Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

The Oxford dictionary defines the Internet of Things (IoT) as: “A proposed development of the Internet in which everyday objects have network connectivity, allowing them to send and receive data.” While this technology unleashed huge opportunities to advance and positively impact our daily life, it increases the attack surface on devices we interact with on a daily basis and consequently when used in malicious way, it could hinder our life. In this program, we aim to address the IoT security and trust challenge in two ways: First, we aim at integrating model driven security (MDS) with the design and development of IoT applications. Such integration of the security meta-model with the IoT ecosystem architectural reference meta-models at the design level will ensure that security aspects will be considered at an early stage of development. The proposed integrated model can also be used as a basis for migrating existing IoT applications into security and privacy aware systems. Second, and from an analysis and testing perspective, and similar to previous work in the framework we developed for web applications security analysis [10], we aim at using static and dynamic analysis techniques to recover security models from existing IoT ecosystems, and to use formal verification techniques to verify whether the IoT applications have security vulnerabilities. This research plan will train six Highly Qualified Personnel (HQP): 2 PhD and 4 Master's students. They will gain extensive hands-on experience with MDE, security analysis research techniques, and industry-grade IoT systems, preparing them for a successful academic career or for the demanding role of cybersecurity researchers of large software systems. The IoT sprang to life with a promise of trillion-dollar economic impact, and enhanced quality of service of our everyday life. This program is designed to support the adoption of this technology by helping standardize the efforts in the design and development of security aware IoT ecosystems. The program will also provide required methods and toolsets to test and verify the conformance of IoT solutions to security standards, thus helping industries to verify and improve their products to meet the market expectations. We hope that our program will contribute to provide higher quality IoT products which will positively impact rather than hinder our life and contribute in many ways to Canadians in the age of ubiquitous computing.