IoT Security and Privacy Issues in Modern Computing Systems Report

This report, authored by Manoj Goriga for ITC595 at Charles Sturt University, provides a comprehensive overview of the security and privacy issues plaguing the Internet of Things (IoT). The report begins by highlighting the rapid growth of IoT devices and the corresponding increase in security vulnerabilities. It explores relevant technologies like Wi-Fi Direct, LTE-A, RFID, and NFC, and their applications in smart cities and buildings. The core of the report focuses on the challenges of scalability, self-organizing capabilities, data volumes, data interpretation, and the risks of theft, damage, and cyberattacks. It emphasizes the need for robust security measures to maintain data integrity, communication confidentiality, and financial transaction security. The report also discusses future research directions, including the integration of IoT with cloud and distributed computing to improve data processing, rapid integration, and deployment costs. The author concludes by emphasizing the potential of IoT to revolutionize digital technology, while acknowledging that security and privacy are critical issues that must be addressed before widespread commercialization.

SECURITY AND PRIVACY ISSUES IN
INTERNET OF THINGS
Manoj Goriga
11639345
ITC595 MIT, School of Computing & Mathematics, Charles Sturt University
[e-mail]
ABSTRACT – The number of IoT devices has already
exceeded the amount of human beings living in today’s
world and it is estimated that there would be around 26
billion to 50 million IoT devices by the year of 2020 (Sadeghi,
Wachsmann, & Waidner, 2015). But along with the growth of
the IoT technology the security and the privacy issues is also
growing at a much faster rate this happens generally due to
the fact that even after assuming that everything is same the
number of communication channels in the network increases
at a much faster rate than the number of nodes. And due to
the heterogeneity of the computer networks various security
challenges are induced. Besides this the IoT devices and
sensors are located everywhere and are exposed to theft,
malicious damage and intrusion. It is possible for the vicious
attackers to access the device physically and find out more
vulnerabilities. The IoT devices are also battery driven and
are fault-prone systems having a low processing power and
memory. The amount of data gathered is increasing data by
day thereby increasing the issue related to storage of the
data (Gubbi et al., 2013). Despite of the protection of the
private data by means of anonymization while dissemination
of the data, there might occur a station when an unpredicted
combination of seemingly non important data is used from
different sources can create a unique identifier. And this
might result in breach of privacy. Another major threat is the
cyber-attack which has greatly threatened the IoT
technology.
Keywords— security issues of IoT, IoT and privacy isues of
IoT
INTRODUCTION
Internet of Things or IoT is an emerging technology which is
being used in almost each and every field. There exists various
benefits of using the IoT but there exists various challenges.
Understanding the security and the privacy challenges can
greatly help in avoiding the various challenges.
A. Research Problem
In this assessment, information about Iot technologies has
been provided. The report of the research project discusses
about the overview of the IoT technology. The relevant
applications and technologies of Iot has been provided in the
report. The problems and challenges that the mentioned
technology faces has been discussed and evaluated. The issues
that has not been addressed in the literature has also been
mentioned. The future research directions of the mentioned
technology has been discussed and evaluated.
B. Research Justification
Although a number of research papers have been initially
released to address the security and privacy issues of IoT, this
paper is particularly justified as it researches around the
security and privacy issues of IoT that are current and up to
date. The project can be applied to help researchers and
students who want information about the latest technologies
and applications of IoT and what challenges this technology is
facing.
LITERATURE REVIEW
Relevant technologies and applications of those
technologies
The Technologies that are involved in IoT consists of
standard networking technologies and protocols. WiFi Direct,
LTE-A, low energy protocols, low energy wireless, low energy
Bluetooth, NFC and RFID are some of the major protocols and
technologies that are used in Iot devices. Instead of a common
network system, these technologies support the IoT’s
particular networking functionality.
Wi-Fi Direct
This technology is different from normal Wi-Fi as it comes
with lower latency. Wi-Fi Direct permits connections from
peer to peer and reduces the want of the connected devices
for a point of access. The speed is similar to that of a Wi-Fi.
The technology does not compromise on its throughput or
speed by eliminating the only variable that bogs down its
network (Mukhopadhyay & Suryadevara, 2014).
LTE-A
This technology is similar to the above mentioned
technology. LTE- Advanced or LTE-A not only increases the
coverage that is provided by normal LTE but also increases its
throughput and decreases its latency. The devices that are
used for IoTs utilize the feature of LTE-A (increased range) for
various applications such as UAV and vehicles.
Radio Protocols
To create private area networks (low rate) with various IoT
devices, certain radio protocols are used such as Thread, Z-
Wave and ZigBee. The advantage of using this technology in
IoT is that it provides high throughput with low power.
Without increased costs, this provides the local small devices
with increased power.
