A Survey on Verification of Security and Safety in IoT Systems

Internet of Things (IoT) has been rapidly growing in the past few years in all life disciplines. IoT provides automation and smart control across various domains, including home automation, healthcare, and automotive. Given the tremendous number of connected IoT devices, this growth leads to enormous automatic interactions among sizable IoT apps in their environment, making IoT apps smarter and more interesting to their users. However, unintended interactions and potential malicious behaviors within IoT apps can pose serious security and safety risks, particularly for non-expert users unfamiliar with their IoT automation processes. Therefore, robust verification tools are crucial to ensure these systems are safe and secure. In this light, this paper surveys current tools and approaches designed to verify security and safety properties in IoT systems. Our survey explores program analysis techniques utilized in the current literature to verify IoT applications’ security and safety. Furthermore, our paper introduces classification and categorization attributes that help understand the research landscape within this domain. We conclude by discussing challenges with current verification techniques and propose potential solutions to support the verification of IoT systems’ security and safety. The results from our survey are significant, as they can guide future research efforts in developing IoT systems that are more secure and safer for all users.