Demonstrating the Effect of Insider Attacks on Perception Layer of Internet of Things (IoT) Systems

Abstract

A lot of fascinating capabilities are being presented by the Internet of Things (IoT) since its inception, which has made and still makes it gather so much interest. As a result, it is being deployed in many domains and particularly in modern computation and intelligent processing demand in businesses and government organizations. Nevertheless, the IoT system has become susceptible to different physical and cyberattacks due to its widespread applications, including the insider threat which can be significantly damaging and harmful. In this work, we demonstrate the effects insider attack could have on an IoT system. We built a working IoT system prototype to measure and send environmental temperature data to an IoT platform over The Things Network gateway using LoRaWAN. We set up our experiments both indoors and outdoors and conducted successful insider attacks on the IoT system without tampering with the system components. The results show that insider threats have significant and overreaching effect on IoT system, which justifies the need to focus research on protecting the system from attacks by insiders at the perception layer, which are often successful, affect the integrity of entire system data and can be highly destructive.