II-EN: IoT Event Emulation Environment (IoTE^3) based on Cyber-Physical Integration

Iowa State University, Ames IA

Investigators

Abstract

The emerging Internet of Things (IoT) has tremendous potential to allow people to communicate with and remotely control, monitor, and manage an unprecedented multitude of physical devices and systems for applications like healthcare, smart cities, manufacturing, transportation, etc. IoT devices will generate large amounts of information-rich data, and the associated security risks are far beyond what people have previously seen and experienced. Researchers need an IoT research infrastructure that allows them to address the challenges associated with the IoT. IoTE^3 (IoT Event Emulation Environment) is a new research infrastructure proposed for this purpose. It will leverage an existing research platform at Iowa State University (ISU) to support a variety of IoT research, ranging from IoT Informatics to IoT-based Intelligent Physical Systems to IoT Security Attacks and Prevention. It will be freely available to the general public upon completion, so that experimenters can undertake hands-on activities with IoT networking and cyber security. In addition, IoTE^3 will be integrated with ISU's Cyber Defense Competition (CDC) platform, exposing students and faculty to the security challenges specific to the IoT. IoTE^3 will be built upon the existing ISEAGE (Internet Scale Event and Attack Generation Environment), which creates a virtual Internet for the purpose of researching, designing, and testing cyber defense mechanisms. In the controlled ISEAGE environment, real-world events and attacks can be tested against different configurations of the environment, unlike computer-based simulations. Currently, ISEAGE is limited to emulation of events and attacks on the traditional Internet. IoTE^3 is proposed to enhance and expand ISEAGE for IoT research. IoTE^3 provides a unique emulation environment based on the integration of physical and cyber environment that is scalable, flexible and realistic. The physical environment will consist of physical networks of actual IoT devices. Each of these physical IoT networks can host small-scale localized experiments by itself. They also can be connected to the ISEAGE to host larger-scale experiments. The cyber environment will consist of multiple high-end servers (IoT emulators) to host a configurable number of virtual IoT networks. Each virtual network can be configured as either a trace-based emulation to replay IoT traffic captured from the physical environment, or a model-based emulation to generate synthetic traffic based on models learned from the captured IoT traffic. The cyber and physical environments will be connected and interact with each other through ISEAGE.