Internet of Things backdoors: Resource management issues, security challenges, and detection methods

Abstract Internet of Things (IoT) technology is one of the successful and interesting products of ubiquitous wireless networks that beneficiate human life with the make use of smart devices. Many companies have a significant plan to develop and utilize the IoT benefits and futures. Context‐aware computing applications are extensively used anywhere and anytime but they may violate or abuse human privacy. For example, if an IoT healthcare resource like a pacemaker acts as a backdoor on a human body, human life will be in danger. Moreover, targeting the privacy of IoT users is much more catastrophic compared with targeting network security as well as network denial of service. In this article, we review the security vulnerabilities and prerequisite of the IoT resource management by pointing out to the IoT architecture in terms of the principal abstraction layer and summarize the corresponding IoT security terms. Next, we define IoT penetration testing, IoT backdoor types, backdoor severity, backdoor mechanism, and propose the corresponding backdoors detection techniques. Finally, we review the reported IoT backdoors and investigate the limitation of backdoors detection and highlight future directions.