IoT Vulnerability Scanning: A State of the Art

Abstract

Our modern life becomes more and more dependent on technology and services provided through an increasing number of deployed devices "Things" which are connected over networks that can sometimes be accessed remotely via the Internet. Although this Internet of Things (IoT) has led to innovations and improvements to our way of life, it has created many issues, especially related to cybersecurity. Ensuring the security of the IoT ecosystem can be achieved using pro-active security processes, including vulnerability scanning. In this paper, we capture the state of the art of the process that is IoT vulnerability scanning to determine its popularity and maturity. We have captured the different motivations for vulnerability scanning, the scanning space, process, and faced challenges. A Systematic Literature Review (SLR) has been conducted to achieve this goal, and the results are presented hereof. Moreover, we conducted a group of experiments to assess the status of IoT services and their associated vulnerabilities in the Nordic countries and found that additional work is needed to improve the security of the IoT ecosystem.