SODA: A software-defined security framework for IoT environments

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT), based on interconnected devices, enables a variety of elegant new services that could not be realized in a traditional environment, and many of these services harvest the information of a potentially sensitive and private nature belonging to individual users. Unfortunately, existing security functions used to protect such information are difficult to implement in an IoT environment due to the widely varying capacities, functionalities, and security requirements of IoT devices. In this work, to protect against unrestricted accesses to other devices and information extortion from these devices, we propose SODA, a secure IoT gateway that enables a device-side dynamic access control and is capable of deploying various security services to protect sensitive and private information. To show its effectiveness and practicality, we assume that a large number of IoT devices are crowded around an IoT gateway, and we implement a prototype of SODA for such an environment based on software-defined-networking (SDN) and integrate virtual network functions (VNFs) over network function virtualization (NFV) on top of a real IoT device. From our evaluation, we demonstrate how SODA mitigates real-world attacks through its security functions, and presents how it satisfies the performance requirements of a real environment.