The consumer Internet of Things (IoT) space has experienced a significant rise in popularity in the recent years. From smart speakers, to baby monitors, and smart kettles and TVs, these devices are increasingly found in households around the world while users may be unaware of the risks associated with owning these devices. Previous work showed that these devices can threaten individuals' privacy and security by exposing information online to a large number of service providers and third party analytics services. Our analysis shows that many of these Internet connections (and the information they expose) are neither critical, nor even essential to the operation of these devices. However, automatically separating out critical from non-critical network traffic for an IoT device is nontrivial, and requires expert analysis based on manual experimentation in a controlled setting. In this paper, we investigate whether it is possible to automatically classify network traffic destinations as either critical (essential for devices to function properly) or not, hence allowing the home gateway to act as a selective firewall to block undesired, non-critical destinations. Our initial results demonstrate that some IoT devices contact destinations that are not critical to their operation, and there is no impact on device functionality if these destinations are blocked. We take the first steps towards designing and evaluating IoTrimmer, a framework for automated testing and analysis of various destinations contacted by devices, and selectively blocking the ones that do not impact device functionality.
Despite the prevalence of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, there is little information about the purpose and risks of the Internet traffic these devices generate, and consumers have limited options for controlling those risks. A key open question is whether one can mitigate these risks by automatically blocking some of the Internet connections from IoT devices, without rendering the devices inoperable. In this paper, we address this question by developing a rigorous methodology that relies on automated IoT-device experimentation to reveal which network connections (and the information they ex…
IoTEdu: Access Control, Detection, and Automatic Incident Response in Academic IoT Networks
IComp, Universidade Federal do Amazonas (UFAM)（IComp，亚马逊联邦大学）；AI Horizon Labs, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Engenharia de Software (PPGES) Universidade Federal do Pampa (UNIPAMPA)（AI Horizon Labs，软件工程硕士项目，潘帕斯联邦大学）
Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) connected in the form of Internet of Things (IoT) are vulnerable to various security threats, due to the infrastructure-less deployment of IoT devices. Device-to-Device (D2D) authentication of these networks ensures the integrity, authenticity, and confidentiality of information in the deployed area. The literature suggests different approaches to address security issues in CPS technologies. However, they are mostly based on centralized techniques or specific system deployments with higher cost of computation and communication. It is therefore necessary to develop …
Traditional techniques to detect malware infections were not meant to be used by the end-user and current malware removal tools and security software cannot handle the heterogeneity of IoT devices. In this paper, we design, develop and evaluate a tool, called NURSE, to fill this information gap, i.e., enabling end-users to detect IoT-malware infections in their home networks. NURSE follows a modular approach to analyze IoT traffic as captured by means of an ARP spoofing technique which does not require any network modification or specific hardware. Thus, NURSE provides zero-configuration IoT t…
In this paper, a real-time Internet of Things (IoT) monitoring system is considered in which multiple IoT devices must transmit timely updates on the status information of a common underlying physical process to a common destination. In particular, a real-world IoT scenario is considered in which multiple (partially) observed status information by different IoT devices are required at the destination, so that the real-time status of the physical process can be properly re-constructed. By taking into account such correlated status information at the IoT devices, the problem of IoT device schedu…
The effective operation of time-critical Internet of things (IoT) applications requires real-time reporting of fresh status information of underlying physical processes. In this paper, a real-time IoT monitoring system is considered, in which the IoT devices sample a physical process with a sampling cost and send the status packet to a given destination with an updating cost. This joint status sampling and updating process is designed to minimize the average age of information (AoI) at the destination node under an average energy cost constraint at each device. This is formulated as an infinit…
Recent research has shown the potential of using available mobile fog devices (such as smartphones, drones, domestic and industrial robots) as relays to minimize communication outages between sensors and destination devices, where localized Internet-of-Things services (e.g., manufacturing process control, health and security monitoring) are delivered. However, these mobile relays deplete energy when they move and transmit to distant destinations. As such, power-control mechanisms and intelligent mobility of the relay devices are critical in improving communication performance and energy utiliz…
Automated and industrial Internet of Things (IoT) devices are increasing daily. As the number of IoT devices grows, the volume of data generated by them will also grow. Managing these rapidly expanding IoT devices and enormous data efficiently to be available to all authorized users without compromising its integrity will become essential in the near future. On the other side, many information security incidents have been recorded, increasing the requirement for countermeasures. While safeguards against hostile third parties have been commonplace until now, operators and parties have seen an i…
Mission critical data dissemination in massive Internet of things (IoT) networks imposes constraints on the message transfer delay between devices. Due to low power and communication range of IoT devices, data is foreseen to be relayed over multiple device-to-device (D2D) links before reaching the destination. The coexistence of a massive number of IoT devices poses a challenge in maximizing the successful transmission capacity of the overall network alongside reducing the multi-hop transmission delay in order to support mission critical applications. There is a delicate interplay between the …
The serverless and functions as a service (FaaS) paradigms are currently trending among cloud providers and are now increasingly being applied to the network edge, and to the Internet of Things (IoT) devices. The benefits include reduced latency for communication, less network traffic and increased privacy for data processing. However, there are challenges as IoT devices have limited resources for running multiple simultaneous containerized functions, and also FaaS does not typically support long-running functions. Our implementation utilizes Docker and CRIU for checkpointing and suspending lo…
