SHIELD: Secure holistic IoT environment with ledger-based defense

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a technology paradigm that has transformed several domains including manufacturing, agriculture, healthcare, power grids, travel, and retail. Despite the enormous advantages that IoT offers to organizations and transforming individuals’ everyday lives in a wide range of domains, it comes with potential cyber risks that can negatively impact, harm, or damage them. Security is the most challenging issue in IoT systems due to insecure devices, inadequate IDMS, lack of data security and privacy, lack of trust, lack of risk analysis on network traffic, various vulnerabilities and attacks, lack of physical security, and many other risk factors. Although several security architectures have been developed, they fail to properly and fully address these IoT security challenges and an urgent demand awaits for a robust IoT security architecture. Thus, this work investigates state-of-the-art solutions and proposes a holistic novel IoT security architecture called SHIELD: Secure Holistic IoT Environment with Ledger-based Defense with core security capabilities of decentralized Identity Management System (IDMS), Network Traffic Monitoring, Analysis, and dataset generation, deep learning-based Intrusion Detection System (IDS), and Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT)-based Trust Management System (TMS). The proposed architecture is qualitatively compared with existing solutions using key features like a single point of failure, risk/attack-aware, trust, real-time traffic behavior monitoring, up-to-date dataset, cross-platform functionality, and availability among others. As a result of this comparison, SHIELD architecture provides a holistic and robust solution with multiple core security features to overcome some of the key security challenges IoT environment.