IoT devices are increasingly utilized in critical infrastructure, enterprises, and households. There are several sophisticated cyber-attacks that have been reported and many networks have proven vulnerable to both active and passive attacks by leaking private information, allowing unauthorized access, and being open to denial of service attacks.
This paper aims firstly, to assist network operators to understand the need for an IoT network security solution, and then secondly, to survey IoT network attack vectors, cyber threats, and countermeasures with a focus on improving the robustness of existing security solutions. Our first contribution highlights viewpoints on IoT security from the perspective of stakeholders such as manufacturers, service providers, consumers, and authorities. We discuss the differences between IoT and IT systems, the need for IoT security solutions, and we highlight the key components required for IoT network security system architecture. For our second contribution, we survey the types of IoT attacks by grouping them based on their impact. We discuss various attack techniques, threats, and shortfalls of existing countermeasures with an intention to enable future research into improving IoT network security.
As the Internet struggles to cope with scalability, mobility, and security issues, new network architectures are being proposed to better accommodate the needs of modern systems and applications. In particular, Content-Oriented Networking (CON) has emerged as a promising next-generation Internet architecture: it sets to decouple content from hosts, at the network layer, by naming data rather than hosts. CON comes with a potential for a wide range of benefits, including reduced congestion and improved delivery speed by means of content caching, simpler configuration of network devices, and secu…
With the expansion of wireless sensor networks (WSNs), the need for securing the data flow through these networks is increasing. These sensor networks allow for easy-to-apply and flexible installations which have enabled them to be used for numerous applications. Due to these properties, they face distinct information security threats. Security of the data flowing through across networks provides the researchers with an interesting and intriguing potential for research. Design of these networks to ensure the protection of data faces the constraints of limited power and processing resources. We…
Assisted-navigation applications have a relevant impact on our daily life. However, technological progress in virtualization technologies and Software-Defined Radios recently enabled new attack vectors, namely, road traffic poisoning. These attacks open up several dreadful scenarios, which are addressed in this contribution by identifying the associated challenges and proposing innovative countermeasures.
Advances in technology have enabled tremendous progress in the development of a highly connected ecosystem of ubiquitous computing devices collectively called the Internet of Things (IoT). Ensuring the security of IoT devices is a high priority due to the sensitive nature of the collected data. Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) have emerged as critical hardware primitive for ensuring the security of IoT nodes. Malicious modeling of PUF architectures has proven to be difficult due to the inherently stochastic nature of PUF architectures. Extant approaches to malicious PUF modeling assume t…
Video chat systems such as Chatroulette have become increasingly popular as a way to meet and converse one-on-one via video and audio with other users online in an open and interactive manner. At the same time, security and privacy concerns inherent in such communication have been little explored. This paper presents one of the first investigations of the privacy threats found in such video chat systems, identifying three such threats, namely de-anonymization attacks, phishing attacks, and man-in-the-middle attacks. The paper further describes countermeasures against each of these attacks.
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) constitute one of the most promising third-millennium technologies and have a wide range of applications in our surrounding environment. The reason behind the vast adoption of WSNs in various applications is that they have tremendously appealing features, e.g., low production cost, low installation cost, unattended network operation, autonomous and longtime operation. WSNs have started to merge with the Internet of Things (IoT) through the introduction of Internet access capability in sensor nodes and sensing ability in Internet-connected devices. Thereby, the I…
Deepfake technology (DT) has taken a new level of sophistication. Cybercriminals now can manipulate sounds, images, and videos to defraud and misinform individuals and businesses. This represents a growing threat to international institutions and individuals which needs to be addressed. This paper provides an overview of deepfakes, their benefits to society, and how DT works. Highlights the threats that are presented by deepfakes to businesses, politics, and judicial systems worldwide. Additionally, the paper will explore potential solutions to deepfakes and conclude with future research direc…
This paper surveys the latest on Smart Grid security. It focuses on the deep understanding of the risk in terms of threats, vulnerabilities and consequences that arise from cyber-attacks.
