A Systematic Mapping of Patterns and Architectures for IoT Security

Tanusan Rajmohan

, Phu H. Nguyen

and Nicolas Ferry

University of Oslo (UiO), Oslo, Norway

SINTEF, Oslo, Norway

Keywords:

IoT, Security, Privacy, Architecture, Patterns, Review, Survey.

Abstract:

We have entered a vast digital revolution of the IoT era when everything is connected. The popularity of

IoT applications makes security for IoT of paramount importance. Security patterns are based on domain-

independent time-proven security knowledge and expertise. Can they be applied to IoT? We aim to draw a

research landscape of patterns and architectures for IoT security by conducting a systematic mapping study.

From more than a thousand of relevant papers, we have systematically identiﬁed and analyzed 24 papers that

have been published around patterns for IoT security (and privacy). Our analysis shows that there is a rise in

the number of publications addressing security patterns in the two recent years. However, there are gaps in

this research area that can be ﬁlled in to promote the use of patterns for IoT security and privacy.

1 INTRODUCTION

The Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming increas-

ingly popular. We can see that every “thing” is get-

ting smarter and connected, from smartphones, smart

cars, to smart energy grids, smart cities. Accord-

ing to Gartner, 25 billion connected things will be in

use by 2021, producing immense volumes of data

IEEE Standards Association deﬁnes an IoT system

as “a system of entities (including cyber-physical de-

vices, information resources, and people) that ex-

change information and interact with the physical

world by sensing, processing information, and actu-

ating.” (IEEE SA, 2018)

Most of the critical infrastructures, such as en-

ergy, water, transport, and healthcare, have already

been or will be IoT-empowered. IoT security is-

sues will “affect not only bits and bytes” but also

“ﬂesh and blood” (Schneier, 2017). Without reli-

able security in place, users will not trust IoT de-

vices and related services as discussed in (Nguyen

et al., 2018; Nguyen et al., 2019) because attacks

and malfunctions in IoT-based critical infrastructures

may outweigh any of their beneﬁts (Roman et al.,

2011), (Hany and Wills, 2020). Security design pat-

terns could be considered as reusable security de-

sign bricks upon which sound and secure systems

https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/

2018-11-07-gartner-identiﬁes-top-10-strategic-iot-

technologies-and-trends, November 2018

can be built. From security engineering’s point of

view, one of the best practices is using patterns to

guide security at each stage of the development pro-

cess (Schumacher et al., 2013). Security patterns are

based on domain-independent, time-proven security

knowledge, and expertise. Books and catalogs of

security patterns such as (Schumacher et al., 2013),

(Fernandez-Buglioni, 2013), (Nguyen et al., 2015),

(Steel and Nagappan, 2006) are supposed to be help-

ful for users to solve security challenges by using

time-proven security knowledge and expertise. How-

ever, the IoT age may introduce new security chal-

lenges that existing approaches and methods cannot

address. Have security patterns been researched and

applied to IoT?

To ﬁgure out a research landscape of existing ap-

proaches around patterns for security in IoT, we have

conducted a Systematic Mapping Study (SMS). Our

SMS has three main objectives. First, we want to give

a summary of the existing publications around pat-

terns for IoT security (and privacy). Second, by ex-

amining the current patterns and approaches, we can

recognize gaps in the state-of-the-art. Also, we want

to explore which developmental level the existing pat-

terns for IoT are describing. We are particularly in-

terested in their method and how advanced the pat-

terns are, especially in addressing IoT security. Third,

based on the results, we propose new research activ-

ities to ﬁll the gaps for supporting security in mod-

ern IoT systems. We conducted our SMS following

138

Rajmohan, T., Nguyen, P. and Ferry, N.

A Systematic Mapping of Patterns and Architectures for IoT Security.

DOI: 10.5220/0009583001380149

In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Internet of Things, Big Data and Security (IoTBDS 2020), pages 138-149

ISBN: 978-989-758-426-8

the latest guidelines from (Petersen et al., 2015). The

main contributions of this work are our answers to the

following Research Questions (RQs).

• RQ1: What are the publication trends of the re-

search on patterns and architecture for IoT secu-

rity?

• RQ2: What is the existing research on patterns

for IoT security, and how advanced is it?

• RQ3: What are the open issues to be further in-

vestigated in this ﬁeld?

We have systematically ﬁltered a large number of

relevant papers from ﬁve central online publication

databases, and a manual search process, to ﬁnally ob-

tain a set of twenty-four (24) primary studies. We ex-

tracted and synthesized data from the primary studies

to answer our RQs. The results show that there is a

rise in the number of publications addressing security

patterns and architectures for IoT in the two recent

years. However, there are gaps in this research area

that can be ﬁlled to promote the use of patterns for

IoT security and privacy.

