IoT Sentinel: Automated Device-Type Identification for Security Enforcement in IoT
This addresses security concerns for IoT networks in home and small office settings, offering an incremental improvement by automating device identification and rule enforcement.
The paper tackles the problem of securing IoT networks with vulnerable devices by presenting IoT Sentinel, a system that automatically identifies device types and enforces communication rules to minimize damage from compromises, showing effectiveness with minimal performance overhead.
With the rapid growth of the Internet-of-Things (IoT), concerns about the security of IoT devices have become prominent. Several vendors are producing IP-connected devices for home and small office networks that often suffer from flawed security designs and implementations. They also tend to lack mechanisms for firmware updates or patches that can help eliminate security vulnerabilities. Securing networks where the presence of such vulnerable devices is given, requires a brownfield approach: applying necessary protection measures within the network so that potentially vulnerable devices can coexist without endangering the security of other devices in the same network. In this paper, we present IOT SENTINEL, a system capable of automatically identifying the types of devices being connected to an IoT network and enabling enforcement of rules for constraining the communications of vulnerable devices so as to minimize damage resulting from their compromise. We show that IOT SENTINEL is effective in identifying device types and has minimal performance overhead.