In the context of the emerging Internet of Things (IoT), a proliferation of wireless connectivity can be expected. That ubiquitous wireless communication will be hard to centrally manage and control, and can be expected to be opaque to end users. As a result, owners and users of physical space are threatened to lose control over their digital environments. In this work, we propose the idea of an IoTScanner. The IoTScanner integrates a range of radios to allow local reconnaissance of existing wireless infrastructure and participating nodes. It enumerates such devices, identifies connection patt…
Internet of things (IoT) is the epitome of sustainable development. It has facilitated the development of smart systems, industrialization, and the state-of-the-art quality of life. IoT architecture is one of the essential baselines of understanding the widespread adoption. Security issues are very crucial for any technical infrastructure. Since IoT comprises heterogeneous devices, its security issues are diverse too. Various security attacks can be responsible for compromising confidentiality, integrity, and availability. In this paper, at first, the IoT architecture is described briefly. Aft…
This paper presents a comprehensive investigation of authentication schemes for smart mobile devices. We start by providing an overview of existing survey articles published in the recent years that deal with security for mobile devices. Then, we describe and give a classification of threat models in smart mobile devices in five categories, including, identity-based attacks, eavesdropping-based attacks, combined eavesdropping and identity-based attacks, manipulation-based attacks, and service-based attacks. We also provide a classification of countermeasures into four types of categories, incl…
A smart city is a place where existing facilities and services are enhanced by digital technology to benefit people and companies. The most critical infrastructures in this city are interconnected. Increased data exchange across municipal domains aims to manage the essential assets, leading to more automation in city governance and optimization of the dynamic offered services. However, no clear guideline or standard exists for modeling these data flows. As a result, operators, municipalities, policymakers, manufac-turers, solution providers, and vendors are forced to accept systems with limite…
Modern trains rely on balises (communication beacons) located on the track to provide location information as they traverse a rail network. Balises, such as those conforming to the Eurobalise standard, were not designed with security in mind and are thus vulnerable to cyber attacks targeting data availability, integrity, or authenticity. In this work, we discuss data integrity threats to balise transmission modules and use high-fidelity simulation to study the risks posed by data integrity attacks. To mitigate such risk, we propose a practical two-layer solution: at the device level, we design…
University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）；Macquarie University（麦考瑞大学）；University of South Wales（南威尔士大学）；Federation University（联邦大学）
Security and privacy of the users have become significant concerns due to the involvement of the Internet of things (IoT) devices in numerous applications. Cyber threats are growing at an explosive pace making the existing security and privacy measures inadequate. Hence, everyone on the Internet is a product for hackers. Consequently, Machine Learning (ML) algorithms are used to produce accurate outputs from large complex databases, where the generated outputs can be used to predict and detect vulnerabilities in IoT-based systems. Furthermore, Blockchain (BC) techniques are becoming popular in…
Uppsala University（乌普萨拉大学）；Hamad bin Khalifa University（哈马德·本·哈利法大学）
We present a new machine learning-based attack that exploits network patterns to detect the presence of smart IoT devices and running services in the WiFi radio spectrum. We perform an extensive measurement campaign of data collection, and we build up a model describing the traffic patterns characterizing three popular IoT smart home devices, i.e., Google Nest Mini, Amazon Echo, and Amazon Echo Dot. We prove that it is possible to detect and identify with overwhelming probability their presence and the services running by the aforementioned devices in a crowded WiFi scenario. This work proves …
The future of Internet of Things (IoT) is already upon us. IoT applications have been widely used in many field of social production and social living such as healthcare, energy and industrial automation. While enjoying the convenience and efficiency that IoT brings to us, new threats from IoT also have emerged. There are increasing research works to ease these threats, but many problems remain open. To better understand the essential reasons of new threats and the challenges in current research, this survey first proposes the concept of "IoT features". Then, the security and privacy effects o…
The purpose of this study is to analyze cyber security and security practices of electronic information and network system, network threats, and techniques to prevent the cyber attacks in hotels. Helping the information technology directors and chief information officers (CIO) is the aim of this study to advance policy for security of electronic information in hotels and suggesting some techniques and tools to secure the computer networks. This research is completely qualitative while the case study and interviews have done in 5 random hotels in Reno, Nevada, United States of America. The inte…
The concept of Internet of Things (IoT) has become more popular in the modern era of technology than ever before. From small household devices to large industrial machines, the vision of IoT has made it possible to connect the devices with the physical world around them. This increasing popularity has also made the IoT devices and applications in the center of attention among attackers. Already, several types of malicious activities exist that attempt to compromise the security and privacy of the IoT devices. One interesting emerging threat vector is the attacks that abuse the use of sensors o…