In the remainder of this paper: Section 2 gives

some background deﬁnitions. In Section 3, we

present our SMS approach. To facilitate data extrac-

tion and comparison, Section 4 describes our classi-

ﬁcation schemes for the primary studies. We present

the results of our SMS in Section 5. Related work is

discussed in Section 6. Finally, we conclude the paper

with summarizing the main ﬁndings in Section 7.

2 BACKGROUND

In this section, we give the deﬁnitions of SMS (2.1),

design patterns (2.2), security design patterns (2.3),

and security architecture (2.4) that were used to deﬁne

the scope of this work.

2.1 Systematic Mapping Study

An SMS is a kind of secondary research, which is “a

study that reviews all the primary studies relating to a

speciﬁc research question to integrate/synthesize ev-

idence related to a speciﬁc research question.” More

speciﬁcally, an SMS gives “a broad review of primary

studies in a speciﬁc topic area that aims to identify

what evidence is available on the topic.” (Kitchenham

et al., 2011)

2.2 Design Pattern

The conventional explanation for a design pattern is

that it is a reusable solution to a standard reoccurring

problem in software design. A pattern is usually gen-

eral so that it can be reused, and it is a proven solution

to solve a design problem. A design pattern is not a

ﬁnished implementation that can be directly used, but

more a strategy or a template for how to solve a prob-

lem that can serve in different situations. (Gamma

et al., 1994) (Fernandez-Buglioni, 2013).

2.3 Security Design Pattern

A Security Design Pattern (aka. security pattern) is

deﬁned as: “A security pattern describes a particu-

lar recurring security problem that arises in speciﬁc

contexts and presents a well-proven generic solution

for it. The solution consists of a set of interacting

roles that can be arranged into multiple concrete de-

sign structures, as well as a process to create one par-

ticular such structure.” (Schumacher et al., 2013).

Because security patterns and design patterns

mostly impact a speciﬁc part of an IoT system, we

also want to look at a reusable solution for a high-

level perspective. This is why we include security

architecture because architectures will concern large-

scale components and global properties and mecha-

nisms of a system.

2.4 Security Architecture

National Institute of Standards and Technology

(NIST) describes security architecture as “the design

artifact that describes how the security controls (se-

curity countermeasures) are positioned, and how they

relate to the overall information technology architec-

ture. These controls serve the purpose of maintain-

ing the system’s quality attributes: conﬁdentiality, in-

tegrity, availability, accountability, and assurance ser-

vices.” (Ron Ross, 2016)

In this paper, we include framework as a pre-

built general or special purpose architecture that is de-

signed to be extended. This is why we would say that

the architecture is the design of a structure. In con-

trast, a framework is the architecture foundation. We,

therefore, include framework as a “sub-part” of the

architecture and suggest that framework solutions are

similar to an architecture solution.

3 OUR SYSTEMATIC MAPPING

APPROACH

We conducted our SMS by following the most recent

principles (Petersen et al., 2015), and other guidelines

from (Kitchenham, 2004). With the speciﬁc context

and motivation exhibited in Section 1, we describe

A Systematic Mapping of Patterns and Architectures for IoT Security

139

our RQs for this paper in Section 3.1. We clarify

the inclusion criteria for selecting primary studies by

explicitly characterizing the extent of our SMS and

lessen possible bias in our selection process, in Sec-

tion 3.2. Section 3.3 shows our search strategy to ﬁnd

the primary studies for answering the RQs.

3.1 Research Questions

This SMS aims to answer the three RQs presented in

Section 1. Each is extended with sub-questions.

RQ1 includes three sub-RQs. RQ1.1 - In which

years were the primary studies published? Answer-

ing this question allows us to know when this research

topic started to get attention as well as how recent the

research on this topic is. The publication trend can

give an indicator of how much attention security pat-

terns and architectures for IoT get from the research

community. RQ1.2 - What are the targeted domains

(e.g., IoT, Network, Cloud, and Software Engineer-

ing(SE)) and which venue type (i.e., Journal, Confer-

ence/Workshop) were the primary studies published

as? Answering this question allows us to know what

the target domain was for each paper. This is es-

pecially important when security patterns are some-

thing that can crossover several related research ar-

eas. The type of paper can give some clues on the

maturity of the primary study. Journal papers nor-

mally report progressively mature studies compared

to papers published at conferences. RQ1.3 - How is

the collaboration between industry and academia on

this topic? We classify a paper as academic if all the

authors are afﬁliated with a university or a research

institute. Likewise, we classify papers as industrial if

all the associated authors are with a company, and sort

the papers as both if there is a collaboration. Answer-

ing RQ1.3 will show the collaboration level between

the industry and academia. It also indicates the inter-

est and needs of security patterns in industry.

