Analysing the Resilience of the Internet of Things Against Physical and Proximity Attacks

The Internet of Things (IoT) technology is being widely integrated in many areas like smart-homes, smart-cities, healthcare, and critical infrastructures. As shown by some recent incidents, like the Mirai and BrickerBot botnets, security is a key issue for current and future IoT systems. In this paper, we examine the security of different categories of IoT devices to understand their resilience under different security conditions for attackers. In particular, we analyse IoT robustness against attacks performed under two threat models, namely (i) physical access of the attacker, (ii) close proximity of the attacker (i.e., RFID and WiFi ranges). We discuss the results of the tests we performed on different categories of IoT devices, namely IP cameras, OFo bike locks, RFID-based smart-locks, and smart-home WiFi routers. The results show that most of IoT devices do not address basic vulnerabilities, which can be exploitable under different threat models.