In this article, we provide an accessible introduction to the emerging idea of Age of Information (AoI) that quantifies freshness of information and explore its possible role in the efficient design of freshness-aware Internet of Things (IoT). We start by summarizing the concept of AoI and its variants with emphasis on the differences between AoI and other well-known performance metrics in the literature, such as throughput and delay. Building on this, we explore freshness-aware IoT design for a network in which IoT devices sense potentially different physical processes and are supposed to fre…
Age of information (AoI), a notion that measures the information freshness, is an essential performance measure for time-critical applications in Internet of Things (IoT). With the surge of computing resources at the IoT devices, it is possible to preprocess the information packets that contain the status update before sending them to the destination so as to alleviate the transmission burden. However, the additional time and energy expenditure induced by computing also make the optimal updating a non-trivial problem. In this paper, we consider a time-critical IoT system, where the IoT device …
Internet of Things (IoT) has emerged as one of the key features of the next generation wireless networks, where timely delivery of status update packets is essential for many real-time IoT applications. To provide users with context-aware services and lighten the transmission burden, the raw data usually needs to be preprocessed before being transmitted to the destination. However, the effect of computing on the overall information freshness is not well understood. In this work, we first develop an analytical framework to investigate the information freshness, in terms of peak age of informati…
Sufficiently strong security and privacy mechanisms are prerequisite to amass the promising benefits of the IoT technology and to incorporate this technology into our daily lives. This paper introduces a novel approach to privacy in networks, an approach which is especially well matched with the IoT characteristics. Our general approach is based on continually changing the identifying attributes of IoT nodes. In particular, the scheme proposed in this work is based on changing the IoT nodes' IP addresses, and because the changing patterns of the IP addresses appear random to a non-intended obs…
In optical WDM networks, since each lightpath can carry a huge mount of traffic, failures may seriously damage the end user applications. Hence fault tolerance becomes an important issue on these networks. The light path which carries traffic during normal operation is called as primary path. The traffic is rerouted on a backup path in case of a failure. In this paper we propose to design a reliable and fault tolerant routing algorithm for establishing primary and backup paths. In order to establish the primary path, this algorithm uses load balancing in which link cost metrics are estimated b…
Motivated by the need to ensure timely delivery of information (e.g., status updates) in the Internet-of-things (IoT) paradigm, this paper investigates the role of an Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) as a mobile relay to minimize the average Peak Age-of-information (PAoI) for a source-destination pair. For this setup, we formulate an optimization problem to jointly optimize the UAV's flight trajectory as well as energy and service time allocations for packet transmissions. In order to solve this non-convex problem, we propose an efficient iterative algorithm and establish its convergence analytic…
In this paper, a real-time Internet of Things (IoT) monitoring system is considered in which the IoT devices are scheduled to sample underlying physical processes and send the status updates to a common destination. In a real-world IoT, due to the possibly different dynamics of each physical process, the sizes of the status updates for different devices are often different and each status update typically requires multiple transmission slots. By taking into account such multi-time slot transmissions with non-uniform sizes of the status updates under noisy channels, the problem of joint device …
In this paper, we propose RECOUP, a reliable group communication routing protocol for IoT networks. RECOUP efficiently uses a low-overhead cluster-based multicast routing technique on top of the RPL protocol. RECOUP increases the probability of message delivery to the intended destination(s), irrespective of the network size and faults (such as broken links or non-responsive nodes), and in the presence of misbehaving nodes.We show that the cluster-based routing mechanism of RECOUP remains robust in presence of various topology (i.e., rank and sybil) and data communication (i.e., blackhole, wor…
This paper considers a cooperative Internet of Things (IoT) system with a source aiming to transmit randomly generated status updates to a designated destination as timely as possible under the help of a relay. We adopt a recently proposed concept, the age of information (AoI), to characterize the timeliness of the status updates. In the considered system, delivering the status updates via the one-hop direct link will have a shorter transmission time at the cost of incurring a higher error probability, while the delivery of status updates through the two-hop relay link could be more reliable a…
This paper considers a cognitive radio-based IoT monitoring system, consisting of an IoT device that aims to update its measurement to a destination using cognitive radio technique. Specifically, the IoT device as a secondary user (SIoT), seeks and exploits the spectrum opportunities of the licensed band vacated by its primary user (PU) to deliver status updates without causing visible effects to the licensed operation. In this context, the SIoT should carefully make use of the licensed band and schedule when to transmit to maintain the timeliness of the status update. We adopt a recent metric…
Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite constellations are bringing the Internet of Things (IoT) to the space arena, also known as non-terrestrial networks. Several IoT satellite applications for tracking ships and cargo can be seen as exemplary cases of intermittent transmission of updates whose main performance parameter is the information freshness. This paper analyzes the Age of Information (AoI) of a satellite network with multiple sources and destinations that are very distant and therefore require several consecutive multi-hop transmissions. A packet erasure channel and different queueing polic…
Partially Observable Restless Bandits for Age-Optimal Scheduling over Markov Channels
School of Electronics and Information Technology, Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学电子与信息工程学院）；Guangzhou Huizhi Communication Co.,Ltd.（广州慧智通信有限公司）；School of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学电子与通信工程学院）；School of Cyber Science and Engineering Southeast University（东南大学网络空间安全学院）；School of Information Engineering, Northwest A&F University（西北农林科技大学信息工程学院）
In Internet of Things (IoT), the freshness of status updates is crucial for mission-critical applications. In this regard, it is suggested to quantify the freshness of updates by using Age of Information (AoI) from the receiver's perspective. Specifically, the AoI measures the freshness over time. However, the freshness in the content is neglected. In this paper, we introduce an age-based utility, named as Age of Changed Information (AoCI), which captures both the passage of time and the change of information content. By modeling the underlying physical process as a discrete time Markov chain,…