RQ2 has two sub-RQs. RQ2.1 - Are there any

papers explicitly addressing, proposing, describing,

or using security patterns or architectures for IoT

systems? Answering this RQs allows us to examine

the support of security pattern and architecture ap-

proaches towards secure IoT systems. RQ2.2 - How

do the patterns/architectures in the primary studies

support IoT security? Answering RQ2.2 shows us

how the primary studies use patterns and architec-

tures, and for what purpose. It also allows us to assess

the characteristics of the primary studies in security

patterns and architectures for IoT.

RQ3 also has two sub-RQs. RQ3.1 - What are the

open issues of IoT security pattern research? RQ3.2

- What research directions could be recommended for

tackling the open issues? These RQs help to suggest

potential directions for future work.

3.2 Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria

In light of the RQs and the extent of our study pre-

sented in Section 1, we predeﬁned the inclusion and

exclusion criteria to reduce bias in our procedure of

search and selection of primary studies. The primary

studies must meet ALL the following inclusion crite-

ria (IC):

1. (IC1) A primary study must contain security pat-

terns (one or more) or architectures in some form

relevant for an IoT system.

2. (IC2) A primary study must be speciﬁcally within

the area of IoT, either in a generally applicable

domain or in a speciﬁc application domain of IoT.

3. (IC3) The paper presents security concerns in sys-

tem design, architecture, or infrastructure.

4. (IC4) The paper discusses some form of a pattern

or architecture (/reusable method) that can be ap-

plied to IoT.

We excluded and ﬁltered out papers that are not writ-

ten in English, as well as papers that only are avail-

able as extended abstracts, posters, or presentations

(not full version).

3.3 Search and Selection Strategy

The search strategy used in this thesis is a mix of

automatic and manual search as well as snowballing

as shown by (Nguyen et al., 2015), to exhaustively

search for IoT security pattern papers. Where the goal

is to ﬁnd the most relevant papers and, therefore, to

ﬁnd as many primary IoT security pattern papers as

possible. Fig. 1 shows an overview of the search and

selection process with the results for each step, which

we describe in the following sections.

3.3.1 Database Search

Utilizing the online inquiry elements of accessible

publication databases is the most well-known ap-

proach to scan for essential primary studies when

directing auxiliary studies (Petersen et al., 2015).

We used ﬁve of the accessible publication databases

IEEE Xplore

, ACM Digital Library

, ScienceDi-

rect

, Web of Knowledge (ISI)

, and Scopus

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org

https://dlnext.acm.org

https://sciencedirect.com/

http://apps.webofknowledge.com

https://scopus.com

IoTBDS 2020 - 5th International Conference on Internet of Things, Big Data and Security

140

Figure 1: Overview of the search and selection steps.

search for potential primary studies. We did not

use Google Scholar, Researchgate, or SpringerLink.

Scopus and ACM DL already index SpringerLink

(Tran et al., 2017). Google Scholar and Research-

Gate return all kinds of papers, in which our ﬁve cho-

sen databases should have covered peer-reviewed ar-

ticles. Google Scholar also returns many non-peer-

reviewed and non-English papers. The ﬁve selected

databases contain peer-reviewed articles, which pro-

vide advanced search functions. Following the guide-

lines from (Kitchenham, 2004), based on the research

questions and keywords used in some related articles,

we have created the search keywords. The following

keywords are the ﬁnal set used as a search query. The

query was tweaked to ﬁt all search engines.

(“Internet of Things” OR “IoT” OR

“Cyber Physical Systems” OR “CPS” OR

“Web of things” OR “WOT”)

AND

(“Security Pattern” OR “Design Pattern” OR

“Security Design Pattern” OR “Security Archi-

tecture”)

https://www.springer.com/gp/computer-science/lncs/

information-on-abstracting-and-indexing/799288

For each candidate paper, we ﬁrst reviewed the pa-

per’s title and abstract, followed by skimming through

the contents. If a candidate paper appears in more

than one database, we list them in the other database

results. When merging to the ﬁrst set of primary stud-

ies, we combine the results, so we get the correct

number of papers without duplicates.

