The internet of things (IoT) fulfils abundant demands of present society by facilitating the services of cutting-edge technology in terms of smart home, smart healthcare, smart city, smart vehicles, and many more, which enables present day objects in our environment to have network communication and the capability to exchange data. These wide range of applications are collected, computed, and provided by thousands of IoT elements placed in open spaces. The highly interconnected heterogeneous structure faces new types of challenges from a security and privacy concern. Previously, security platforms were not so capable of handling these complex platforms due to different communication stacks and protocols. It seems to be of the utmost importance to keep concern about security issues relating to several attacks and vulnerabilities. The main motive of this chapter is to analyze the broad overview of security vulnerabilities and its counteractions. Generally, it discusses the major security techniques and protocols adopted by the IoT and analyzes the attacks against IoT devices.
TopIntroduction
Everyday information security brings new challenges because of it’s wide availability in each field starting from personal to commercial lives. Data must be protected from interception, theft and attack caused by unauthorized persons or hackers (F.Meneghello et.al, 2019). Network security is one part of information security which may be challenged by Denial-of-Service attack and Cloning attack . Several countermeasures have been introduced to reduce the vulnerability risk and to strengthen the network security (M.Irshad et.al, 2016) Among the counter measures the best form is prevention action that includes monitoring control to detect threats. This network security expanding in dimension becomes complex every day as per as the varying mode of uses and applications. Traditionally, only the edge devices (J.W.Jones et.al, 2018) were included in the formation of network but towards the last part of twentieth century all devices within a proposed area became enable to communicate with each other. Fig 1. shows the types of devices integrated within a common area satisfying the communication criteria to form the IoT.
This newly formed network linked to Internet by following cloud technology and facilitates the automation of applications such as smart agriculture, smart healthcare, smart home, smart city, smart car, and smart transportation system etc. By the year 1999, this idea was first introduced by Kevin Asthon, founder of one automated organization at MIT to describe a system where the Internet is connected to the physical world via ubiquitous sensors. He successfully implemented the data connectivity and after this communication started between any two devices where as previously it was only limited between any two routing devices. Fig.2 includes the list of number of connected devices used in IoT . According to this, in the year 2015, there were only 3.8 billion IoT devices were connected, the number will reach to 9.9 billion in this year 2020 and the number is expected to reach by 21.5 billion by the year 2025.
Figure 2. Size of IoT according to the number of connected devices
By the study of Fig. 2 it can be observed that a varying number of IoT devices are merging into it and form a complex structure. This complex form, the IoT in it’s architecture includes three tiers where each tier is having a coherent set of similar type of elements. Tier one includes sensors and actuators, tier two includes the edge gateway and tier three includes the cloud. The function of sensor is to read and collect information, convert it to electrical signal and forwards it to other processed part. These wide range of sensors are classified as: inductive, capacitive, photoelectric, ultrasonic, and magnetic field sensors depending upon their functions. Actuators work in the reverse way to sensors. They receive electrical signals and convert it into physical actions. The cloud or more appropriately the cloud server is used to aggregate data and process data. So in IoT, cloud acts as a main component and thus it is called as the Head or Brain of IoT.
With the realization that billions of devices are included in the representation of IoT, a deep insight also focuses towards the origin of data sources. The different types of data sources are summarized as follows (M.A. Iqbal et.al, 2016):
Passive sources: These kind of sensors are low-energy and low-opearational ability particularly applicable for remote and rough locations such as ground water testing. Mainly they produce current data when application program interface (API) is called.
Active sources: This category of sensors are active and placed in fast application of information, such as continuously streaming data from jet engine.
Dynamic sources: Here the sources are in the form of physical, mechanical and electrical systems attached with the sensors. Here the sensors have the capacity to carry out communication with the organization, and web based applications.