# A Security Framework for the Internet of Things in the Future Internet Architecture
## 3 General Security Analysis of IoT Systems  
The IoT extends the Internet to the physical world and thus poses many new security and privacy challenges. Some of the problems are due to the intrinsic characteristics of the IoT and its differences compared to traditional networks, while others arise as a result of the integration of the IoT and the Internet. As shown in Figure 2, various adversaries may come in at different points to attack IoT systems. To protect against those attacks, it is important to examine the security problems according to the information flows and potential adversarial points of control. Below, we outline four security and privacy problems:  
Figure 1: Legacy Internet of Things (IoT) architectures: (**a**) Silo architecture of standalone IoT systems. (**b**) The overlay-based IoT architecture connects standalone IoT systems with the IoT server through standardized APIs on the IoT gateways. * **Authentication and physical threats**: highly distributed deployments of a large number of IoT devices, such as RFID tags and wireless sensors, will generally be deployed in public areas without any protection, which makes the devices difficult to manage and vulnerable to physical attacks. For example, an illegitimate sensor may register itself claiming that it is at one location while it is actually at a different location. Or a sensor installed in a room monitoring the room temperature is moved to another room by a malicious person. This introduces the challenge of authenticating IoT devices, which involves recognizing the device and verifying its association with a correct topological address. * **Integrity**: the unattended environment for IoT devices also makes data integrity a concern. Once deployed, most of these devices will operate in a self-supported manner. As with very limited maintenance or even no maintenance, tampering data is a much easier task than in a supervised wired network. Further, as a result of a natural loss of calibration or a deliberate perturbation of the measurement environment by an attacker, the data collected by IoT devices is quite likely to have low quality and might be corrupted at the environmental level. In short, IoT data may be noisy and easy to spoof and forge. * **Confidentiality**: the communication method between devices and the gateway is primarily wireless, which results in confidentiality risks. For example, eavesdropping is a major concern in wireless networks. Unfortunately, unlike many other wireless environments, such as cellular and Wi-Fi networks, it is difficult for IoT networks to provide confidentiality for data transmission due to the resource-constrained nature of low-end devices, which are a large fraction of IoT devices [30]. Different from typical devices in traditional wired and wireless networks, such as smartphones, tablets, PCs and routers, most of the devices in future IoT networks are active sensors or passive RFID tags, which have very limited resources and capabilities. Constraints on power, computational capability, storage and other aspects of an IoT device introduce a high barrier for it to perform the necessary operations to achieve data confidentiality, such as through encryption and key management. * **Privacy**: as an existing public concern for monitoring and interacting with the real world, the consequence of information leakage in local IoT networks becomes exacerbated when integrated into the global Internet. By connecting real world objects and information through the Internet, data may become accessible to various organizations and domains across the Internet, instead of only being revealed to a small group, which makes it more likely to be exposed to sophisticated malicious parties and therefore increases the probability of being exploited and attacked. Figure 2: Potential threats for the IoT systems. Conventional security and privacy techniques are not necessarily appropriate for the IoT due to the special characteristics of the IoT.