A Survey Study of Common Security Failures and Mitigations for the Internet of Things (IoT)

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is transforming the world on almost a daily basis. There are tens of billions of things interconnected and that number is growing daily. Everywhere the IOT is present security is critical, especially in healthcare applications. Reported frequently are exploitations of security failings within the IoT. The exploitation of IoT security failures can result in dramatic consequences including loss of human life. This makes it essential to create a culture of awareness of the potential security failures within the IoT and their available mitigations. This article begins the engendering of that awareness. Presented is a simplified three-tier architecture of the IoT to serve as a lens to view the commonalities in the diverse IoT ecosystem. While there are multiple security weaknesses in the IoT ecosystem and numerous individual malicious attacks potentially exploiting them the viewpoint presented provides for the distillation of those into a common group that indicates a finite set of mitigation techniques. When applied these mitigations make the entire IoT ecosystem secure against the currently known exploitations.