Towards a Visual Grammar for IoT Systems Representation and their Cybersecurity Requirements

In this paper we present progress towards visual iconography (elements) and a grammar for Internet of Things (IoT) system representations and their cybersecurity requirements. Our visual representation of IoT systems aims to facilitate the identification of the IoT attack surface and the vulnerabilities that an attacker may exploit. The paper first outlines the basic visual elements and the associated grammar, which are then applied to a series of smart home IoT use cases to demonstrate how these can be used to represent these networks and their cybersecurity requirements in a visual and intuitive way. The motivation behind this work is to improve our ability to reason about IoT attack surfaces towards improving our defense capabilities for those systems.