The proliferation of IoT systems, has seen them targeted by malicious third parties. To address this, realistic protection and investigation countermeasures need to be developed. Such countermeasures include network intrusion detection and network forensic systems. For that purpose, a well-structured and representative dataset is paramount for training and validating the credibility of the systems. Although there are several network, in most cases, not much information is given about the Botnet scenarios that were used. This paper, proposes a new dataset, Bot-IoT, which incorporates legitimate…
Despite its technological benefits, Internet of Things (IoT) has cyber weaknesses due to the vulnerabilities in the wireless medium. Machine learning (ML)-based methods are widely used against cyber threats in IoT networks with promising performance. Advanced persistent threat (APT) is prominent for cybercriminals to compromise networks, and it is crucial to long-term and harmful characteristics. However, it is difficult to apply ML-based approaches to identify APT attacks to obtain a promising detection performance due to an extremely small percentage among normal traffic. There are limited s…
A number of Internet of Things (IoTs) platforms have emerged to enable various IoT apps developed by third-party developers to automate smart homes. Prior research mostly concerns the overprivilege problem in the permission model. Our work, however, reveals that even IoT apps that follow the principle of least privilege, when they interplay, can cause unique types of threats, named Cross-App Interference (CAI) threats. We describe and categorize the new threats, showing that unexpected automation, security and privacy issues may be caused by such threats, which cannot be handled by existing Io…
Internet of Things (IoT) aims at providing connectivity between every computing entity. However, this facilitation is also leading to more cyber threats which may exploit the presence of a vulnerability of a period of time. One such vulnerability is the zero-day threat that may lead to zero-day attacks which are detrimental to an enterprise as well as the network security. In this article, a study is presented on the zero-day threats for IoT networks and a context graph-based framework is presented to provide a strategy for mitigating these attacks. The proposed approach uses a distributed dia…
Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）；The University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）；Data61, CSIRO（联邦科学与工业研究组织数据61研究所）
Since Deep Learning (DL) backdoor attacks have been revealed as one of the most insidious adversarial attacks, a number of countermeasures have been developed with certain assumptions defined in their respective threat models. However, the robustness of these countermeasures is inadvertently ignored, which can introduce severe consequences, e.g., a countermeasure can be misused and result in a false implication of backdoor detection. For the first time, we critically examine the robustness of existing backdoor countermeasures with an initial focus on three influential model-inspection ones tha…
In this work, we propose a profile matching (or deanonymization) attack for unstructured online social networks (OSNs) in which similarity in graphical structure cannot be used for profile matching. We consider different attributes that are publicly shared by users. Such attributes include both obvious identifiers such as the user name and non-obvious identifiers such as interest similarity or sentiment variation between different posts of a user in different platforms. We study the effect of using different combinations of these attributes to the profile matching in order to show the privacy …
Insider threats are one of today's most challenging cybersecurity issues that are not well addressed by commonly employed security solutions. Despite several scientific works published in this domain, we argue that the field can benefit from the proposed structural taxonomy and novel categorization of research that contribute to the organization and disambiguation of insider threat incidents and the defense solutions used against them. The objective of our categorization is to systematize knowledge in insider threat research, while leveraging existing grounded theory method for rigorous litera…
Despite the surging development and utilization of IoT devices, the security of IoT devices is still in infancy. The security pitfalls of IoT devices have made it easy for hackers to take over IoT devices and use them for malicious activities like botnet attacks. With the rampant emergence of IoT devices, botnet attacks are surging. The botnet attacks are not only catastrophic for IoT device users but also for the rest of the world. Therefore, there is a crucial need to identify and mitigate the possible threats in IoT devices during the design phase. Threat modelling is a technique that is us…
The next generation of cellular technology, 6G, is being developed to enable a wide range of new applications and services for the Internet of Things (IoT). One of 6G's main advantages for IoT applications is its ability to support much higher data rates and bandwidth as well as to support ultra-low latency. However, with this increased connectivity will come to an increased risk of cyber threats, as attackers will be able to exploit the large network of connected devices. Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be used to detect and prevent cyber attacks by continuously learning and adapt…
The Internet of things (IoT) is still in its infancy and has attracted much interest in many industrial sectors including medical fields, logistics tracking, smart cities and automobiles. However as a paradigm, it is susceptible to a range of significant intrusion threats. This paper presents a threat analysis of the IoT and uses an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) to combat these threats. A multi-level perceptron, a type of supervised ANN, is trained using internet packet traces, then is assessed on its ability to thwart Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS/DoS) attacks. This paper focuses on t…
