Internet of Things based Smart Homes : Security Risk Assessment and Recommendations

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging paradigm focusing on the inter-connection of things or devices to each other and to the users. Over time, the most of connections in IoT are shifting from ‘Human to Thing’ to ‘Thing to Thing’. This technology is anticipated to become an essential milestone in the development of smart homes to bring convenience and efficiency into our lives and our homes. But, by bringing this IoT technology into our homes there will be important implications for security in these technologies. Connecting every smart objects inside the home to the internet and to each other results in new security and privacy problems, e.g., confidentiality, authenticity, and integrity of data sensed and exchanged by objects. These technologies are very much vulnerable to different security attacks that make an IoT-based smart home unsecure to live in and therefore it is necessary to evaluate the security risks to judge the situation of the smart homes. For any technology to be successful and achieve widespread use, it needs to gain the trust of users by providing sufficient security and privacy assurance. As in all sectors, maintaining security will be a critical challenge to overcome. As homes are increasingly computerized and filled with devices, potential computer security attacks and their impact on residents need to be investigated. This report uses OCTAVE Allegro Methodology which focuses mainly on information assets and considers containers (technical, physical and people) and conducts a security risk assessment with the goal of highlighting various security flaws in IoT-based smart home, impacts and proposing countermeasures to the identified issues satisfying most of security requirements. Finally, it comes up with some recommendations to the users. The research findings documented into a thesis paper for secure IoT-based smart home systems and the resulted list and recommendations will be some useful contribution which can be used as a foundation for the specification of security requirements. For future work, the assessment will be extended to include more types of smart home applications rather than just typical one.