A Novel Approach for Security Situational Awareness in the Internet of Things

Abstract: Internet of Things (IoT) is characterized by various of heterogeneous devices and facing numerous threats. Modeling security of IoT is still a certain challenge. This paper defines a Stochastic Colored Petri Net (SCPN) for IoT-based smart environment and then proposes a Markov Game model for security situational awareness (SSA) in the defined SCPN. All possible attack paths are computed by the SCPN, and antagonistic behavior of both attackers and defenders are taken into consideration dynamically according to Game Theory. Two attack scenarios in smart home environment are taken into consideration to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model. The proposed model can form a macroscopic trend curve of security situation. Analysis of the results shows the capabilities of the proposed model in finding vulnerable devices and potential attack paths, and even mitigating the impact of attacks. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to establish a dynamic SSA model for a complex IoT-based smart environment.