Connectivity and Security Threats in IoT

Running head: CONNECTIVITY AND SECURITY THREATS IN IOT
CONNECTIVITY AND SECURITY THREATS IN IOT
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CONNECTIVITY AND SECURITY THREATS IN IOT2
Abstract: Owing to the numerous devices
connected to the network it poses a threat to
the security of data and leads to privacy
breaches. With the advent of this technology,
it has become an essential part of lives of
organizations and individuals. The concern is
about the privacy issues and security in the
operations and in the era of data theft is of
highest priority. It is an emerging topic that
how much effective will IoT devices be in
considering the vulnerabilities to the network
Keywords: IoT, Web Interface,
Encryption
I. OVERVIEW OF THE
TECHNOLOGY
The technology of Internet of Things
is a network related to physical objects that
include buildings, devices, vehicles and other
items that are embedded with network
connectivity, electronics, sensors and software.
The electronics embedded systems enable the
objects to collect data and also aid in
exchanging data between different sources.
The concept of IoT is same but has been given
different names by the organizations such as
World Size Web by Bruce Schneier, Internet
of Everything by Cisco Systems and Skynet by
Terminator movie (Granjal, Monteiro & Silva,
2015). Like every other technology, the
Internet of Things has both advantages and
disadvantages. The “always-on” concept of the
technology requires a change in the mindset of
the individuals when products and services are
implemented based on the concept of IoT.
(Borgohain, Kumar & Sanyal, 2015). The
technology behind IoT devices are not
auxiliary services unlike other technologies
that are prevalent in the market for years
instead IoT deals with unique devices and each
device has a specific set of risks related to the
security aspects. In order to handle IoT
devices and prevent security breaches,
appropriate security training is required.
RELEVANT TECHNOLOGIES AND THEIR
APPLICATIONS
The principles of Internet of Things
and the related technologies are associated
with wide impacts on the organizations that
affect the business and risk management
strategies along with the technical areas that
include network design and architecture (Li,
Da & Zhao, 2018). Some of the top evolving
technologies of IoT and their respective
applications are as follows:
 IoT Security- The security principles
of the technology are required to
secure the IoT devices from cyber
attacks and tampering of the data
physically. It involves encrypting the
communications and addressing the
challenges such as denial-of-sleep
attacks that involves draining
batteries. The IoT security is a
complicated technology because it is a
network of processors and numerous
operating systems that may not be
ideal supporters of security
approaches (Tankard, 2015).
 IoT Analytics- The various business
models of IoT will utilize the data
collected by “things” in different
methods that will demand modern
tools and specific algorithms. The
volumes of information increasing
with every passing day, the
requirements of the Internet of Things
may bifurcate further from the
traditional methods of analytics.
 IoT Device Management- The long-
lived “things” require managing and
monitoring that include device
monitoring, diagnostics, firmware and
software updates, crash analysis and
reporting, security management and
physical management. The tools
considered for the purpose must have
the potential to manage and monitor
huge amount of data (Madakam &
Date, 2016).
 IoT Processors- The processors used by
the IoT devices describe their capabilities,
that include their capability of providing
robust security and encryption,
consumption of power and determine how
sophisticated they are to act as a support to
an operating system, embedded device
managing agents and updatable firmware
(Decuir, 2015).
There are several challenging issues that
require to be addressed and amongst them the
main issues are the connectivity and security
threats (Sicari et al., 2015). It is to be
determined how flexible interoperability can
be achieved between the connected devices in

CONNECTIVITY AND SECURITY THREATS IN IOT3
the network and what could be the probable
processes that can help improve the
connectivity.
PROBLEMS RELATED TO IOT
CONNECTIVITY AND SECURITY
Insecure Web Interface
The web interfaces that are built in the
IoT environment are vulnerable to attacks as
the technology not only enables the users to
interact with the devices but at the same time
the attackers also gain access to the networks
(Burg, Chattopadhyay & Lam, 2017). The
vulnerabilities in the security that could be the
possible reasons for the web interface issue
are:
1. Account Enumeration- The user
enumeration is a malicious element
that uses brute-force to confirm the
valid users of a system. It generally
relates to web based application
vulnerability and can be present in
almost any system that opts for user
authentication (Ge et al., 2017). The
common spheres which are prone to
user enumeration are login site page
and the “Forgot password” page.
2. SQL-Injection- This type of injection
is able to hijack the IoT devices and
results in crashing the system. The
SQL injection is about executing
malicious SQL statements that are
capable of controlling a database
server operating behind a web
application. It helps in bypassing the
security measures of the application
(Pal, 2019).
3. Cross-site scripting- It is denoted as
XSS and is a type of vulnerability
associated to computer security that is
found the web applications (Adat &
Gupta, 2018). XSS aids the attackers
to inject scripts from the side of the
client into the web pages that is
viewed by the users of the network.
This is used to bypass the access
controls such as the policy related to
same origin (Roe, 2017).
Authentication Issue in IoT environment
The challenges with respect to
authentication is reduction of the cost of
energy for the process involved in
authentication and it is difficult to deploy
protocols on the authentication process that
needs to be adapted in the environment. The
various network architectures that are based on
IoT notions and thus requires deployment of
authentication schemes in order to secure the
communications (Kraijak & Tuwanut, 2015).
One more hindrance is designing the scheme
related to the authentication that needs to
identify the users according to their devices
without establishing permanent contact in the
parts.
Lack of transport Encryption
The use of SSL that is Secure Socket
layer can help in encrypting the transport
layer. The transport encryption can
successfully be inculcated in IoT networks by
ensuring that data is encrypted properly based
on the protocols such as TLS and Secure
Socket Layer in the process of transiting
networks. It can be checked by using other
standard encryption protocols other than SSL
or TLS. Lack of encryption of the data while
getting transported makes it vulnerable to
attacks as the data can be viewed by third
parties (Mansfield-Devine, 2016). Both
internal and external sources can attack on the
data and disrupt the system. Attackers can be
unknown users and thus it violates large
number of files in a system. Lack of transport
encryption results in loss of data and could
lead to crash of the device and the accounts of
the users.
Privacy Concerns and Confidentiality
The huge volumes of data from the
numerous connected devices serve a huge
challenge to the environment based on the IoT.
The Big data solutions are instrumental in
facing this challenge by providing the IoT
service providers the capability to analyze the
available data and discovering the associated
trends linked to it (Ammar, Russello & Crispo,
2018). The trust issues related to the sharing of
the personal data will be a topic of concern as
customers will not trust the huge database
system on keeping their credentials that are
confidential to them. The connected devices in
the network are able to communicate with the
customers and transmit their data back and
forth from the service providers and can also