Securing Internet of Things Devices Using The Network Context

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) devices have been widely adopted in recent years. Unlike conventional information systems, IoT solutions have greater access to real-world contextual data and are typically deployed in an environment that cannot be fully controlled, and these circumstances create new challenges and opportunities. In this article, we leverage the knowledge that an IoT device has about its network context to provide an additional security factor. The device periodically scans a network and reports a list of all devices in the network. The server analyzes movements in the network and subsequently reacts to suspicious events. This article describes how our method can detect network changes, retrieved only from scanning devices in the network. To demonstrate the proposed solution, we perform a multiweek case study on a network with hundreds of active devices and confirm that our method can detect network anomalies or changes.