Architecture and Its Vulnerabilities in Smart-Lighting Systems

TL;DR

This paper presents a layered security analysis approach for smart-lighting systems within Industry 4.0, identifying vulnerabilities and proposing countermeasures to enhance system security.

Contribution

It introduces a novel, application-specific, layer-based security analysis method for Smart-* systems, combining expertise from multiple domains.

Findings

Identified potential security threats in smart-lighting architectures.

Developed a unified taxonomy for the smart-lighting use case.

Suggested countermeasures for identified vulnerabilities.

Abstract

Industry 4.0 embodies one of the significant technological changes of this decade. Cyber-physical systems and the Internet Of Things are two central technologies in this change that embed or connect with sensors and actuators and interact with the physical environment. However, such systems-of-systems undergo additional restrictions in an endeavor to maintain reliability and security when building and interconnecting components to a heterogeneous, multi-domain \textit{Smart-*} systems architecture. This paper presents an application-specific, layer-based approach to an offline security analysis inspired by design science that merges preceding expertise from relevant domains. With the example of a Smart-lighting system, we create a dedicated unified taxonomy for the use case and analyze its distributed Smart-* architecture by multiple layer-based models. We derive potential attacks from the system specifications in an iterative and incremental process and discuss resulting threats and vulnerabilities. Finally, we suggest immediate countermeasures for the latter potential multiple-domain security concerns.