An IoT analysis framework: An investigation of IoT smart cameras' vulnerabilities

The significant increase in the number of applications that depend on Internet of Things concept is becoming more evident. It has been deployed in many areas in smart homes, smart cities and health monitoring applications. The means to secure these applications are slower than our growing dependence on them. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the kinds of vulnerabilities that exist in home monitoring smart cameras and to demonstrate their effects on users' security and privacy, by proposing a threat model and a security and privacy analysis framework. The framework covers five major components of the smart camera system with a set of designed test cases. The framework is applied to five commodity smart cameras. Range of vulnerabilities are discovered with respect to the framework. The vulnerabilities discovered indicate that IoT devices continue to be shipped by vendors without putting enough effort on their security and with insufficient regard for the implications that they have on users' privacy. The work reported here has been part of the first author's MSc thesis [1].