Towards a semantic modelling for threat analysis of IoT applications: a case study on transactive energy

Abstract

The evolution of Internet-of-Things (IoT) is leading to an increasing number of new security issues. This is due to the nature of IoT devices which use lighter protocols and which may be either hacked or physically tampered with. Thus, common approaches for threat modelling are insufficient on IoT environments, since they hardly catch all possible threats related to physical and protocols vulnerabilities. Furthermore, in IoT scenarios multiple parties can be involved, like in a transactive energy scenario, where nodes of the network can trade energy each other. So, it is important to catch risks that an attack may lead to each involved party.
In this work, we propose a novel approach to model (i) the process list of a system and (ii) attacks towards it. Specifically, we extended the PROV-N semantic notation by including rules for modelling the attacks. We apply such modelling to ETSE [12], the architecture we proposed in the context of the PETRAS BlockIT project to enable energy trading among prosumers. ETSE manages the trading through a smart contract deployed on top of a blockchain distributed on the grid. Since in this context multiple parties are involved, we discuss possible issues that each attack may bring to the entire smart grid or to a specific prosumer.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Nawfal Fadhel: orcid.org/0000-0002-1129-5217

ORCID for Federico Lombardi: orcid.org/0000-0001-6463-8722

ORCID for Leonardo Aniello: orcid.org/0000-0003-2886-8445

ORCID for Andrea Margheri: orcid.org/0000-0002-5048-8070

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