Grant: Alliance Grants

The widespread adoption of autonomous Internet of Things (IoT) devices, strongly coupled with the increasing power of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, has brought many revolutionary changes in our lives. This digital transformation has also been rapidly changing the cybersecurity landscape. For instance, today's large-scale IoT systems reportedly suffer from various implementation flaws and misconfigurations, and adversaries frequently exploit those vulnerabilities to craft sophisticated and powerful cyberattacks. As a result, the security of those systems is often compromised, and the safety of citizens is endangered. To that end, security monitoring is known to be an effective solution to enable various security applications to detect, prevent, and mitigate cyberattacks. However, security monitoring for IoT devices faces several unique challenges. First, automatically collecting telemetry data from a large-scale IoT deployment is a non-trivial task. Second, available telemetry data in current IoT products is typically not intended for specific cybersecurity purposes (including security monitoring). Third, monitoring remotely located IoT devices becomes uniquely non-trivial in the absence of any human operator. Finally, adversaries in IoT are strengthening attack vectors by utilizing the power of AI to defeat typical rule-based security monitoring methods. The proposed research project aims at addressing these challenges and providing a novel security monitoring framework for IoT. Upon successful completion of the project, we anticipate the following outcomes: (i) an autonomous security solution that will reduce human intervention and fit more with the design of IoT devices; (ii) practical implementation and rigorous evaluation of the proposed solution to prepare it for potential commercialization through the help of an industrial partner (Sunphinx Inc.) as well as for realization in defence applications with the help of a federal partner (DRDC); (iii) adoption plan to enable security monitoring for IoT environments in Canada; and (iv) HQPs trained with demanding skillsets of IoT security for the Canadian market.