Advanced Digital Forensic IoT Based Secure Communication

Abstract

With the explosive growth of the Internet-of-Things (IoT) due to its widespread applicability, it is imperative that IoT designers and architects must incorporate ensuring security of communication in IoT as a key requirement. This emerging field of study, communication in IoT, is concerned with ensuring secure collaboration between smart sensors, actuators and devices and the external environment that constitute the overarching arena of IoT. The field poses new challenges to security and privacy in communication. Most of the cloud service providers such as Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, and Google facilitate various cloud services at reduced cost. The architecture of IoT must be designed to have many features such as scalability, efficiency, accessibility, availability, and flexibility so that applications can be built that can benefit both public and commercial entities. Key factors in driving the success of the IoT will be an accurate specification of security parameters with various security measures that must be enforced. This paper gives an overview of security and privacy aspects in IoT communications using an advanced digital forensic approach for security enhancement. The researchers face various challenges in the investigation of security breaches in IoT. The challenges get magnified multiple folds as cloud service providers utilize many advanced techniques such as virtualization and a multi-tenant usage model to allocate its resources to users securely. These models and architectures make it difficult for investigators who try identify sources that launched various malicious activities and attacks on cloud services. The investigators resort to advanced digital forensic investigation to analyze such attacks. There exist various digital forensic techniques and tools which are not necessarily applied in the context of security breach in IoT. When any security breach occurs, investigators face challenges in collecting evidence as they cannot physically access the evidence buried in devices connected to a local host. The advanced digital forensic approach consists of identifying the evidence related to the source of the crime, and examining and reporting the results and conclusions. The proposed methodology, which employs an advanced digital forensic approach, describes an improved, efficient, and reliable method to identify the source of the crime and collect evidence responsible for security breach during communication.