Towards Adaptive Cybersecurity for Green IoT

The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm has led to an explosion in the number of IoT devices and an exponential rise in carbon footprint incurred by overburdened IoT networks and pervasive cloud/edge communications. Hence, there is a growing interest in industry and academia to enable the efficient use of computing infrastructures by optimizing the management of data center and IoT resources (hardware, software, network, and data) and reducing operational costs to slash greenhouse gas emissions and create healthy environments. Cybersecurity has also been considered in such efforts as a contributor to these environmental issues. Nonetheless, most green security approaches focus on designing low-overhead encryption schemes and do not emphasize energy-efficient security from architectural and deployment viewpoints. This paper sheds light on the emerging paradigm of adaptive cybersecurity as one of the research directions to support sustainable computing in green IoT. It presents three potential research directions and their associated methods for designing and deploying adaptive security in green computing and resource-constrained IoT environments to save on energy consumption. Such efforts will transform the development of data-driven IoT security solutions to be greener and more environment-friendly.