Information Flow Control for the Internet of Things

Gildas Kouko, Josée Desharnais, Nadia Tawbi

2025

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to devices and applications that interact and connect the physical and digital worlds. Unfortunately, their interactions often lead to information leaks and safety issues. Controlling their autonomous behavior related to events and actions in their environment is therefore important. This is the key to uncovering conflicts between user-defined expectations. To control these conflicts, we propose to verify IoT information-flow according to the principles of model checking. We propose a model based on an abstraction of the information flow induced by device and application operations and interactions in an IoT network. More precisely, the model is independent of any functional and technical heterogeneity. This abstraction is the result of an information flow analysis carried out, a priori, for all the involved devices, as well as for all the applications controlling them. A transition system is constructed from these abstractions enabling us to transform the information flow control into reachability and safety properties verification. We express these properties using a modal logic inspired by Timed Computation Tree Logic (TCTL) (Baier and Katoen, 2008). We illustrate our approach with an example and adapt the language and the model to an existing model checker.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Kouko G., Desharnais J. and Tawbi N. (2025). Information Flow Control for the Internet of Things. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Internet of Things, Big Data and Security - Volume 1: IoTBDS; ISBN 978-989-758-750-4, SciTePress, pages 105-116. DOI: 10.5220/0013297800003944

in Bibtex Style

@conference{iotbds25,
author={Gildas Kouko and Josée Desharnais and Nadia Tawbi},
title={Information Flow Control for the Internet of Things},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Internet of Things, Big Data and Security - Volume 1: IoTBDS},
year={2025},
pages={105-116},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0013297800003944},
isbn={978-989-758-750-4},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Internet of Things, Big Data and Security - Volume 1: IoTBDS
TI - Information Flow Control for the Internet of Things
SN - 978-989-758-750-4
AU - Kouko G.
AU - Desharnais J.
AU - Tawbi N.
PY - 2025
SP - 105
EP - 116
DO - 10.5220/0013297800003944
PB - SciTePress