Towards Secure and Reliable IoT Applications

Abstract

The growth of commodity IoT devices that integrate physical processes with digital systems have changed the way we live, play, and work. Yet existing IoT platforms cannot help programmers evaluate whether their IoT applications are safe and secure, nor do these platforms help programmers build secure and reliable applications. In this talk, we discuss several pieces of work that help programmers build secure and reliable IoT applications. We first discuss our work of using static model checking and dynamic analysis to find violations of safety and functional properties in an IoT app or a collection of apps, according to a set of desired properties. We then discuss our recent effort of developing a framework for handling device faults in IoT applications. The framework provides a set of fault-handling primitives such as retry and restart, which programmers can utilize to handle device faults systematically to improve their applications' reliability. This is joint work with Z. Berkay Celik, Patrick McDaniel, Michael Norris, Anand Sivasubramaniam, Prasanna Venkatesh, and Shulin Zhao.