Attacks and Defenses in Short-Range Wireless Technologies for IoT

The Internet of Things, abbreviated as IoT, is a new networking paradigm composed of wireless and wired networks, geographically distributed and interconnected by a “secured” backbone, essentially, the Internet. It connects billions of heterogeneous devices, called Things, using different communication technologies and provides end-users, all over the world, with a variety of smart applications. IoT constitutes a new evolution for the Internet in terms of diversity, size, and applications. It also invites cybercriminals who exploit IoT infrastructures to conduct large scale, distributed, and devastating cyberattacks that may have serious consequences. The security of IoT infrastructures strongly depends on the security of its wired and wireless infrastructures. Still, the wireless infrastructures are thought to be the most outspread, important, and vulnerable part of IoT. To achieve the security goals in the wireless infrastructures of IoT, it is crucial to have a comprehensive understanding of IoT attacks, their classification, and security solutions in such infrastructures. In this paper, we provide a survey of attacks related to the wireless infrastructures of IoT in general, and to the most used short-range wireless communication technologies in the resource-constrained part of IoT in particular. Namely, we consider Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, ZigBee, and RFID wireless communication technologies. The paper also provides a taxonomy of these attacks based on a security service-based attack classification and discusses existing security defenses and mechanisms that mitigate certain attacks as well as the limitations of these security mechanisms.