| Real Threats | Security Techniques |
|---|---|
| Messages can be read by anyone on the internet. | Various symmetric encryption techniques to make sure only sender and receivers can understand the message. Examples: – Advanced Encryption Standard(AES) – Data Encryption Standard(DES) |
| Unencrypted or encrypted messages can be altered by anyone on the internet. | Various Integrity protection techniques like Hash based solutions to detect alteration in messages. Examples: – SHA256 MAC |
| Stealing encryption key on the internet and calculating fixed key | Public private key infrastructure based techniques make sure that keys used for encrypting the message are not fixed and random for each session. Along with it, it also makes sure that message encryption key cannot be steal by anyone by using asymmetric public and private key concepts. Examples: – Rivest, Shamir and Adleman (RSA) – Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) |
| Unauthorized access and illegal control of network and system resources | Authentication and Authorization techniques to make sure only authenticated users with valid credentials are allowed to enter into networks. Along with it, an adequate permission mechanism to set various authorization levels like admin, super admin, user level access, group level access, role based access control (RBAC) and attributes based access control (ABAC). Example: – oAuth (Open Authorization) |
| Physical attacks of devices computing, memory and storage devices | In build security techniques to make sure you have a secure run time execution environment, secure RAM or ROM and Secure storage for any physical attacks. |
Category Archives: IoT Gateway
IoT Layered Architecture – Security Threats
1. Perception Layer:
- Eavesdropping: Stealing the information transmitted between sender & Receiver.
- Node Capture: Getting full control of node like gateway node. That way all types of data including key used to build secure connection along with data in memory.
- Fake Node & Malicious node: Adding not a valid or real node to occupy network bandwidth and hardware resources of real node. That causes destruction of whole network.
- Replay attack: By eavesdropping between sender & receiver, an intruder capture the very basic identity of sender and start behaving like he is a real sender such that receiver gets impression that data is coming from real sender. That way intruder can send his or her desired command to receiver.
- Timing attack: Intruder tries to observe the time consume between request and response that way tries to understand what types of queries are sent, what type of algorithms are used.
2. Network Layer:
- Denial of Service (DoS) attack: Consume whole network bandwidth such that authentic user are not allowed to consume services.
- Main-in-The-Middle (MiTM) attack: An attacker intercepts between sender & receiver and change the data of communication such that both sender & receiver believe that they are getting data from each other only.
- Storage attack: Altering the information stored in storage devices or on cloud specially when multiple types of people are involved into replication of stored data.
- Exploit attack: Taking advantages of security vulnerability, weak algorithm, poor hardware or bad programming helps attacker to retrieve precious information.
3. Application Layer:
- Cross site scripting attack: Adding client side malicious script like java-script to change the actual code and execute the code what attacker wants to execute.
- Malicious Code attack: A code inside the software itself causes damage of overall system. Such type of code is very hard to detect with even anti virus code.
4. Support Layer:
- Denial of Service (DoS) attack: As describe above.
- Malicious inside attack: Attack happens with the help of someone inside the network with valid authorization.
5. Processing Layer:
- Exhaustion attack : To exhaust the system resources like battery & memory consumption.
- Malwares attack : In the form of viruses, spyware, adware, Trojans horses and worms.
6. Business Layer:
- Business Logic attack: Due to flaw in programming like poor coding, password recovery mechanism, poor validation & bad encryption techniques.
- Zero-Day attack: Security issues in application and vendor is not aware about it.
IoT- Basics of Nano-network
- What is nano-machine?
If device size is measured in a few nano-meters or a few micrometers is called nano-machine.
2. What is nano-network?
A set of interconnected nano-machines is called nano-network.
3. What are the basic tasks performed by nano-network?
It Performs below tasks:
- Sensing
- Actuation
- Computing
- Storing
4. What are the areas where nono-network is used?
- Military
- Biomedical
- Industry
- Environmental Research etc
5. What types of communication technologies are used in nano-networks?
- Molecules based data transmission & reception
- Electromagnetic radiation based data transmission & reception
6. What types of frequencies are used in nano-network?
It works in tera-hertz frequencies. The frequency range is from 0.1 THz to 100 Thz.
Layered architectures of IoT
Introduction
Based on the business and technologies needs, the architecture of the IoT solution is designed. It is very critical for any enterprise or government organization to define the IoT architecture to fulfill their requirements. Therefore, Industry experts, researchers and architects have invented layer based architecture for IoT solutions. They highly recommend choosing and defining the architecture very intelligently.
Layer based architecture has following advantages:
- Segregation of requirements into various categories
- Identifying the technologies
- Defining the overall work flow of solution
- Planning & managing different activities
- Defining hardware & software requirements
- Estimating the approximate cost of overall infrastructure
- Minimize complexity and increase confidence level of stakeholders
What are the available IoT Layered architectures?
- 3 Layered Architecture
- 4 Layered Architecture
- 5 Layered Architecture
- 6 Layered Architecture
There is also 7 Layered architecture exits based on business requirement by adding a separate Edge Layer. All these architectures are evolved based on research and actual business requirements.
In most of the cases, 5 Layered architecture is used.
What are the different layers in IoT layered architectures and their hierarchies?
| 3 Layers Architecture | 4 Layers Architecture | 5 Layers Architecture | 6 Layers Architecture |
|---|---|---|---|
| Application Layer | Application Layer | Business Layer | Business Layer |
| Network Layer | Network Layer | Application Layer | Application Layer |
| Perception Layer | Support Layer | Processing/Middle-ware Layer | Security Layer |
| Perception Layer | Network Layer | Processing/Middle-ware Layer | |
| Perception Layer | Network Layer | ||
| Perception Layer |
Here, data flows in both directions from top to bottom and from bottom to top.
Description about different Layers
Perception Layer
IoT Devices (Sensors & Actuators) reside in this layer. These devices capture data and pass to the next layer.
Network Layer
This layer provides support for different wired & wireless network connectivity like ethernet, wifi, Bluetooth, BLE, Zigbee, sigfox, RFID, LoRAWAN, NB-IoT , 2G, 3G, LTE & 5G etc. This also includes different messaging transfer protocols i.e MQTT, CoAP, AMQP and DDS.
Processing Layer
This layer performs all types of activities that are required to generate structured data that can be shown to the user or administrator. These activities are data accumulation, parsing of different formats, filtering of data, data aggregation, storage of data and conversion of data in recipient format.
Support/Security Layer
This layer provides devices & user authentication along with authorization. It is also responsible for data protection (encryption & decryption) to support all types of cryptography based solutions to enhance security in complete solution. Nowadays, software and hardware based security is very much needed at IoT devices, Gateway, communication networks, message protocols as well as user interface level.
Application Layer
This layer provides an interface for end users to interact with IoT solutions. This interface enables the generation of information based on end user requirements. Here, the end user can be a customer who uses IoT enabled services or an administrator who manages and controls IoT components and overall operations.
Business Layer
This layer defines a set of rules, organization policies, defines security parameters, defines specification of data based on business or customer needs and use cases.