Optimal Placement of Security Resources for the Internet of Things

In many Internet of Thing application domains security is a critical requirement, because malicious parties can undermine the effectiveness of IoT-based systems by compromising single components and/or communication channels. Thus, a security infrastructure is needed to ensure the proper functioning of such systems even under attack. However, it is also critical that security be at a reasonable resource and/or energy cost. This chapter deals with the problem of efficiently and effectively securing IoT networks by carefully allocating security resources in the network area. The problem is modeled according to game theory, and provide a Pareto-optimal solution, in which the cost of the security infrastructure and the probability of a successful attack are minimized. As in the context of smart urban ecosystems both static and mobile smart city applications can take place, two different formalizations are provided for the two scenarios. For static networks, the optimization problem is modeled as a mixed integer linear program, whereas for mobile scenarios, computational intelligent techniques are adopted for providing a good approximation of the optimal solution.