Security Ranking of IoT Devices Using an AHP Model

The proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) technology raises major security and privacy concerns. Specifically, ordinary electrical appliances are being transformed into smart connected devices with the capability to sense, compute, and communicate with their surroundings and the Internet. These smart embedded devices increase the attack surface of the environments in which they are deployed by becoming new points of entry for malicious activities, resulting in severe network security flaws. One of the major challenges lies in examining the influence of IoT devices on the security level of the environment they operate within. In this paper, we propose a security ranking model for IoT devices, based on the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) technique, which can be used for the device risk assessment task. Our implementation of the AHP model is based on a device-centric approach, where both device-specific features and domain-related features are taken into account. We applied the proposed model on several IoT devices in the context of an enterprise network environment, demonstrating its feasibility in analyzing security-related considerations in smart environments.