Research pick: IoT security in a smart city - "Attack resistance-based topology robustness of scale-free internet of things for smart cities"

Can we build smart cities that utilise a network of Internet of Things (IoT) devices that are interconnected and protected in such a way that they can resist malicious attacks from third parties? Writing in the International Journal of Web and Grid Services, an international team looks at how topology can be used to make a robust scale-free system with attack resistance.

The researchers suggest that the emergence of the IoT has led to an exponential increase in devices and applications running on them that leaves many systems vulnerable to attack where unwitting users and even those running such systems are unaware of the exploits and loopholes at a single point that might be used to gain access or disrupt whole networks and systems. The team has looked at how Enhanced Angle Sum Operation ROSE (EASO-ROSE), Enhanced ROSE, Adaptive Genetic Algorithm (AGA), and Cluster Adaptive Genetic Algorithm (CAGA) might be used as protection at the scale-free smart city level of the IoT.

Given that many aspects of the IoT are critical components in healthcare, industry, transport, and defence, there is an ongoing and pressing need to ensure they are protected in a robust way against attack. Indeed, failure at a power station or hospital could be life threatening, for instance. The problem is that IoT networks have myriad components and absorb, generate, and process vast amounts of data. Coupled with multiple input and output points there are many ways in which they might be attacked. In addition, the reduction in complexity of utilizing a scale-free system in preference to a small-world model for networking at once adds to the security concerns as well as making them more resilient in some ways.

The team has simulated a smart city and assessed two models of protection. Each has its pros and cons, as one would expect. The team shows that their proposed Enhanced ROSE and EASO-ROSE outperform conventional ROSE and simulating annealing. The CAGA and AGA approaches in turn perform better than conventional simulating annealing and hill-climbing approaches in terms of results. They work by guiding the system topology towards a global optimal solution.

Qureshi, T.N., Javaid, N., Almogren, A., Abubaker, Z., Almajed, H. and Mohiuddin, I. (2021) ‘Attack resistance-based topology robustness of scale-free internet of things for smart cities’, Int. J. Web and Grid Services, Vol. 17, No. 4, pp.343–370.