Traffic management, road safety, and environmental impact are important issues in the modern world. These challenges are addressed by the application of sensing, control and communication methods of intelligent transportation systems (ITS). A part of ITS is a vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) which means a wireless network of vehicles. However, communication among vehicles in a VANET exposes several security threats which need to be studied and addressed. In this review, firstly, the basic flow of VANET is illustrated focusing on its communication methods, architecture, characteristics, standar…
Advances in the development and increased availability of smart devices ranging from small sensors to complex cloud infrastructures as well as various networking technologies and communication protocols have supported the rapid expansion of Internet of Things deployments. The Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) protocol has been widely accepted and used in the IoT domain to support interactions among heterogeneous IoT devices, in part due to zero configuration implementation which makes it feasible for use in large-scale networks. The popularity and ubiquity of UPnP to support IoT systems necessita…
Securing the supply chain of information and communications technology (ICT) has recently emerged as a critical concern for national security and integrity. With the proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and their increasing role in controlling real world infrastructure, there is a need to analyze risks in networked systems beyond established security analyses. Existing methods in literature typically leverage attack and fault trees to analyze malicious activity and its impact. In this paper, we develop RIoTS, a security risk assessment framework borrowing from system reliability t…
Supply chain is emerging as the next frontier of threats in the rapidly evolving IoT ecosystem. It is fundamentally more complex compared to traditional ICT systems. We analyze supply chain risks in IoT systems and their unique aspects, discuss research challenges in supply chain security, and identify future research directions.
Threat modeling and risk assessments are common ways to identify, estimate, and prioritize risk to national, organizational, and individual operations and assets. Several threat modeling and risk assessment approaches have been proposed prior to the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) that focus on threats and risks in information technology (IT). Due to shortcomings in these approaches and the fact that there are significant differences between the IoT and IT, we synthesize and adapt these approaches to provide a threat modeling framework that focuses on threats and risks in the IoT. In do…
Lately, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have become an emerging technology and can be utilized in some crucial circumstances like battlegrounds, commercial applications, habitat observing, buildings, smart homes, traffic surveillance and other different places. One of the foremost difficulties that WSN faces nowadays is protection from serious attacks. While organizing the sensor nodes in an abandoned environment makes network systems helpless against an assortment of strong assaults, intrinsic memory and power restrictions of sensor nodes make the traditional security arrangements impractical…
The impact of localization systems in our daily lives is increasing. As next-generation networks will introduce hyperconnectivity with the emerging applications, this impact will undoubtedly further increase, proliferating the importance of the location information's reliability. As society becomes more dependent on this information in terms of the products and services, security solutions will have to be enriched to provide countermeasures sufficiently advanced to ever-evolving threats, forcing the joint design of communication and localization systems. This paper envisions integrated communi…
A thorough and systematic understanding of different elements of cyberattacks is essential for developing the necessary tools to prevent, detect, diagnose, and mitigate cyberattacks in manufacturing systems. In response, researchers have proposed several attack taxonomies as methods for recognizing and categorizing various cyberattack attributes. However, those taxonomies cover selected attack attributes depending on the research focus, sometimes accompanied by inconsistent naming and definitions. These seemingly different taxonomies often overlap and can complement each other to create a comp…
The factories of the future require efficient interconnection of their physical machines into the cyber space to cope with the emerging need of an increased uptime of machines, higher performance rates, an improved level of productivity and a collective collaboration along the supply chain. With the rapid growth of the Internet of Things (IoT), and its application in industrial areas, the so called Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT)/Industry 4.0 emerged. However, further to the rapid growth of IoT/IIoT systems, cyber attacks are an emerging threat and simple manual security testing can often…
For years, attack graphs have been an important tool for security assessment of enterprise networks, but IoT devices, a new player in the IT world, might threat the reliability of this tool. In this paper, we review the challenges that must be addressed when using attack graphs to model and analyze enterprise networks that include IoT devices. In addition, we propose novel ideas and countermeasures aimed at addressing these challenges.
The rapid development of IoT applications and their use in various fields of everyday life has resulted in an escalated number of different possible cyber-threats, and has consequently raised the need of securing IoT devices. Collecting Cyber-Threat Intelligence (e.g., zero-day vulnerabilities or trending exploits) from various online sources and utilizing it to proactively secure IoT systems or prepare mitigation scenarios has proven to be a promising direction. In this work, we focus on social media monitoring and investigate real-time Cyber-Threat Intelligence detection from the Twitter str…
