Data Integrity: A security threat for Internet of Things and Cyber-Physical Systems

Internet of Things (IoT), is emerging as the most evolving technology and contributing to the critical domain areas from transportation, to manufacturing, to energy, to automation, to space, to defence, to health care. IoT system architecture is an aggregation of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) that include multiple edge nodes like sensors, actuators or devices as primary components of the system. The crucial element in the existence and evolution of IoT is collecting rich and diverse data stream from the application of interest. Information extracted from data inference mostly drives the decisional policies of the cyber-physical system, which govern the functionality of critical application areas. Edge devices play the role of data generator, collector, or integrator of the system. The fact that these edge devices are ubiquitous and placed in easily accessible unsecured locations make then prone to cyber-attacks. The data sourced through these systems being safety-critical and high commercial value, draw the attention of adversary to attempt for cyber attacks unceasingly. This survey paper contributes in terms of identifying the security threats and challenges related to privacy and security of data in the context of IoT systems and CPS. Data tampering and malicious infusion are the prime sources of threats. The paper also outlines the current state of art research to identify and mitigate such data integrity threats and attacks.

I. Introduction

The scope for application of IoT and CPS extends over a vast horizon ranging from micro-scale to large scale. It is a tight integration of various components in a network, and functions as collection, computation, and communication of data collected from the edge devices or nodes.