The coverage of the Internet of Things (IoT), especially on security, is critical. As the paper and other sources on the Internet say, there are over 15 billion IoT devices in 2014, and this number is expected to grow exponentially in the coming years. It is critical that security is addressed as the “things” become commonplace.
The authors provide a summary of the December 2016 special issue of the ACM Transactions on Internet Technology, giving an overview of the five published papers and some avenues for future work.
The five published papers cover 1) an access control mechanism, which is important for IoT devices; 2) key establishment, as pre-shared keys are hard to use for IoT; 3) design of a lightweight authentication protocol for IoT; 4) vulnerability assessment for software prior to commercialization; and 5) real-time intrusion detection for IoT infrastructure.
The authors also propose some research challenges, which cover all the important aspects of IoT security from middleware to authentication, to patch management to infrastructure security. This special issue and the research challenges will hopefully spur further work on IoT security.