Towards Threat Modelling of IoT Context-Sharing Platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) involves complex, interconnected systems and devices that depend on context- sharing platforms for interoperability and information exchange. These platforms are, therefore, critical components of real-world IoT deployments, making their security essential to ensure the resilience and reliability of these “systems of systems.” In this paper, we take the first steps toward systematically and compre- hensively addressing the security of IoT context-sharing platforms. We propose a framework for threat modelling and security analysis of a generic IoT context-sharing solution, employing the MITRE ATT&CK framework. Through an evaluation of various industry-funded projects and academic research, we identify significant security challenges in the design of IoT context-sharing platforms. Our threat modelling provides an in-depth analysis of the techniques and sub-techniques adversaries may use to exploit these systems, offering valuable insights for future research aimed at developing resilient solutions. Additionally, we have developed an open-source threat analysis tool that incorporates our detailed threat modelling, which can be used to evaluate and enhance the security of existing context-sharing platforms.