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.
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
Table 1.0 Layered Architectures
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.