Security Awareness in Smart Homes and Internet of Things Networks through Swarm-Based Cybersecurity Penetration Testing

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) devices are common in today’s computer networks. These devices can be computationally powerful, yet prone to cybersecurity exploitation. To remedy these growing security weaknesses, this work proposes a new artificial intelligence method that makes these IoT networks safer through the use of autonomous, swarm-based cybersecurity penetration testing. In this work, the introduced Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) penetration testing technique is compared against traditional linear and queue-based approaches to find vulnerabilities in smart homes and IoT networks. To evaluate the effectiveness of the PSO approach, a network simulator is used to simulate smart home networks of two scales: a small, home network and a large, commercial-sized network. These experiments demonstrate that the swarm-based algorithms detect vulnerabilities significantly faster than the linear algorithms. The presented findings support the case that autonomous and swarm-based penetration testing in a network could be used to render more secure IoT networks in the future. This approach can affect private households with smart home networks, settings within the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), and military environments.