Spamming the Internet of Things: A Possibility and its probable Solution

The Internet of Things (IoT) enabled users to bring physical objects into the sphere of cyber world. This was made possible by different tagging technologies like NFC, RFID and 2D barcode which allowed physical objects to be identified and referred over the Internet. Due to less complexity and low development and deployment cost of 2D barcodes, they have become modus operandi for building an IoT system. This paper explores the possibility of spamming the Internet of Things. It tries to establish that web spammers can use 2D barcodes to flood the physical side of the IoT, trick users to see or reach unsolicited and unrelated content over the Internet and possibly destroy the legitimacy of correct content. Preliminary results from an experiment establishing the possibility of the problem are outlined. This paper also proposes the use of digital signatures (ECDSA) to address the problem of spamming the IoT. A prototype implementation of the solution and its experimental results are given in this paper.