The emerging IoT (Internet of Things) paradigm aims to connect all kinds of different physical objects together and make them accessible from the Internet, with advanced sensing, actuation, communications, and networking technologies. IoT systems vary in type, scale, and function. They range from Internet of Vehicles, to Industrial Internet of Things, to Internet of Battlefield Things and Internet of Medical Things. Gartner predicts that tens of billions of IoT devices will be in use in the near future. Many low-cost IoT devices have little processing power or storage capacity, resulting in poor built-in security capabilities. This allows these devices to be used as ingress points to access the broader IT or critical infrastructure. Because of the expanded attack surface, IoT security and privacy has become a pressing issue. Every threat against the IoT may constitute a more severe threat to the IT or critical infrastructure behind the IoT. Thus, it is imperative to study and understand the security and privacy risks related to IoT and to propose innovative solutions to deal with these risks.
This special issue received 16 submitted manuscripts, out of which 7 papers have been accepted for publication. The editors would like to thank the authors of all papers for their submissions and special thanks go to the reviewers for their help in allowing us to complete the reviews and decisions in a timely fashion. The papers in this special issue will report research advances in IoT Security and Privacy in the following two aspects:
Algorithms and Protocols; Systems and Applications.
IoT Security and Privacy – Algorithms and Protocols: This section includes three papers that overview the IoT security and privacy research, and propose new security and privacy algorithms and protocols for IoT networks and wireless sensor networks in general. The first paper “On the Security Aspects of Internet of Things: A Systematic Literature Review” by Evandro Macedo et al. performs a systematic and comprehensive review on research in the following four security aspects of the IoT: authentication, access control, data protection, and trust, and then identifies open issues and challenges that provide a useful guidance for future research studies in this area. Next, the paper “Sentinel Based Malicious Relay Detection in Wireless IoT Networks” by Anshoo Tandon et al. designs an effective and practical scheme to protect wireless IoT networks from data integrity and selective forwarding attacks launched by malicious relays. Finally, the paper “Security Cooperation Model Based on Topology Control and Time Synchronization for Wireless Sensor Networks” by Zhaobin Liu et al. presents a security collaboration model between wireless sensor and IoT nodes, based on topology control and time synchronization.
IoT Security and Privacy – Systems and Applications: This section selects four papers that develop new security and privacy techniques for various practical IoT systems and applications. The first two papers discuss how UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) may be used to enhance the security and privacy performance of an IoT system. In particular, the paper “UAV-enabled Friendly Jamming Scheme to Secure Industrial Internet of Things” by Qubeijian Wang et al. proposes to have multiple UAVs emit jamming signals in an intelligent manner, in order to disrupt eavesdropping activities on industrial IoT devices without affecting legitimate communications between these devices. The paper “BUAV: A Blockchain Based Secure UAV-Assisted Data Acquisition Scheme in Internet of Things” by Anik Islam et al. presents a secure data acquisition scheme to transfer data from IoT nodes to the MEC (Mobile Edge Computing) server, based on the blockchain technology and the assistance of a UAV. The next paper “An Intelligent Agriculture Network Security System Based on Private Blockchains” by Hsin-Te Wu et al. also applies the blockchain technology but for a different application, to prevent DDoS (Distributed Denial-of- Service) attacks against intelligent agriculture systems. Finally, the paper “Worth One Minute: An Anonymous Rewarding Platform for Crowd-Sensing Systems” by Lorenz Klopfenstein et al. studies how IoT devices and their users may participate in crowd-sourcing applications while preserving their anonymity, and a general-purpose rewarding system based on anonymous vouchers has been designed and implemented for this purpose.