Addressing Security and Privacy Challenges in Internet of Things

Abstract: Internet of Things (IoT), also referred to as the Internet of Objects, is envisioned as a holistic and transformative approach for providing numerous services. The rapid development of various communication protocols and miniaturization of transceivers along with recent advances in sensing technologies offer the opportunity to transform isolated devices into communicating smart things. Smart things, that can sense, store, and even process electrical, thermal, optical, chemical, and other signals to extract user-/environment-related information, have enabled services only limited by human imagination. Despite picturesque promises of IoT-enabled systems, the integration of smart things into the standard Internet introduces several security challenges because the majority of Internet technologies, communication protocols, and sensors were not designed to support IoT. Several recent research studies have demonstrated that launching security/privacy attacks against IoT-enabled systems, in particular wearable medical sensor (WMS)-based systems, may lead to catastrophic situations and life-threatening conditions. Therefore, security threats and privacy concerns in the IoT domain need to be proactively studied and aggressively addressed. In this thesis, we tackle several domain-specific security/privacy challenges associated with IoT-enabled systems.