The Theory of Internet of Things, Its Vulnerabilities, and

defenses

Hashmat Ali (32726)

Instructor: Dr Abdul Hameed
Subject: Advance Research Methodologies
1 June 2020
Abstract

Now a days Internet of Things play a very important role in the connection of virtual objects with real world
objects to exchange information. IoT has a great impact on daily life in many fields from tiny smart wearables to
smart home and smart cities and also in industrial systems. Billions of devices and object with each one having a
different ID can be connected through IoT environment. IoT is the most important domain in recent years and is
the focus in various fields like industry, military application, space science, health care and agriculture and
because of that it is more venerable to cyber-attacks. IoT need security solutions for integrity, authentication
services and confidentiality. In this paper we explain the theory of IoT, History, security threats and possible
defenses of IoT systems. The architecture of IoT system has three main layers physical layer or sensor layer,
network layer and application layer.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Origins
3. IoT Vulnerabilities
4. Defenses against the IoT Vulnerabilities
5. Conclusion
6. References

1. Introduction

The main purpose of the IoT is that to enhance the quality of modern life. For example, IoT based solutions for
elderly and the disabled person are increasing their self-confidence and living [1]. IoT based device that are
wearable and implantable can measure and monitor the health of a person, generates the emergency alert to
increase the survival chances of a patient [2].IoT is also used to reduce the response time to a sudden health
issue like sudden infant death syndrome while in sleep [3]. The presence of IoT eases everyday life enhance the
way of communication between people and make interaction with environment and object easy, however this
also raises many concerns like security level and how it can protect the privacy of user as it has billions of
devices connect it is more vulnerable to attacks and security threats.

Vehicle systems, distributed energy resource microgrids, and surveillance system of Smart City through Drones
are some good examples of IoT microgrids. A microgrid system is a good example of a cyber-physical system: it
binds together all distributed energy resources (DER) to provide a comprehensive energy solution for a local
geographic region. A microgrid IoT system, however, still relies on the traditional Supervisory and Data
Acquisition (SCADA). Integrating the physical and cyber domains greatly increases exposure to attacks: cyber-
attacks can target SCADA supervisory control and paralyze the physical domain, or the physical devices can be
tampered as well as compromised, going to affect the supervisory control system. The drone industry, on the
other hand, is going quickly to incorporate robotics technologies and can be incorporated into firefighting, police,
smart city monitoring and emergency response. When municipalities and people continue relying on such a
network, keeping the program stable and efficient would become essential.

In recent years, it has been noted that significant advances have been made in scientific work to tackle the
privacy and protection problems for IoT devices. Apparently, the emerging approaches and protection measures
are essentially based on traditional network security strategies. However, it is more difficult to implement
protection measures in an IoT environment than in a conventional network, owing to the complexity of the
systems and protocols as well as the size or number of nodes in the framework. The complexities of
implementing IoT security are very high due to physical pairing, complexity, budget limitations, anonymity, large
scope, trust management and protection unpreparedness are discussed thoroughly in [9].
 Figure 1 (a)

Figure 1 (b)

Figure 1 (a) show’s the number of IoT devices connected all over the world and (b) them market size of IoT in
billion dollars.

