Discussion on IoT Security Recommendations against the State-of-the-Art Solutions

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging concept comprising a wide ecosystem of interconnected devices and services. These technologies collect, exchange and process data in order to dynamically adapt to a specific context. IoT is tightly bound to cyber-physical systems and, in this respect, has relevant security implications. A need for IoT security guidelines was identified by the industry in the early 2010s. While numerous institutions across the globe have proposed recommendations with a goal to help developers, distributors and users to ensure a secure IoT infrastructure, a strict set of regulations for IoT security is yet to be established. In this paper, we aim to provide an overview of security guidelines for IoT proposed by various organizations, and evaluate some of the existing technologies applied to ensure IoT security against these guidelines. We gathered recommendations proposed by selected government organizations, international associations and advisory groups, and compiled them into a set of the most common and important considerations, divided into eight categories. Then we chose a number of representative examples from IoT security technologies and evaluated them against these criteria. While none of the examined solutions fulfill all recommendations on their own, the existing technologies introduced by those solutions could be combined to create a design framework which satisfies all the requirements of a secure IoT device. Further research on this matter could be beneficial. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive survey to evaluate different security technologies for IoT device security against the compilation of criteria based on existing guidelines.