Advanced issues in wireless communication security: Towards a security-demonstrator for smart-home environments

Abstract

The term Internet of Things might be regarded as simultaneous occurrence of three important trends. First, the general change from isolated devices to large-scale interconnected and interacting environments. Second, the rapidly increasing numbers of applied hardware and software components. Third, an increasing level of complexity of the individual hardware and software components applied. The connection of a broad range of heterogeneous devices to each other, or to the Internet, results in greater attack potentials and multitudes of attack vectors. Consequently, IT-Security has to deal with highly complex IoT-Structures consisting of large numbers of interconnected, heterogeneous hardware and software components. The exploration of methods for ensuring the security of such environments is a currently emerging field of research. In this work we introduce our idea of a Security-Demonstrator for Home-Automation environments aiming at reproducible, practical Security-Testing. This includes a proposal for a generalized Smart-Home reference-architecture, a detailed technical mapping of the setup, and a preliminary experimental evaluation focused around wireless communication using the Z-Wave protocol.