2. Origins

The first version of IoT emerged nearly two decades ago, but the technology behind it had already existed and
had been in development for several years. Let us look at the past of the development of IoT and its support and
related technology in chronological order In 1969 Internet, the core technology behind IoT has emerged as
Advanced ARPANET (Research Project Organization Network) which was primarily used by ARPANET.
Academic and academic community in order to exchange previous results, to create new ones Interconnecting
approaches and linking machines to a broad variety of general purposes Department of Defense Computer
Centers in the United States and both in the public and private sectors [4]. Another essential technology for IoT
is RFID (Radio-Frequency Identification) was introduced in 1973 Though the roots of RFID can be traced back to
World War-II and the advances continued through the 1950s and 1960s, the first U.S. patent for RFID tag with
re-writable memory was received by Mario W. Cardullo in 1973. However, a California based entrepreneur,
Charles Walton also received a patent in the same year for a passive transponder to unlock the door remotely.
The Ubiquitous computing concept was introduced by Mark Weiser [5]. It made computers to be present in
everything by using advanced embedding computing. Later on, it was known as pervasive computing Embedded
computer systems were another important technology for IoT. These systems are implemented using single
board computers and microcontrollers and are embedded in the bigger system to form its integral part [7]. Then
in the Mid 1990s, to sense the data uniquely identified embedded devices sensor nodes were developed to
continuously exchange the information to realize the idea of IoT [6]. Device for Device Communication was
presented by Bill Joy in 1999 for the first time Internet taxonomy and the term ‘Internet of Things&’ were used by
Ashton [ 8]. The quality of life is experiencing progressive change and will be significantly changed in the future.
Only 500 million devices have been connected to the Internet, and today more than 25 billion devices have been
installed. By 2020, 50 billion devices will be equipped with a unique identifier so that they can benefit greatly
from energy, safety and security, industry, manufacturing , retail, healthcare, the independence of elderly
people , people with reduced mobility, the environment, transport, smart cities, entertainment and much more
[11].

Figure 2 IoT Architecture

3. IoT Vulnerabilities

IoT has three layers: physical or sensing layer, network layer and application layer as shown in Figure 2.

The Sensing layer undergoes aggregation and sensing of IoT object information. Information aggregation is
done on this layer with the help of different devices, such as sensor nodes, smart cards, and RFID tags. There
are two important components of the layer:  sensors and sensor network. Sensing node such as controllers or
sensors is used to collect data and to monitor data and  sensing network is used to transmit control signals to the
processor, or to transmit the collected data to the network layer gateway [12]

Wireless and wired networks are handled via the Network layer. This passes the collected data through the
sensors across the wired and wireless networks. It can also support connection-oriented operation by keeping
the data transmission secure. Routing takes place at this point, where data is distributed over the internet via
various IoT devices. On this network, routing, switching, gateway systems run using a range of technologies
such as Wi-Fi, 3G, Bluetooth, and LTE. By aggregating, filtering, and moving data between different sensors, the
gateway acts as a medium between separate IoT devices [13].

Application layer provides an interface and collaboration with, the applications and end users. This determines
the distribution of resources and the computation in the development, delivery, scanning and selection of data
features. Via its filtering feature it can provide methods to identify spam data, malicious data and legitimate data.
It's named the "process layer" It resolves the information obtained and makes control decisions to enable
intelligent processing to be accomplished through detection, communication, and control between devices and
objects [14].

Figure 3 taxonomy of IoT attack on layers

Figure 3 showing a detailed view of IoT attack on each layer of IoT architecture.

3.1 Attacks on Application Layer

In the application layer virus, worms, trojans, spyware are malware that attacks the IoT protection system.  virus
causes harm in IoT resources worms distributed across the network utilizing various device
vulnerabilities, Trojans try to portray as legitimate programs and execute various malicious acts on the victim's
computer, spyware, gathering various hidden details about the victim's machines like credit card details,
password and contacts etc.

The purpose of DoS and DDoS attacks is to prevent legal users from reaching a particular IoT resource or to
degrade normal services for legitimate users. This is achieved by sending tremendous unnecessary traffic to the
compromise (machines or networks) to induce fatigue of infrastructure. Increase the potential for flow and
communication, or bandwidth. Does / DoS Attacks allow attackers to have full access User layer entry, which
may be infertile, Databases, and sensitive private data.

A buffer is a sequential memory section which can contain different types of data from a string of characters to
an array of integers. Extra data are assigned to a fixed-length buffer in a buffer overflow where the buffer will
contain. The excess data overflows into a nearby memory space, overwriting or destroying the data that remains
within previously. A buffer overflows further choice for attackers to execute arbitrary code on use such coding
failures or trigger malicious acts

A vulnerability in software can be viewed as a system malfunction, fault or just an mistake that an attacker may
use to alter the program's typical behavior. When the number of electronic applications is rising every day, the
number of vulnerabilities is also increasing. Hackers use this tool or approach to achieve their targets.

