Design and Evaluation of a Distributed Security Framework for the Internet of Things

Abstract

The adopters of IoT face challenges with the surging Internet-based attacks on their IoT assets and inefficiencies within the technology. Unfortunately, IoT is overly distributed, still evolving and facing implementation and security challenges. Given the above scenario, we argue that the IoT network should always be decentralized design, and security should be built by design. The paper is the design and construction of a decentralized IoT security framework, with the goal of making emerging IoT systems more resilient to attacks and supporting complex communication and resource sharing. The framework improves efficiency and scalability in IoT, exposes vulnerable subsystems and components as possible weak links to system compromise, and meets the requirements of a heterogeneous computing environment. Other features of the framework including efficient resource sharing, fault tolerance, and distributed storage support the Internet of Things. We discuss the design requirements and carry out the implementation of Proof of Concept and evaluation of our framework. Two underlying technologies: the actor model and the blockchain were used for the implementation. Our reason for choosing the actor model and blockchain is to compare its suitability for IoT integration in parallel. Hence, evaluation of the system is performed based on computational and memory efficiency, security, and scalability. We conclude from the evaluations that the actorbased implementation has better scalability than the block-chain-based implementation. Also, the blockchain seems to be computationally more intensive than the actors and less suitable for IoT systems.