IoVT: Internet of Vulnerable Things? Threat Architecture, Attack Surfaces, and Vulnerabilities in Internet of Things and Its Applications towards Smart Grids

Abstract

In recent years, people have witnessed numerous Internet of Things (IoT)-based attacks with the exponential increase in the number of IoT devices. Alongside this, the means to secure IoT-based applications are maturing slower than our budding dependence on them. Moreover, the vulnerabilities in an IoT system are exploited in chains to penetrate deep into the network and yield more adverse aftereffects. To mitigate these issues, this paper gives unique insights for handling the growing vulnerabilities in common IoT devices and proposes a threat architecture for IoT, addressing threats in the context of a three-layer IoT reference architecture. Furthermore, the vulnerabilities exploited at the several IoT attack surfaces and the challenges they exert are explored. Thereafter, the challenges in quantifying the IoT vulnerabilities with the existing framework are also analyzed. The study also covers a case study on the Intelligent Transportation System, covering road transport and traffic control specifically in terms of threats and vulnerabilities. Another case study on secure energy management in the Smart Grid is also presented. This case study covers the applications of Internet of Vulnerable Things (IoVT) in Smart energy Grid solutions, as there will be tremendous use of IoT in future Smart Grids to save energy and improve overall distribution. The analysis shows that the integration of the proposed architecture in existing applications alarms the developers about the embedded threats in the system.

Internet of Things: Evolution, Concerns and Security Challenges

“…Lightweight M2M (machine to machine) has become a standard for low memory, lightweight devices that typically find an application in IoT [ 44 ]. However, such a dynamic approach is disrupted by some of the significant threats by the intruder [ 3 , 9 , 21 ].…”

“…Tesla motors faced the causality in the smart car accident all due to the compromised sensors [ 144 ]. Anand et al [ 3 ] discussed the use-case of smart transportation covering the common attack surfaces and inherent vulnerabilities.…”

“…Likewise, intelligent transportation systems provide valuable insights into different services. For example, based on real-time traffic conditions traffic signals consequentially set their timer to avoid traffic congestion and thus, environmental pollution [ 3 ]. With smart agriculture, the crop yield could be predicted, fertilizers needed, disease-prone crop areas could be identified and isolated.…”

A systematic survey on internet of things: Energy efficiency and interoperability perspective

“…Such type of battery drainage attacks results in node outage and network connection loss. Battery drainage attacks prevent the node to perform its routine functioning 7 . The main factors that lead to such attacks are unauthorized access, battery drainage, code injection, and sleep deprivation.…”

“…CoAP is operated over UDP and MQTT runs over TCP. MQTT 7 is meant for constrained devices and it mitigates the overhead of HTTP protocol. Moreover, MQTT is considered as a good choice for IoT devices that are operated on batteries 75…”