The Internet of Things (IoT) connects different IoT smart objects around people to make their life easier by connecting them with the internet, which leads IoT environments vulnerable to many attacks. This chapter has few main objectives: to understand basics of IoT; different types of attacks possible in IoT; and prevention steps to secure IoT environment at some extent. Therefore, this chapter is mainly divided into three parts. In first part discusses IoT devices and application of it; the second part is about cyber-attacks possible on IoT environments; and in the third part is discussed prevention and recommendation steps to avoid damage from different attacks.
TopIntroduction
Nowadays technology changing rapidly day by day and affect our lives in many ways. Internet connectivity easily available everywhere. Many devices like computers, laptops, network devices, smartphones etc. connected with internet around us.
Popularity of the Internet of Things (IoT) has increase in last few years and number of applications for introduced in market for different IoT domain such as traffic controlling, home automation, transportation management, manufacturing management, environmental monitoring, defense system, medical industries, smart farming, etc. In different applications of IoT many sensors, actuators, Gateway, Circuits, hardware and routers communicate with each other via wired/wireless communication technologies are known as IoT devices. More than 50 billion IoT devices will connect with internet by 2020 as per Cisco white paper.
There are many communication technologies and way to connect anything(IoT devices) such as radio frequency identification (RFID), ZigBee, Bluetooth, Bluetooth low energy (BLE), wireless fidelity (Wi-Fi), worldwide interoperability for microwave access (WiMAX), wireless personal area network (WPAN), near field communication (NFC),Ethernet cables, coaxial cable, mobile communication technology (1G/2G/3G/4G/5G/GSM/CDMA) and many more that depends on existing infrastructure whether wired or wireless.
There are various protocols used in IoT such as advanced message queuing protocol (AMQP), constrained application protocol (CoAP), message queuing telemetry transport (MQTT), multicast domain name system (mDNS), domain name system service discovery (DNS-SD), extensible messaging presence protocol (XMPP), representational state transfer (RESTFUL) services, IPv6 over low-power wireless personal area networks (6LowPAN), internet protocol version 4 (IPv4)/ internet protocol version 6 (IPv6), routing protocol for low-power and lossy networks (RPL), HyperText transfer protocol (HTTP), web sockets and many more protocols being used at the different layers.
Security play vital role when these devices are near to us and send their data over network. IoT devices are also widely used in industries. Therefore, it is important to consider risk of cyber vulnerabilities & attacks in IoT environment and implementing recommendation steps to secure IoT environment to some extent.