IoT 2 : Security benchmarks for the Internet of Things

Abstract

Attacks against IoT systems are increasing at an alarming pace. Many IoT systems are and will be built using lowcost micro-controllers (IoT-μCs). Different security mechanisms have been proposed for IoT-μCs with different trade-offs. To guarantee a realistic and practical evaluation, the constrained resources of IoT-μCs require that defenses must be evaluated with respect to not only security, but performance, memory, and energy as well. Evaluating security mechanisms for IoT-μCs is limited by the lack of realistic benchmarks and evaluation frameworks. This burdens researchers with the task of developing not only the proposed defenses but applications on which to evaluate them. As a result, security evaluation for IoT-μCs is limited and adhoc. A sound benchmarking suite is essential to enable robust and comparable evaluations of security techniques on IoT-μCs. This paper introduces IoT2, a benchmark suite and evaluation framework to address pressing challenges and limitations for evaluating IoT-μCs security. The evaluation framework enables automatic evaluation of 14 metrics covering security, performance, memory usage, and energy consumption. The IoT2 benchmarks provide a curated set of five real-world IoT applications that cover both IoT-μCs with and without an OS. We demonstrate IoT2 ability by evaluating three defense mechanisms. All benchmarks and the evaluation framework is open sourced and available to the research community.