RFID and NFC
Near field communication or NFC and radio frequency
identification or RFID are two technologies that provides
multiple options for identity, low energy and simplistic design.

It also allows other benefits such as payments, connection
bootstrapping and accessing tokens.
Some applications of the technology are written as follows:-
Smart cities- Development of smart projects in Dubai,
Tokyo, New York ad Seoul has facilitated the rise of IoTs in
these smart cities. Special agreement from the governments
and careful planning is required to implement the uses of IoTs
in every aspect of our lives. The IoTs can be used for various
applications in the cities such as more engagement with the
community, keeping the citizens safe, decrease traffic
congestion, enhance the transportation and improve the
infrastructures (Wortmann & Flüchter, 2015). With time, the
cities will become smarter with IoT devices due as they can
track the transportation system in real time, monitor the
weather conditions and healthcare systems.
Smart buildings- WiFi systems are adopted in buildings and
homes to avoid the networked nature of the rest of the
appliances. IoTs can be used here to develop platforms that
can integrate wireless sensors in the home environment,
monitor energy, monitor healthcare and automate the
entertainment system of the house (Skarmeta & Moreno,
2013). Moreover, the IoTs can be used to perform other
applications such as energy security and management, central
heating and air control, smart media and environment and
smart lightning.
The problems and challenges that are faced due to IoT are
written as follows:-
Scalability- Unlike conventional internet system where
computers are interlinked, Internet of Things is a different
concept as it involves integration with the open environment.
The devices need to perform their basic functionalities such as
service discovery and communication to perform efficiently in
both large as well as small scale environments (Gubbi et al.
2013). For attaining efficient scalability operations, new
methods and functions are required for IoTs.
Self-Organizing- The usage of IoT devices diminish the need
for configuring each and every system individually to adapt
with a particular environment. The IoT devices need to
spontaneously establish connection and organize themselves
accordingly to suit with the present environment.
Data Volumes- The usage of Internet of Things will require
gathering of huge amounts of data from various sensors for
creating large scale networks and logistics. These data needs
to be collected in network servers and nodes (Skarmeta &
Moreno, 2013). If the data from IoTs is not integrated with
other data processing technology such as Big Data it can cause
a huge problem for the proliferation of the technology.
Data interpretation- The need to determine the information
from the sensors as accurately as possible is a major challenge
for the IoT devices (Cui, 2016). The disparate data will be likely
used by service providers for profitability but steps need to be
taken so that the general conclusions that are analyzed from
the sensor data are efficient.
Theft and damage issues- To incorporate the physical
environment with the virtual environment, the number of Iot
devices is increasing rapidly. From thermostats, internal room
temperature control, automated robots and autonomous
house cleaning robots, the number of Iot devices brings an
increased potential of the devices being stolen or damaged
(Whitmore, Agarwal & Da Xu, 2015). To prevent these many
Iot devices are programmed with GPS chips to prevent this
issue from occurring but still a lot of devices in the industry are
potentially vulnerable.
Low memory, more battery and processing power- Most of
the IoT devices that are launched nowadays are normally low
powered to make them last longer in functionality. With
lithium ion batteries taking the latest strides towards power
innovation, the future of Iot is secure. But with the rise in
processing power, the battery consumption power of the
devices are increasingly parallel (Mulani & Pingle, 2016). The
memory space of the devices are increasing as per the
innovation. In the future, the increased number of sensors will
require powerful processors and more memory space which is
a makor challenge for Iot to address
Cyber-attack and security- With the rise in cyber security in
the present decade, protection and security aspects of IoT
devices has gained a lot of traction. The main challenge of the
IoT devices is to maintain the trustworthiness of the
community, message integrity, communication authenticity
and communication confidentiality. To avoid the competitors,
the Iot devices will need to enhance the capability of
communicating with other devices securely considering the
heterogeneity of a number of protocols that these device use.
Maintaining the financial and business transaction securely is
also a major challenge that IoT needs to resolve.
The report fails to address several other gaps and
challenges of IoT such as automatic discovery, fault tolerance
and software complexity. The services that are incorporated
for Iot devices need to automatically identify their respective
services in the dynamic environment. This requires a mean of
describing their functionality which needs appropriate
semantics. This is a major challenge for IoT (Chandrakanth et
al. 2014). Moreover, as the Iot devices are more mobile and
dynamic they can adapt in unprecedented ways unlike
internet computers. To make them adjust in a trustworthy
manner, a redundancy mechanism needs to be adjusted in the
Iot devices. To address the software complexity challenge, the
Iot needs an extensive infrastructure to maintain these smart
devices so that they can function properly with minimal
resources.