3.3.2 Manual Search

It is unrealistic to ensure the database search results

can cover all the relevant papers in our study. We

have, therefore, tried to complement the database

search by doing a manual search. We began our

manual search by initiating a set of IoT security and

security pattern studies from published journals and

conferences. The conferences and journals we went

through to ﬁnd papers were: The International Con-

ference on the Internet of Things

, IEEE ICIOT

ACM Transactions on Internet of Things (TIOT)

and IEEE Internet of Things Journal

. After search-

ing through these journals and conferences, we con-

cluded that the papers posted were already found in

https://iot-conference.org/iot2020/

https://conferences.computer.org/iciot/2019/

https://dl.acm.org/journal/tiot

https://ieee-iotj.org/

A Systematic Mapping of Patterns and Architectures for IoT Security

141

the database search, or they did not fulﬁll the inclu-

sion criteria set. Therefore we only found two extra

papers that supplemented our primary set with papers

from the manual search and increased with two. The

manual search also included a snowballing process,

but no new primary studies found.

Note that, at every stage of our search and selec-

tion process, any candidate papers in doubt were kept

to be thoroughly reviewed and crosschecked among

the reviewers. Our group discussions have ﬁnally

yielded a set of 24 primary studies for data extraction

and synthesis to answer the RQs

4 TAXONOMY OF THE

RESEARCH AREA

In this section, we deﬁne a taxonomy of IoT security

patterns. The primary purpose of the taxonomy is to

extract and compare data from the primary studies so

that they can help to answer the RQs. This taxonomy

is deﬁned by a top-down and bottom-up approach.

These approaches are strategies commonly used for

information processing and knowledge ordering. We

have used the top-down method to process informa-

tion from the literature around IoT, security patterns,

IoT architecture, design patterns, and so forth. The

bottom-up approach is for extracting data from a test

set of primary studies. This test set is the ﬁrst ten

primary studies selected. It helped us to classify and

specify the essential techniques and terminology used

in the primary studies.

4.1 Domain Speciﬁcity

We characterize the Domain Speciﬁcity in the same

manner as (Washizaki et al., 2019) with minor adjust-

ments. It is essential to examine the applicability and

reusability of each IoT security pattern. We divide

this into three types: any, general IoT, and speciﬁc

IoT.

1. Any. General systems and software security pat-

terns, as well as design patterns and security archi-

tectures that can be adapted to design IoT systems

and software if their contexts and problems match

the patterns’ contexts and challenges.

2. General IoT. IoT security and design patterns, as

well as security architectures, which apply to any

IoT system and software.

Our search and selection process for the primary stud-

ies ended late December 2019

3. Speciﬁc IoT. IoT security and design patterns, as

well as security architectures that address speciﬁc

problem domains (e.g., healthcare) and technical

domains (e.g., brain-computer interaction).

4.2 Categorization of Security Pattern

and Architecture Research

To specify the domain, security concerns, implemen-

tation and modeling, we list some features to sort

out the different security patterns and architectures

quickly. In such a way that we can see the patterns’ or

architectures’ purpose, quality, method, and research

implementation as deﬁned in (Washizaki et al., 2018).

• Purpose. This includes intended users, and

phases of the targeted system and software life-

cycle.

• Quality. This refers to security characteristics:

conﬁdentiality, integrity, availability, authentica-

tion, and authorization.

• Method. This includes methodology and model-

ing methods to identify the structure and design of

the pattern or architecture.

• Research Implementation. This consists of the

platform to realize the results of security pattern

research, whether the results are automated and

encapsulated as a tool, and whether case studies or

experiments are conducted to evaluate the results

relevant to the original research purpose.

4.3 Design Pattern

Design patterns are similar to security patterns in the

way of their structure. Therefore, we will show the

core parts that will be in a design pattern, so that the

pattern structure is familiar and makes it easier to look

for patterns in the primary studies. The following el-

ements often express a design pattern (Joshi, 2014):

• Name. Representation of its purpose in a nutshell.

• Intent. What the pattern does, short statement to

capture essence of the pattern.

• Problem. A software design problem under a

given system environment.

• Solution. A solution to the problem mentioned

above.

• Consequences. Trade-offs of using a design pat-

tern.

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142

4.4 IoT Architecture

In our taxonomy, we reuse the IoT World Forum Ref-

erence Model

with minimal modiﬁcations. The IoT

World Forum Reference Model consists of seven lay-

ers:

• Physical Devices and Controllers. This layer as

the title describes is the physical layer consisting

of devices or “things” of the internet of things.

The “things”, sensors and Edge Node devices are

classiﬁed within this layer.

• Connectivity. Connectivity spans from the “mid-

dle” of an Edge Node device up through transport

to the Cloud. This layer maps data from the log-

ical and physical technologies used, the commu-

nication between the physical layer and the com-

puting layer, and above.

• Edge Computing. This layer is referred to as

the layer that brings computation and data stor-

age closer to the location it is needed. “Proto-

col conversion, routing to higher-layer software

functions, and even “fast path” logic for low la-

tency decision making will be implemented at this

layer.”

• Data Accumulation. This layer serves as inter-

mediate storage of incoming storage and outgo-

ing trafﬁc queued for delivery to lower layers.

