Toward consumer-friendly security in smart environments

Abstract

The use of Internet of Things (IoT) devices has grown significantly in the past decade. While IoT is expected to improve life for many by enabling smart living spaces, the number of security risks that consumers and businesses will face is also increasing. A high number of vulnerable IoT devices are prone to attacks and easy exploit. Existing research has focused on security that must be implemented by administrators and manufacturers to be effective. Our work focuses on a system that does not rely on best practices by IoT device companies, but rather allows inexperienced users to be confident about the security of the devices that they add to their network. We present an implementation of an IoT architectural framework based on Software Defined Networking (SDN). In this architecture, IoT devices attempting to join an IoT network are scanned for vulnerabilities using custom vulnerability scanners and penetration testing tools before being allowed to communicate with any other device. In the case that a vulnerability is detected, the system will try to fix the vulnerability. If the fix fails, then the user will be alerted to the vulnerability and provided with suggestions for fixing it before it will be allowed to join the network. Our implementation demonstrates that the approach works and causes minimal overhead to the network once the device is deemed trustworthy.