Security and Machine Learning Adoption in IoT: A Preliminary Study of IoT Developer Discussions
This is an incremental study that identifies specific discussion patterns for IoT developers, informing vendors and researchers on security and ML adoption issues.
The study analyzed IoT developer discussions on Stack Overflow, finding that 12% of sentences involve security topics and 0.12% involve machine learning, with developers facing challenges in implementing ML models on resource-constrained devices.
Internet of Things (IoT) is defined as the connection between places and physical objects (i.e., things) over the internet/network via smart computing devices. Traditionally, we learn about the IoT ecosystem/problems by conducting surveys of IoT developers/practitioners. Another way to learn is by analyzing IoT developer discussions in popular online developer forums like Stack Overflow (SO). However, we are aware of no such studies that focused on IoT developers' security and ML-related discussions in SO. This paper offers the results of preliminary study of IoT developer discussions in SO. We find around 12% of sentences contain security discussions, while around 0.12% sentences contain ML- related discussions. We find that IoT developers discussing security issues frequently inquired about how the shared data can be stored, shared, and transferred securely across IoT devices and users. We also find that IoT developers are interested to adopt deep neural network-based ML models into their IoT devices, but they find it challenging to accommodate those into their resource-constrained IoT devices. Our findings offer implications for IoT vendors and researchers to develop and design novel techniques for improved security and ML adoption into IoT devices.