Pure SQL is what the layer is implemented with,

but it may require more advanced solutions, i.e.

Hadoop & Hadoop File System, Mongo, Cassan-

dra, Spark, or other NoSQL solutions.

• Data Abstraction. This is the layer where data

is made clear and understandable. This layer cen-

ters around rendering data and its storage in man-

ners that enable developing more straightforward,

performance-enhanced applications. This layer

speeds up high priority trafﬁc or alarms, and sort

incoming data from the data lake into the appro-

priate schema and streams for upstream process-

ing. Likewise, application information bound for

downstream layers is reformatted appropriately

for device communication and queued for pro-

cessing.

• Application Layer. This is the layer where in-

formation interpretation of multiple IoT sensors

or measurements occur, and logic is executed.

“Monitoring, process optimization, alarm man-

agement, statistical analysis, control logic, logis-

tics, consumer patterns, are just a few examples of

IoT applications.

Juxtology - IoT: Architecture

• Collaboration and Processes. This layer

presents the application processing to its users,

and data processed at lower layers are integrated

with business applications. This layer consists of

human interaction with all the layers of the IoT

system, and economic value is delivered.

5 RESULTS

Table 1 shows an overview of the primary IoT security

pattern and architecture studies. Based on the taxon-

omy, we have extracted and synthesized the data from

the primary studies to answer the RQs.

Table 1: Overview of the primary IoT security pattern stud-

ies (sorted by year of publication).

# Year Title (click to open the corresponding publication) v f

1 2019 Applying Privacy Patterns to the Internet of Things’

(IoT) Architecture

J P

2 2019 Architectural Patterns for Secure IoT Orchestrations C P

3 2019 From internet of threats to internet of things: A cyber

security architecture for smart homes

C A

4 2019 BlockSecIoTNet: Blockchain-based decentralized se-

curity architecture for IoT network

J A

5 2019 Lightweight security architecture based on embedded

virtualization and trust mechanisms for IoT edge de-

vices

J A

6 2018 A blockchain-based decentralized security architec-

ture for Iot

C A

7 2018 A misuse Pattern for DDoS in the IoT C P

8 2018 A Secure and Privacy-preserving Internet of Things

Framework for Smart City

C A

9 2018 Applying Security Patterns for authorization of users

in IoT Based Applications

C P

10 2018 Cataloging design patterns for internet of things arti-

fact integration

C P

11 2018 Design patterns for the industrial Internet of Things C P

12 2018 IoT device security the hard(ware) way C P

13 2017 A Case Study in Applying Security Design Patterns

for IoT Software System

C P

14 2016 A Simple Security Architecture for Smart Water Man-

agement System

J A

15 2016 A survey on Internet of Things architectures J A

16 2015 New Security Architecture for IoT Network C A

17 2015 OSCAR: Object security architecture for the Internet

of Things

J A

18 2015 Secure Design Patterns for Security in Smart Meter-

ing Systems

C P

19 2015 Software-security patterns: degree of maturity C P

20 2014 A security engineering process for systems of systems

using security patterns

C P

21 2013 HIP Security Architecture for the IP-Based Internet

of Things

C A

22 2013 Securing the IP-based internet of things with HIP and

DTLS

C A

23 2013 Using security patterns to model and analyze security

requirements

J P

24 2011 A natural classiﬁcation scheme for software security

patterns

C P

Venue type: J = Journal (7), C = Conference (17).

Focus: P = pattern, A = Architecture.

5.1 Publication Trends

In this section, we address the sub-RQs 1.1, 1.2

and 1.3 correspondingly in the following subsections

5.1.1, 5.1.2, and 5.1.3.

A Systematic Mapping of Patterns and Architectures for IoT Security

143

Figure 2: Publications per year, per venue type.

5.1.1 Publication Trend

Fig. 2 displays paper publications within the domain

of security patterns and architectures for IoT systems

in the last 10 years. As Fig. 2 shows, we can see a rise

in the number of IoT security patterns and architec-

tures related publications in the last two years (2018:

7C and 2019: 2C, 3J). The trend in recent years in-

dicates that there is a need for IoT security pattern

and architecture research, and more attention to these

research areas. The results are a bit lower than ex-

pected, but we hope that this trend will keep increas-

ing. Our search process ended in December 2019, and

we found ﬁve primary studies with our search query

that were published in 2019 (2C, 3J).

5.1.2 Publication Venue Types and Target

Domains

IoT, with its heterogeneous nature, traverses through

different relevant research domains, among which we

recognized Software Engineering (SE), Cloud , Net-

work, and recently specialized IoT research domain.

