Modeling IoT Application Interactions In Physical Spaces

Open Access
- Author:
- Erdogdu, Elif
- Area of Honors:
- Computer Science
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Science
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Patrick Drew Mcdaniel, Thesis Supervisor
Dr. John Joseph Hannan, Thesis Honors Advisor - Keywords:
- Internet of Things
IoT
Security
application - Abstract:
- IoT (Internet of Things) is emerging as a powerful sector of technology, providing the opportunity to collect a wealth of valuable information and automate mundane tasks. Now more than ever, IoT devices are playing significant roles in various settings such as monitoring industrial automation, tracking human health, and providing convenience and security in our homes. The number of deployed IoT devices is growing exponentially: as of December 2018, there exist 8 Billion IoT devices, and the number is estimated to double by 2020. As the number of connected devices increases exponentially fast, and the IoT attack surface continues to expand, securely connecting these systems becomes critically important. Security researchers have been studying vulnerabilities in IoT devices and systems, and a number of their findings suggest that their proliferation will lead to security threats introduced by the physical space these devices share. Research has indi- cated that simple IoT devices positioned near each other, paired with IoT applications, can interact in unintended and harmful ways via their physical environment. The created interactions are classified as negative if two or more devices’ correct operation result in an unintended behavior, provoking harm for user’s security, safety and privacy. Although researchers have demonstrated the possibility of these interactions through code analysis, whether they can occur in the physical world is still an open question. This work examines the negative interactions articulated in research space and investigates their feasibility in the real world through the physical modeling of IoT devices. We provide an approach to model IoT devices with commodity Arduino microcontrollers and sensors. We build five IoT devices and design a suite of scenarios that demonstrate negative device interactions in realistic settings. The results of this work confirm that IoT devices interact with each other in physical spaces and cause security, safety and privacy harm to the user. The main contributions of this work are: (1) We show that the theorized negative physical interactions between IoT devices do occur, especially with high-precision sensors, (2) we introduce a process to accurately model IoT devices with commercial sensors and Arduino microcontrollers, and (3) we augment the IoTBench suite of IoT applications by incorporating test cases used in this work.