Cyberprotection in IoT environments: A dynamic rule-based solution to defend smart devices

Undoubtedly, modern human digital lives are every day more and more connected, and the revolution of “everything connected” is already becoming a reality. Indeed, humans live in the age of the Internet of Things (IoT), and one of the most usual IoT contexts is a smart home. Unfortunately, such significant enhancement also means that common home devices, such as fridges, cameras, or even bulbs, are exposed to malevolent entities whose primary goal is to threaten the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the automatically-exchanged information. Aiming at fine-tuning the protection of the smart devices, this paper proposes a novel dynamic rule management solution adaptable to the current status of the IoT environment, so to protect it against cyberattacks. Experiments demonstrated that a notable reduction in the CPU and RAM consumption was achieved when applying this novel scheme. Additionally, the number of packets processed per second increased substantially, inducing a meaningful enhancement also from a security perspective.