(Borgia et al., 2016)

Fig. 3 displays the occurrence of each research

domain appearance in the primary studies (SE:4, IoT:

20, Cloud: 4, Network: 6). Note that the publica-

tion venues can have several research domains in their

calls for papers. Some of the papers overlap in their

research domain, i.e. almost all the papers fall under

the IoT domain and might include another domain.

Since we are looking for security patterns and archi-

tectures for IoT systems, this may be patterns for spe-

ciﬁc parts within an IoT system. It can also include

patterns and architectures for software that can be ap-

plied for IoT systems, which is why we have several

domains and why these can overlap considering the

numbers in Fig. 3. These numbers do mirror the dif-

ferent ideas of IoT research, with IoT research domain

is getting progressively visible. We see the trends of

conference papers within each research area is higher

Figure 3: Research topics per publication venue.

than in journals, which is expected. Conference pa-

pers tend to gain quick feedback and visibility within

the research ﬁeld. In comparison, it can take years for

a journal publication to appear, and the research topic

may become outdated. Which explains the numbers

in Fig. 2 and Fig. 3. Even though the numbers are low

for journal papers, we still hope to see more journal

papers, which normally have a more in-depth analysis

of the domain.

5.1.3 Author Afﬁliation Impact

Because IoT systems and devices are widely used and

growing in the industry and consumer market, we

took a closer look at how the afﬁliations of the authors

are distributed from the primary studies. Fig. 4 shows

that a majority of the authors who have published re-

sults on IoT security pattern or architecture are from

academia (∼ 58%), as expected. While there are no

contributions solely from industry, this number is not

surprising, considering that industry rarely publishes

papers alone. Industry occasionally publishes with

the collaboration of academia. We found some papers

of this type (∼ 42%). These papers have more imple-

mentation examples and testing compared to papers

purely from academia, in accordance with research

implementation from Section 4.2. Almost half of the

primary studies are joint papers between academia

and industry, which show a promising collaboration

level. This is a trend we want to see grow as well as

real implementations of the research to show how it is

implemented and distributed. We do not expect the in-

dustry to publish on their own, which is why we think

IoTBDS 2020 - 5th International Conference on Internet of Things, Big Data and Security

144

Figure 4: Afﬁliation trend of authors.

the numbers for joint papers are reasonably good. We

hope that this number keeps growing as well as that

they use the patterns and architectures proposed to im-

prove their products, production process, and internal

processes that use IoT devices or systems further. We

would be interested to see some real implementations

or examples of security patterns or architectures usage

in the industry in the future.

5.2 The Primary Approaches

We will address the sub-RQs 2.1 and 2.2 correspond-

ingly in the subsections 5.2.1, and 5.2.2. These sub-

sections detail the primary approaches and how ad-

vanced they are, especially in addressing security as-

pects in this section. We outline and depict the illus-

trations to show ﬁndings clearly and understandably,

as well as highlight some of the trends within security.

5.2.1 Security Pattern Usage

Fig. 5 illustrates the distribution of papers with re-

gards to the domain speciﬁcity of the papers, elabo-

rated in Section 4.1. We see that most of the papers

found were in speciﬁc domains, i.e. healthcare, wa-

ter systems, network communication, manufacturing

factories, smart metering, etc. The general cases have

security patterns for IoT systems, but not a speciﬁc or

detailed use case. In contrast, any cases are just se-

curity patterns in general that we think can be applied

for any IoT systems.

Out of all the papers we review, we found that

46% of the papers were explicitly discussing or us-

ing security patterns for IoT. The other papers either

discussed security architectures (38%), privacy pat-

tern (4%), security framework (4%), or design pat-

terns (8%). Fig. 6 shows that out of all the papers

found, over half (84% / 88% when framework is in-

cluded) of the papers use or propose how to use se-

curity patterns or architectures either in general or in

Figure 5: IoT speciﬁcity, Section 4.1.

Figure 6: Pattern/architecture categorization.

speciﬁc usage areas. This tells us that out of all the pa-

pers found (24) there is already a good amount of pa-

pers regarding the topic we want to highlight. When

we look directly at numbers and compare this to how

many papers we initially found when doing the auto-

matic search it is a low number. We still believe this

a good amount, but it should be higher so that secu-

rity patterns become more frequent and accessible for

industry and users who want to develop IoT systems

(software, hardware, or Cloud).

The papers such as 10, 7, 12, 9, 13, and 18 from

Table. 1 are examples of papers we found that explic-

itly address, propose, or use security patterns. Papers

7, 12, 13, and 18 show patterns in a use case where

they apply the pattern and discuss how it is used and

what the results are. While papers 9 and 10 show mul-

tiple security patterns and explain their usage area,

name, intent, problem, solution, and consequence in

accordance with design pattern description in Section

4.3. Papers 9 and 10 do not explicitly use the patterns

in any way, it is mostly for illustration and cataloging.

