Systematic Review of Existing IoT Architectures Security and Privacy Issues and Concerns

Abstract

Internet of things (IoT) has become one of the most prominent technologies that the world has been witnessing nowadays. It provides great solutions to humanity in many significant fields of life. IoT refers to a collection of sensors or object in the universe with the capability of communicating with each other through the internet without human intervention. Currently, there is no standard IoT architecture. As it is in its infancy, IoT is surrounded by numerous security and privacy concerns. Thus, to avoid such concerns that may hinder its deployment, an IoT architecture has to be carefully designed to incorporate security and privacy solutions. In this paper, a systematic literature review was conducted to trace the evolvement of IoT architectures from its initial development in 2008 until 2018. The Comparison among these architectures is based on terms of the architectural stack, covered issues, the technology used and considerations of security and privacy aspects. The findings of the review show that the initial IoT architectures did not provide a comprehensive meaning for IoT that describe its nature, whereas the recent IoT architectures convey a comprehensive meaning of IoT, starting from data collection, followed by data transmission and processing, and ending with data dissemination. Moreover, the findings reveal that IoT architecture has evolved gradually across the years, through improving architecture stack with new solutions to mitigate IoT challenges such as scalability, interoperability, extensibility, management, etc. with lack consideration of security solutions. The findings disclose that none of the discussed IoT architectures considers privacy concerns, which indeed considered as a critical factor of IoT sustainability and success. Therefore, there is an inevitable need to consider security and privacy solutions when designing IoT architecture.