IoT Vulnerability Assessment for Sustainable Computing: Threats, Current Solutions, and Open Challenges

Abstract

Over the last few decades, sustainable computing has been widely used in areas like social computing, artificial intelligence-based agent systems, mobile computing, and Internet of Things (IoT). There are social, economic, and commercial impacts of IoT on human lives. However, IoT nodes are generally power-constrained with data transmission using an open channel, i.e., Internet which opens the gates for various types of attacks on them. In this context, several efforts are initiated to deal with the evolving security issues in IoT systems and make them self-sufficient to harvest energy for smooth functioning. Motivated by these facts, in this paper, we explore the evolving vulnerabilities in IoT devices. We provide a state-of-the-art survey that addresses multiple dimensions of the IoT realm. Moreover, we provide a general overview of IoT, Sustainable IoT, its architecture, and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) protocol suite. Subsequently, we explore the open-source tools and datasets for the proliferation in research and growth of IoT. A detailed taxonomy of attacks associated with various vulnerabilities is also presented in the text. Then we have specifically focused on the IoT Vulnerability Assessment techniques followed by a case study on sustainability of Smart Agriculture. Finally, this paper outlines the emerging challenges related to IoT and its sustainability, and opening the doors for the beginners to start research in this promising area.

Industrial IoT, Cyber Threats, and Standards Landscape: Evaluation and Roadmap

“…[ 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 ]. The authors relate these concerns to the IIoT/I4.0 domain and highlight how these unresolved issues [ 12 , 13 ] leave the industrial environment susceptible to security breaches.…”

Internet of Things: Evolution, Concerns and Security Challenges

“…Colakovic et al [ 4 ] detailed the vision towards IoT along with various technologies used at different levels. Moreover, the survey conducted in [ 1 , 5 ] also introduces these technologies.…”

“…DoS attack: In this attack, the intruder pretends to be an authenticated user to disrupt the normal functioning of the network. It is accomplished by flooding the authenticated user to trigger a crash [ 5 ].…”

“…The exponential growth and integration of IoT with other technologies have provided a bigger attack surface to play with [ 4 , 5 ]. Moreover, it is challenging to maintain the security requirements of an IoT system due to the very nature of IoT nodes in terms of scarce resources and unattended environments [ 6 ].…”

A systematic survey on internet of things: Energy efficiency and interoperability perspective

“…QoS levels increase the reliability but the energy consumption and the bandwidth also increases as well. Both CoAP and MQTT is based on the IEEE 802.11 mesh network 74 . CoAP is operated over UDP and MQTT runs over TCP.…”