All these patterns contribute with one or several pat-

terns that have a speciﬁc usage area or a generic area.

5.2.2 Supporting IoT Security

To answer this sub-RQ, we look at Fig. 7, where we

see that out of all the papers found, 66% discuss se-

curity in some form, either by using a security pattern

A Systematic Mapping of Patterns and Architectures for IoT Security

145

or suggesting how security can be improved. The re-

maining 34% discuss privacy, which security helps to

improve. Some primary studies give a clear solution,

while others propose a possible solution, and some

papers have overlapping concerns regarding both se-

curity and privacy. To get an elaborate statistic, we

look at Fig. 8, which is a ﬁgure that crosses results

with the help of Sections 4.2 and 4.4. This diagram il-

lustrates how many papers fall into each IoT architec-

ture layer and how many of them concern security and

privacy. The security categorization is based on the

quality aspect from Section 4.2, where we categorize

papers that focus on security characteristics, such as

conﬁdentiality, integrity, availability, authentication,

and authorization within the security category.

The patterns shown in the papers either propose

patterns or architectures that can increase the security

of IoT, software, or the Cloud fragment. Some essen-

tial papers (7, 12, 13, and 18) from Table. 1 discuss

how they keep the security intact by securing the con-

ﬁdentiality, integrity, and availability (CIA). Paper 12

proposes a security pattern for the hardware level that

ensures the integrity and conﬁdentiality of the device.

While paper 7 shows a misuse pattern that attacks the

availability, but they list countermeasures on how to

prevent this and maintain the availability. Paper 18

discusses smart metering systems and propose a pat-

tern that especially secures integrity and conﬁdential-

ity by digitally signing and encrypting the data in tran-

sit to ensure security and privacy. Paper 13 shows ﬁve

patterns that help to provide security through the CIA

for different application areas of an IoT system. They

propose patterns for input validation, secure logging,

secure exception handling, etc.

The data from the papers have been extracted ac-

cordingly to the taxonomy to give us meaningful in-

formation as well as pinpoint how the papers are rel-

evant and where they contribute. From the IoT ar-

chitecture, we also saw that most of the papers added

to the Physical Devices and Controllers, Connectiv-

ity, Edge Computing, and Application layer, which

is illustrated in Fig. 8. From the ﬁgures referenced

through this section, we see that the patterns and ar-

chitectures help to secure different levels of the archi-

tecture as well as the system in itself by focusing on

the characteristics mentioned. With the help of our

taxonomy, we found 14 papers out of 24 that had both

implementation or example and model or methodol-

ogy description of their architecture or pattern.

5.3 Ideas for Future Research

Here we address the open issues that we believe

should be further investigated. We try to illustrate

Figure 7: Pattern topic of the papers.

some of the issues and suggest research directions to

further improve this domain.

5.3.1 Open Issues

To illustrate the open issues, we crossed the taxonomy

criteria of quality to ﬁnd papers that handle the secu-

rity characteristics to improve the security with the

contribution of the different papers. This gave us the

results we can see in Fig. 9, where the main contri-

butions of architectures and patterns from the several

patterns show that they mostly propose security re-

lated contributions. The reason we still keep the three

contributions that do not handle the security charac-

teristics is that they discuss how to improve security

patterns in general, securing systems, or do not con-

tribute but rather evaluate patterns or architectures.

We found that the number of security pattern ap-

proaches is nearly the same as the number of security

architecture patterns for IoT. The number of existing

papers that directly address security patterns for IoT

is not as high as it should be when considering the

estimates of growth, according to Gartner (van der

Meulen, 2017). Even among those studies, we have

not found any that explicitly and systematically list or

show patterns that apply to IoT security.

The open issues of IoT security pattern research,

in our opinion, would be the lack of research on the

topic already. Even though most of the papers we

found discuss security or improves it. This is only

a small fraction of what we expected after looking

through thousands of papers to ﬁnd relevant primary

studies. We saw that there is a spike in the number of

publications within this domain for the last couple of

years, and our analysis shows that IoT security pattern

research is still in its early stages. In addition to a lack

of research, it is harder to produce good quality pat-

terns that are tested and used in the industry. The lack

of research may lead to mistakes in the production of

these systems that consumers might buy and may end

up in catastrophic consequences. This is why we want

to promote this type of study to highlight the security

IoTBDS 2020 - 5th International Conference on Internet of Things, Big Data and Security

146

Figure 8: Security and privacy with relation to the IoT architecture from Section 4.4.