In an attack on privacy leaks, hackers have the potential to access private data from other sites than the IoT
system, or to achieve illegal gains by manipulating this data. The trade-off between confidential information
usage privacy is a big problem for the research world.

Cross-site scripting is the flaw in the usage of dynamic web design elements by the user, which may allow
anyone the potential to use JavaScript to undermine protection. It's called "cross-site" because it includes
collaboration between a pair of separate websites to achieve its goals.

3.2 Attacks on network layer

Network layer collaborates with IoT nodes within local and short-range networks. This will manage the data
retrieval and delivery over the internet to multiple IoT hubs and computers. Routers, switches, clouds and
gateways in this network use wireless protocols. The main role of the network layer (second layer) in the IoT
architecture is to transfer the information across the network. Because IoT rely on the basic communication
system, it is more exposed to numerous threats, such as the traffic analysis attack.

In traffic analysis attack, the attacker continually attempts to learn the pattern of traffic based on the secretly
taped data. This intercepts and scans communications to obtain information about the network. This analyzes
the packet flow, i.e. the node-to - node exchange of the packets, and then begins with the aggressive attacks on
that case.

In a Hello flooding attack, an attacker may represent himself as a neighboring entity to multiple objects. It emits a
hi alert with a high-powered antenna to trick other artifacts into transmitting their packet in. This attack is so
dangerous for the IoT system that it involves reducing resources such as the nodes' battery power. Various
protocols that presume that receiving this packet is within the radio range and is thus a neighbor dependent on
HELLO packets. A large driven transmitter may be used by the intruder to trick a wide area of nodes within
assuming they are the neighbors of the transmitting node.

Black holes, attack means any network locations wherever incoming or outgoing traffic is quietly lost, without
notifying source that the data have not reached the intended receiver. It is an attacking node that erroneously
reacts to a single destination for any route and loses all the packets received. If malicious nodes interact as a
group, then the harm will be very severe.

M-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks were detected before the computers emerged. A case of MITM attacks is the
manipulative postman who opens the letters to people and reads or modifies their contents before sending them
to their recipient. The MITM makes interception by a pair of nodes communicating. When the attacker  interrupts
his victims' connection, he can take control of a proxy 's role. There are billions of vulnerable devices in the IoT
environment and their number is rapidly increasing as a result, very different types of MITM attacks have
appeared. With the rising need for IoT, MITM attacks are going to become a huge challenge.
Sybil attack is another type of network layer attack where a malicious agent may use multiple identities within the
same network. Sybil intruder reveals every node 's incorrect ID or duplicate ID so it can trick the other nodes in
the IoT system. Sybil attack causes issues with reliability of routing protocol. The attacking node does not copy
any other node but instead appropriates the identities of other nodes on the fly. The impact of Sybil attack on
data integrity, security of the nodes and the use of IoT resources.

3.3 Attacks on Sensor Layer

IoT includes hardware elements, such as switches, RFID scanners, cameras and various forms of RFID tags.
Typically speaking, each object in IoT includes a digital identity, so sensing data can be recognized quickly and
IoT environment can be monitored for multiple target applications. Universal Unique Identifier is the way a
unique identifier is assigned to an object.

RF Interference Attack is an attack in which a large number of noise signals are transmitted to RFID
communication radio frequencies as RFID works in a noisy and unstable environment the intrusion may use
some of the material inhibiting RF tags or produce electromagnetic interference signals that have the same
frequency with the RFID communication system, preventing normal communication between tags.

Another attack in the sensing layer of IoT is a jamming attack in which the attacker is distorting the channels in
wireless communication. Essentially, RF is an open medium, so the jamming attack can cause a huge wireless
network problem. The jamming attack, which is a kind of denial of service attack by introducing malicious traffic
that blocks the channel.

