Summary
Being based on inter-device communication and smooth information sharing, IoT applications allow remote control and access. IoT systems’ security, which incorporates five distinct components, is the first priority. Integrity promotes IoT systems’ security by preventing unauthorized manipulations during data transmission, whereas confidentiality involves the instrumentalization of data encryption techniques to eliminate privacy violations. Any secure IoT application must also demonstrate availability to make sure that the authorized users have easy access to the system, while the absence of rights makes data use impossible. Another basic security characteristic, authentication, is required to introduce adequate and effective device identity confirmation processes, thus blocking suspicious IoT devices as early as possible. Access control features ensure consistency between the authenticated devices’ prescribed rights and actual opportunities in accessing information. Together, the five basic security requirements create a process in which security is maintained despite adding and utilizing new nodes.
Component 1: Confidentiality
In IoT applications, confidentiality issues might take place in diverse system layers, including service composition and user interface. The absence of confidentiality-enhancing techniques applied to data transmission in IoT networks, for instance, symmetric and asymmetric data encryption strategies or device authentication, generates valuable opportunities for adverse parties, enabling them to compromise data owners’ privacy. IoT system architects can select and incorporate suitable encryption algorithms, including DES, AES, 3DES, and other options to maintain confidentiality. Therefore, this security component’s presence ensures risk-free data transmission while also maximizing protections for the owners of information assets.
Component 2: Integrity
Integrity refers to the IoT system’s ability to assure and maintain the transmitted data’s completeness, accuracy, and lack of distortion. Therefore, an IoT network demonstrates this component if it is guaranteed that none of the components of received data have been manipulated or altered during the transmission stage. The modern means of addressing this specific security threat affecting IoT include diverse integrity-checking protocols based on parity bits, blockchain, and big data, and protocol selection decisions are made individually and with a specific system in mind. Thus, similarly to the previous component, integrity is concerned with secure data transmission in the IoT.
Component 3: Authentication
The authentication component involves the IoT system’s ability to verify users’ and devices’ identities before guaranteeing access to information from individual devices or the right to operate such devices remotely in group tasks. In this dimension, security can be achieved through various methods, for instance, one-way, two-way, and three-way authentication processes that involve the parties verifying each other or using another central authority’s assistance. Depending on the system’s characteristics, IoT system designers can prefer distributed or centralized authentication approaches.
Component 4: Access Control
In multi-component IoT systems with their internal hierarchies, it is pivotal to maintain order through access control features. This security requirement involves preventing authorized users or nodes from accessing any parts of the system that they should not be able to view or control. IoT systems can incorporate sets of permissions for specific connected devices to produce detailed access control lists that specify users and the range of operations they can perform.
Component 5: Availability
The final requirement, availability, involves making sure that the system is widely available for users that have the right to access it. From the considerations of security, availability should, however, be limited in a way to eliminate the risks of unapproved access. One issue that increasingly available IoT applications should address is the situation in which one node’s or channel’s failure severely affects the range of functions that authorized IoT users are allowed to access.