Chapter 14 - Security Issues of the Web of Things

Abstract

The progress in the area of embedded systems has favored the emergence of so called “smart objects” or “Things”. These ones incorporate, in a context of low energy consumption, various wireless communication capabilities combined with a micro-controller driving sensors and/or actuators. Smartphones, connected TVs, smart watches, and so on, are concrete examples of smart objects belonging to our everyday life. The Internet of Things (IoT) conceptualizes this new environment based on traditional networks connected with objects as specific components of the real world. Building however a global ecosystem gathering the different IoT environments, where Things can communicate seamlessly is a difficult task. Since each IoT platform uses its own stack of communication protocols, they usually are not able to work across the many available networking interfaces, which creates silos of users and Things. Web of Things (WoT) has the ambition to provide a single universal application layer protocol enabling the various Things to communicate with each other in a seamless way by using the standards and the APIs of the web as a universal platform. The articulation between objects and Internet if it represents a strong point of the WoT, leads also this one to inherit all the problems of security and privacy already present in Internet. These problems rest with stronger acuity in this new environment, because of its particular characteristics. It is therefore important to analyze the way in which traditional security and privacy requirements can be declined in this new environment. In this chapter, we will try to give a global overview of the currently proposed architectures for securing the WoT. This overview covers an analysis of the different threats and vulnerabilities that an IoT, eventually a WoT, architecture can be exposed to. It covers also the solutions proposed to solve the problematics related to the identity management, data confidentiality, the authorization and the access control in a WoT system.