Threat Modelling: A Study of Cybersecurity Threats in Smart Home Systems

Abstract

Nowadays the Internet of things has many applications that make the devices involved in these applications vulnerable and need more security measures. Threat modelling is the first step that allow researchers identify risks and vulnerabilities in any system at early stages. One of the most important aspects in IoT is the smart home environment which make life much easier for the people because of the services it provides. However, security issue is a hot topic when it come to new technologies like smart homes. The aim of this project is modelling threats and identifying them to help developers and designers recognize the most vulnerable components in particular system. We specify set of rules and relations to define a threat model in order to compute the final states for each component. Then these rules and relations are applied in real life scenarios to illustrate how a secure component could get affected by other components if a malicious event occurred. Finally, we have developed a console-based tool and validated it with the created scenarios.