An In-Depth Analysis of IoT Security Requirements, Challenges, and Their Countermeasures via Software-Defined Security

Internet of Things (IoT) is transforming everyone's life by providing features, such as controlling and monitoring of the connected smart objects. IoT applications range over a broad spectrum of services including smart cities, homes, cars, manufacturing, e-healthcare, smart control system, transportation, wearables, farming, and much more. The adoption of these devices is growing exponentially, that has resulted in generation of a substantial amount of data for processing and analyzing. Thus, besides bringing ease to the human lives, these devices are susceptible to different threats and security challenges, which do not only worry the users for adopting it in sensitive environments, such as e-health, smart home, etc., but also pose hazards for the advancement of IoT in coming days. This article thoroughly reviews the threats, security requirements, challenges, and the attack vectors pertinent to IoT networks. Based on the gap analysis, a novel paradigm that combines a network-based deployment of IoT architecture through software-defined networking (SDN) is proposed. This article presents an overview of the SDN along with a thorough discussion on SDN-based IoT deployment models, i.e., centralized and decentralized. We further elaborated SDN-based IoT security solutions to present a comprehensive overview of the software-defined security (SDSec) technology. Furthermore, based on the literature, core issues are highlighted that are the main hurdles in unifying all IoT stakeholders on one platform and few findings that emphases on a network-based security solution for IoT paradigm. Finally, some future research directions of SDN-based IoT security technologies are discussed.

I. Introduction

Internet and Web expansion into the physical reality was made possible through various aspects that come under the umbrella of the term widely used, i.e., Internet of Things or IoT, which is an evolving topic of economic, social, and technical importance [1]. The growth of advanced enabling technologies, such as cloud computing, data analytics, IP-based networking, ubiquitous computing etc., has brought IoT into reality; otherwise, the trend of controlling devices by combining sensors, computers, and networks has been in use for decades [2]. The word Internet of Things was first introduced by Ashton et al. in 1999 [3] while talking of a global network of objects connected to RFID in a supply chain application. Since then, IoT is extended to new application areas and a plethora of new technologies have emerged in the IoT domain, such as industry, agriculture, animal farming, transport, healthcare, smart homes, smart retail, supply chain, smart wearables, smart security, etc. Network of Things or NoT is often used interchangeably with IoT [4].