On the Contents and Utility of IoT Cybersecurity Guidelines

Abstract

Cybersecurity concerns of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and infrastructure are growing each year. In response, organizations worldwide have published IoT security guidelines to protect their citizens and customers by providing recommendations on the development and operation of IoT systems. While these guidelines are being adopted, e.g. by US federal contractors, their content and merits have not been critically examined. Specifically, we do not know what topics and recommendations they cover and their effectiveness at preventing real-world IoT failures. In this paper, we address these gaps through a qualitative study of guidelines. We collect 142 IoT cybersecurity guidelines and sample them for recommendations until reaching saturation at 25 guidelines. From the resulting 958 unique recommendations, we iteratively develop a hierarchical taxonomy following grounded theory coding principles and study the guidelines’ comprehensiveness. In addition, we evaluate the actionability and specificity of each recommendation and match recommendations to CVEs and security failures in the news they can prevent. We report that: (1) Each guideline has gaps in its topic coverage and comprehensiveness; (2) 87.2% recommendations are actionable and 38.7% recommendations can prevent specific threats; and (3) although the union of the guidelines mitigates all 17 of the failures from our news stories corpus, 21% of the CVEs evade the guidelines. In summary, we report shortcomings in each guideline’s depth and breadth, but as a whole they address major security issues.