According to me, despite of the mentioned challenges and
issues, the technology still has a lot of potential to change the
present landscape of digital technology. Just like the internet
and block chain, this technology has the capability to bring an
entire revolution to modern civilization. The integration of the
physical environment with the virtual environment will bring
unprecedented advantages that we humans have not thought
of before. The only thing I agree with is the security and
confidentiality issue which is the only serious challenge that
the technology has to address before it can be commercialized
safely. But any other major technologies, I am sure that in the
future, a relevant solution to this solution will be explored.
PROPOSED DESIGN
Iot and cloud have widely evolved in the past decade
simultaneously. Although their worlds are vastly different,
there technologies actually complement both of these
technologies simultaneously. Iot can gain a lot of benefits from
the storage capacity and benefits that cloud computing
provides for example enhanced communication, processing
and storage IoT composition for putting extra services and
applications to exploit data as well as service management will
be possible with the integration of cloud with IoT (Sadeghi,
Wachsmann & Waidner, 2015). It will provide Iot with the
added benefit of working in a dynamic as well as distributed
way. The intermediate layer between the Iot and its

applications can be merged in the future with the help of
cloud. In multi cloud as well as fog environment, information
transmission, processing and gathering will provide new
challenges. The future research directions of Iot with cloud is
evident as cloud will allow data processing and collection,
rapid integration and setup as well as low cost for data
processing complex in nature and low deployment cost.
Another future research direction is distributed computing.
For the same computational objective, a number of networked
computer are used which is known as distributed computing.
This is different from parallel and concurrent computing. Most
of the distributed computing technologies are incorporated
with utility and autonomic computing, architecture which are
service oriented and hardware virtualization (Zanella et al.,
2015) Iot devices can make use of this technologies to
embrace the real world aspects as the physical objects are
linked with the virtual world allowing for remote control.
The third research direction is with big data. As the volume
of data from the sensors of Iot increases, big data technology
will be needed in the future to analyze the data and turn them
into real information so that they can be applied conclusively
in the physical world (Zanella et al., 2014) . The big data will
also allow the IoT devices to collect information from weather
forecasts, social media and other data analytics softwares to
increase the IoT’s operations and interoperability.
CONCLUSION
To conclude the report, it can be stated that several
applications of Iot technology has been mentioned
conclusively in the report. The relevant technologies of the Iot
has been mentioned and discussed effectively. Several
challenges and issues of the proposed technology has been
mentioned and some minor methods to prevent the issues has
been mentioned in the discussion part. The report also
discusses the gaps that the report has not mentioned and
accordingly proposes the research direction of the mentioned
technology.
Iot has a lot of potential in the future. With its present
impact on the community and the potential that these
technology has with the modern digital revolution, the future
looks bright for this technology. Although the technology faces
a lot of issues and challenges that it needs to address, it is
quite evident with that with the rise in digital evolution, the
challenges and issues can be mitigated and the technology will
be widely welcomed by the future generation.in this section.
REFERENCES
Al-Fuqaha, A., Guizani, M., Mohammadi, M., Aledhari, M., &
Ayyash, M. (2015). Internet of things: A survey on enabling
technologies, protocols, and applications. IEEE Communications
Surveys & Tutorials, 17(4), 2347-2376.
Chandrakanth, S., Venkatesh, K., Uma Mahesh, J., &
Naganjaneyulu, K. V. (2014). Internet of things. International
Journal of Innovations & Advancement in Computer Science,
3(8), 16-20.
Cui, X. (2016). The internet of things. In Ethical Ripples of
Creativity and Innovation (pp. 61-68). Palgrave Macmillan,
London.
Gubbi, J., Buyya, R., Marusic, S., & Palaniswami, M. (2013).
Internet of Things (IoT): A vision, architectural elements, and
future directions. Future generation computer systems, 29(7),
1645-1660.
Mukhopadhyay, S. C., & Suryadevara, N. K. (2014). Internet
of things: Challenges and opportunities. In Internet of Things
(pp. 1-17). Springer, Cham.
Mulani, T. T., & Pingle, S. V. (2016). Internet of things.
International Research Journal of Multidisciplinary Studies,
2(3).
Sadeghi, A. R., Wachsmann, C., & Waidner, M. (2015, June).
Security and privacy challenges in industrial internet of things.
In Proceedings of the 52nd annual design automation
conference (p. 54). ACM.
Skarmeta, A., & Moreno, M. V. (2013, August). Internet of
things. In Workshop on Secure Data Management (pp. 48-53).
Springer, Cham.
Whitmore, A., Agarwal, A., & Da Xu, L. (2015). The Internet
of Things—A survey of topics and trends. Information Systems
Frontiers, 17(2), 261-274.
Wortmann, F., & Flüchter, K. (2015). Internet of things.
Business & Information Systems Engineering, 57(3), 221-224.
Zanella, A., Bui, N., Castellani, A., Vangelista, L., & Zorzi, M.
(2014). Internet of things for smart cities. IEEE Internet of
Things journal, 1(1), 22-32.