Object replication attack is a sensing layer attack that is capable of adding a new object physically to the
network. For example, a malicious object may be inserted by replicating an object's identifier. This attack could
cause the network output to drop enormously.

4. Defenses against the IoT Vulnerabilities

4.1 Application Layer attack defenses

In order to resolve application layer virus, malware, trojan and spyware attacks, a number of methodologies were
suggested, IBM research group suggested n-grams method and this approach was developed using several
machine learning algorithms. Machine learning and the methodology of data mining were introduced for malware
identification. This model consists of the process of disassembly, extraction of the feature.

Bandwidth exhaustion is a sort of DoS attack, a defense mechanism to that attack is proposed on network
packet counting. Through circumscribing the bandwidths, data packet communications through the pinhole
firewall can be changed to handle a large amount of data packet communications through the firewall.

The solution for software vulnerabilities attacks is relies on program metrics taken from source code and the
background of production discriminates and forecasts weak code locations.

To prevent Privacy leak attack, Similar to the homomorphic algorithm, the data encryption and masking are tools
which many solutions use to protect sensitive information. Such methods may, however, have a negative effect
on the quality of original data and increase the time delay. Despite high quality, the original data must be
maintained using the privacy security system used to safeguard the privacy of users.

Cross-site scripting exploits, JavaScript conveyed to the user via an approved website requires the vulnerability
to exist. The Cookies are often used to provide some kind of security against cross-site scripting

4.2 Defenses against Network layer attacks

The cryptographic is assumed as a solution for HELLO flood attack detection, but it is less suitable in IoT in
terms of storage and battery power. It may suit static networks that have overhead storage, scalability concerns.
The non-cryptographic approach that implies sending the packet to process and detect attacks is right but may
result in overhead communication. The identification agent can be far from the network so the packet should be
sent to processing service for transmission. The energy used to send the packet is bigger than the energy used
to process and measure it.

A robust encryption approach may be applied between client and server to avoid MITM attacks. The server
validates the request of a client by then presenting a digital certificate confirmation and then the connection can
be started. And, when developing apps, IoT companies will develop recognition and authentication as an
essential capability. Another solution to counteracting an MITM attack is by the use of an anonymous secure
virtual network (VPN).

4.3 Defense against sensor layer attacks

There are different forms of anti-jamming, such as frequency hopping spread spectrum (FHSS), power
management, timing signal transfer, and strategies for the cancellation of interference. In order to create a stable
IoT network, we can save a method of detecting jamming attacks that infiltrate the device through the physical
layer. Detection jamming attacks are a difficult problem and are viewed as the first step to establish a secure IoT
climate. Carrier sensing time, signal intensity and packet transmission allocation are standard methods for
detection.

Object replication attack can be avoided by a centralized path of data collection through the base station and
checking the identity (authentication) of nodes via a trusted. Vulnerabilities and proposed defenses Of IoT are
shown below in table 1.

Layer Security issues Proposed Defenses

Data and its unknown sender Due to huge network use public key encryption
Perception Access control and Slot reservation protocol, prevention of
Vulnerabilities of device
Layer resource depletion attacks
Finding abnormal or malicious
Intrusion detection system and fault finder algorithm
sensor node
Network IPsec communication with IPv6
Suitability of IPv6 and IPsec to secure communication.
Layer enabled nodes
Application Embedded computer systems with
No suggestion
layer various configuration
Table 1 (Security issues in IoT and proposed defenses)
5. Conclusion

The IoT has been viewed as a key research area over the last few years as the physical objects will
communicate across different network technologies. The broad development of IoT infrastructure requires real
and credible security tool. This paper discusses the IoT, its Oregon, threats and vulnerabilities of IoT and there
possible solutions in details. Due to vast range of devices and communication between physical and virtual
domain new research challenges are arising every day.

6. References

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