Figure 9: Patterns and architectures in relation to the quality

from categorization, Section 4.2.

aspects and make it easier to implement and use se-

curity from the beginning, also known as security by

design. Promoting the use of patterns and architec-

ture for IoT security (and privacy) early and in com-

bination with continuous deployment of security and

privacy mechanisms together with IoT applications as

presented by (Ferry et al., 2019; Ferry and Nguyen,

2019) is a way forward.

5.3.2 Potential Directions for Future Work

From the papers found, not many had deﬁned the pat-

terns or architecture accordingly to the taxonomy we

built or deﬁned clearly in which layers of the IoT

architecture the patterns work. We would hope that

this research domain grows as well as the contribu-

tions to ensure the security and privacy in IoT sys-

tems. To make it safe would be more comfortable

if there were more security patterns that developers

could use with proper testing and documentation. We

would, therefore, propose that further research should

address more thoroughly and systematically security

pattern aspects for IoT systems. This can further high-

light and bring forth research, while systematically

listing it and giving a reference for either future re-

search, production, or development.

Finally, the dominance of academia-only and joint

collaboration in IoT security pattern research sug-

gests that there should be even more collaboration be-

tween academia and industry. Especially since the

IoT market is blossoming and making the industry

more aware, there should be approaches that are more

practical and closer to the needs in the industry. This

topic is yet to blossom, both in the industrial and aca-

demic worlds.

A Systematic Mapping of Patterns and Architectures for IoT Security

147

6 RELATED WORK

There exist some surveys that have addressed IoT se-

curity and IoT patterns, but none has systematically,

speciﬁcally investigated security pattern approaches

for IoT.

(Oracevic et al., 2017) surveyed IoT security.

They want to shed light on this topic and spread

awareness, with examples of IoT security solutions.

The authors provide different measures on different

levels to secure the systems but do not go into de-

tail. They also do not offer any form of architecture or

pattern to solve common recurring problems for IoT

security. Security patterns-based approaches for new

systems design and development have also been re-

viewed by (L

ucio et al., 2014; Nguyen et al., 2015).

However, the reviewed approaches are not speciﬁc for

IoT systems, which is what we focus on.

(Washizaki et al., 2019) present a collection of pa-

pers that either describe IoT architecture or design

patterns, or both. They also classify the patterns that

are being used in detail as well as in which paper.

They present a security column and specify which pa-

pers from their study that have patterns that cover se-

curity. We looked through these papers, but not all of

the papers did meet our criteria described in Section

3.2. The papers from (Washizaki et al., 2019) that we

analyzed and included as primary studies are the pa-

pers 10 and 14 in Table. 1.

(Reinfurt et al., 2016) give details of IoT pat-

terns by investigating a large number of production-

ready IoT offerings to extract recurring proven solu-

tion principles into patterns. These patterns show and

describe how to help other individuals to understand

different aspects of IoT, and also make it easier. (Qan-

bari et al., 2016) elaborate on how to design, build,

and engineer applications for IoT systems and have

created patterns to do this. They do not highlight se-

curity as one of their focus points, which is our main

concern for this paper.

(Nguyen et al., 2019a; Nguyen et al., 2019b) sur-

veyed deployment and orchestration approach for IoT

but neither about security nor patterns. The approach

used in their study is similar to ours, an SMS.

In general, the results of these studies do address

not only the functional aspects of IoT patterns but also

some quality aspects such as security and develop-

ment that we even considered in our work. However,

they were not conducted systematically and explicitly

for analyzing the patterns and architectures for IoT se-

curity similar to our work. Note that we have clearly

deﬁned the scope of our SMS, which only considered

peer-reviewed publications, not white papers from the

industry. Thus, our SMS reports the state of the art in

IoT security pattern research, not including the state

of practice in the industry.

7 CONCLUSION

In this paper, we have examined a research landscape

of patterns and architectures for IoT security by con-

ducting a systematic mapping study. After systemat-

ically recognizing and reviewing 24 primary studies

out of thousand of relevant papers in this ﬁeld, we

have found out that 1) there is a rise in the number of

publications addressing security patterns in the two

recent years; 2) however, there are still gaps in the

research that does not focus on security patterns, se-

curity architectures or security in general; 3) new IoT

systems development should focus more on address-

ing security, which can be improved with more rel-

evant security patterns to apply and reuse. In other

words, we want to promote the use of patterns and ar-

chitectures for IoT security (and privacy) by design.

To make security patterns for IoT approaches more

practical, research collaborations between academia

and industry should be increased.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The research leading to these results has received

funding from the European Commission’s H2020

Programme under the grant agreement number

780351 (ENACT), and from the Research Council of

Norway’s Pilot-T Programme under the grant agree-

ment number 296651 (ASAM).

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