Securebox: Toward Safer and Smarter IoT Networks

Abstract

In this paper we present Securebox, an affordable and deployable platform for securing and managing IoT networks. Our proposal targets an alarming spot in the fast growing IoT industry where security is often overlooked due to device limitation, budget constraint, and development deadline. In contrast to existing host-centric and hardware-coupled solutions, Securebox empowers a cloud-assisted "charge for network service" model that is dedicated to budget and resource constrained IoT environments. Owing to its cloud-driven and modular design, Securebox allows us to 1) flexibly offload and onload security and management functions to the cloud and network edge components; 2) offer advanced security and management services to end users in an affordable and on-demand manner; 3) ease the upgrade and deployment of new services to guard against abrupt security breakouts. To demonstrate Securebox, we have implemented the platform consisting of a plug-n-play frontend, a Kubernetes-powered backend cluster, and a smartphone mobile application. Based on the testbed evaluation, we show that Securebox is robust and responsive. Its collaborative and extensible architecture enforces rapid update cycles and can scale with the growing diversity of IoT devices.