, which potentially incurs a higher overhead. Compared to the early version of this work, this article presents a more comprehensive design and architecture of TWINKLE, describes challenges and details in implementing TWINKLE, and reports evaluations of TWINKLE based on real-world IoT testbeds with more metrics. We show the efficacy of TWINKLE in two case studies where we examine two existing intrusion detection and prevention systems and transform both into new, improved systems using TWINKLE. Our evaluations show that TWINKLE is not only effective at securing resource-constrained IoT networks, but can also successfully detect and prevent attacks with a significantly lower overhead and detection latency than existing solutions.