To Örebro University

The Internet of Things makes possible to connect each everyday object to the Internet, making computing pervasive like never before. From a security and privacy perspective, this tsunami of connectivity represents a disaster, which makes each object remotely hackable. We claim that, in order to tackle this issue, we need to address a new challenge in security: education.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is rapidly changing our society to a world where every thing is connected to the Internet, making computing pervasive like never before. This tsunami of connectivity and data collection relies more and more on the Cloud, where data analytics and intelligence actually reside. Cloud computing has indeed revolutionized the way computational resources and services can be used and accessed, implementing the concept of utility computing whose advantages are undeniable for every business. However, despite the benefits in terms of flexibility, economic savings, and support of new services, its widespread adoption is hindered by the security issues arising with its usage. From a security perspective, the technological revolution introduced by IoT and Cloud computing can represent a disaster, as each object might become inherently remotely hackable and, as a consequence, controllable by malicious actors. While the literature mostly focuses on the security of IoT and Cloud computing as separate entities, in this article we provide an up-to-date and well-structured survey of the security issues of cloud computing in the IoT era. We give a clear picture of where security issues occur and what their potential impact is. As a result, we claim that it is not enough to secure IoT devices, as cyber-storms come from Clouds.

The rise of connectivity, digitalization, robotics, and artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly changing our society and shaping its future development. During this technological and societal revolution, security has been persistently neglected, yet a hacked robot can act as an insider threat in organizations, industries, public spaces, and private homes. In this paper, we perform a structured security assessment of Pepper, a commercial humanoid robot. Our analysis, composed by an automated and a manual part, points out a relevant number of security flaws that can be used to take over and command the robot. Furthermore, we suggest how these issues could be fixed, thus, avoided in the future. The very final aim of this work is to push the rise of the security level of IoT products before they are sold on the public market.

The Internet of Things (IoT) revolution promises to make our lives easier by providing cheap and always connected smart embedded devices, which can interact on the Internet and create added values for human needs. But all that glitters is not gold. Indeed, the other side of the coin is that, from a security perspective, this IoT revolution represents a potential disaster. This plethora of IoT devices that flooded the market were very badly protected, thus an easy prey for several families of malwares that can enslave and incorporate them in very large botnets. This, eventually, brought back to the top Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, making them more powerful and easier to achieve than ever. This paper aims at provide an up-to-date picture of DDoS attacks in the specific subject of the IoT, studying how these attacks work and considering the most common families in the IoT context, in terms of their nature and evolution through the years. It also explores the additional offensive capabilities that this arsenal of IoT malwares has available, to mine the security of Internet users and systems. We think that this up-to-date picture will be a valuable reference to the scientific community in order to take a first crucial step to tackle this urgent security issue.

The Internet of Things (IoT) revolution has not only carried the astonishing promise to interconnect a whole generation of traditionally “dumb” devices, but also brought to the Internet the menace of billions of badly protected and easily hackable objects. Not surprisingly, this sudden flooding of fresh and insecure devices fueled older threats, such as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. In this paper, we first propose an updated and comprehensive taxonomy of DDoS attacks, together with a number of examples on how this classification maps to real-world attacks. Then, we outline the current situation of DDoS-enabled malwares in IoT networks, highlighting how recent data support our concerns about the growing in popularity of these malwares. Finally, we give a detailed analysis of the general framework and the operating principles of Mirai, the most disruptive DDoS-capable IoT malware seen so far.

Nowadays, the Internet of Things (IoT) is a consolidated reality. Smart homes are equipped with a growing number of IoT devices that capture more and more information about human beings lives. However, manufacturers paid little or no attention to security, so that various challenges are still in place. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to secure IoT systems that combines the concept of Security-by-Contract (SxC) with the Fog computing distributed paradigm. We define the pillars of our approach, namely the notions of IoT device contract, Fog node policy and contract-policy matching, the respective life-cycles, and the resulting SxC workflow. To better understand all the concepts of the SxC framework, and highlight its practical feasibility, we use a running case study based on a context-aware system deployed in a real smart home.

Cybersecurity is one of the biggest challenges in the Internet of Things (IoT) domain, as well as one of its most embarrassing failures. As a matter of fact, nowadays IoT devices still exhibit various shortcomings. For example, they lack secure default configurations and sufficient security configurability. They also lack rich behavioural descriptions, failing to list provided and required services. To answer this problem, we envision a future where IoT devices carry behavioural contracts and Fog nodes store network policies. One requirement is that contract consistency must be easy to prove. Moreover, contracts must be easy to verify against network policies. In this paper, we propose to combine the security-by-contract (S × C) paradigm with Fog computing to secure IoT devices. Following our previous work, first we formally define the pillars of our proposal. Then, by means of a running case study, we show that we can model communication flows and prevent information leaks. Last, we show that our contribution enables a holistic approach to IoT security, and that it can also prevent unexpected chains of events.