Mitigating IoT security threats with a trusted Network element

Abstract

Securing the growing amount of IoT devices is a challenge for both the end-users bringing IoT devices into their homes, as well as the corporates and industries exposing these devices into the Internet as part of their service or operations. The exposure of these devices, often poorly configured and secured, offers malicious actors an easy access to the private information of their users, or potential to utilize the devices in further activities, e.g., attacks on other devices via Distributed Denial of Service. This paper discusses the current security challenges of IoT devices and proposes a solution to secure these devices via a trusted Network Edge Device. NED offloads the security countermeasures of the individual devices into the trusted network elements. The major benefit of this approach is that the system can protect the IoT devices with user-defined policies, which can be applied to all devices regardless of the constraints of computing resources in the IoT tags. Additional benefit is the possibility to manage the countermeasures of multiple IoT devices/gateways at once, via a shared interface, thus largely avoiding the per-device maintenance operations.