Internet of Things A to Z

8Security Mechanisms and Technologies for Constrained IoT Devices

Marco Tiloca and Shahid Raza

RISE SICS Security Lab, Kista, Stockholm, Sweden

8.1 Introduction

The Internet of Things (IoT) emerging paradigm is commonly identified as the growing information technology trend toward a pervasive network society where all devices that can benefit from a connection will be connected with one another. This means that, in addition to traditional commodity devices and PCs, all kinds of electronic equipments that can benefit from a connection are expected to be available and accessible online.

In such a massively interconnected scenario, security has been immediately acknowledged as a dramatically important requirement to fulfill. On one hand, the well-known security threats, vulnerabilities, and attacks from traditional Information Technology (IT) systems are naturally inherited. This is why communication and management protocols proposed and adopted in the IoT already provide a number of basic fundamental security services. On the other hand, many additional security attack vectors are enabled against easier to target IoT devices, essentially because of two main reasons.

First of all, the long-term IoT vision assumes that the majority of devices are going to be directly connected to the Internet, in order to be directly accessible. This also makes them directly exposed to several kinds of security attacks, especially denial-of-service (DoS), that would be otherwise more difficult ...