Traffic Characterization to Provide Trust for Internet of Things Devices

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is paving the way for the development of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), the next step of the Internet evolution, which will allow the development of several new systems and applications. Likewise, urged by the adoption of 5G and Beyond networks, the massive, ubiquitous spread of interconnected IoT devices has increasingly exposed the vulnerability of data and related applications in an unprecedented way. If the security of any component in such systems gets compromised, affecting its trust with respect to others, an associated data leak may cause serious threats to privacy, material losses, and even put people’s lives at risk. In this paper, we present IoT devices’ traffic characterization to provide trust values to enable secure communications among such devices. We develop experiments using a real IoT dataset to demonstrate the feasibility and the effectiveness of our proposal. Considering that complementary features between blockchain technology and information theory triggers a great potential for research and innovation, the key idea of the contribution consists in modeling trust using a two-level approach, which is based on a distributed-ledger (at the high level), and a relative entropy measure (at the low level). The results show the feasibility of our approach.