Toward Usable Network Traffic Policies for IoT Devices in Consumer Networks

The Internet of Things (IoT) revolution has brought millions of small, low-cost, connected devices into our homes, cities, infrastructure, and more. However, these devices are often plagued by security vulnerabilities that pose threats to user privacy or can threaten the Internet architecture as a whole. Home networks can be particularly vulnerable to these threats as they typically have no network administrator and often contain unpatched or otherwise vulnerable devices. In this paper, we argue that the unique security challenges of home networks require a new network-layer architecture to both protect against external threats and mitigate attacks from compromised devices. We present initial findings based on traffic analysis from a small-scale IoT testbed toward identifying predictable patterns in IoT traffic that may allow construction of a policy-based framework to restrict malicious traffic. Based on our observations, we discuss key features for the design of this architecture to promote future developments in network-layer security in smart home networks.