BenchIoT: A Security Benchmark for the Internet of Things

Attacks against IoT systems are increasing at an alarming pace. Many IoT systems are and will be built using low-cost micro-controllers (IoT-pCs). Different security mechanisms have been proposed for IoT-mu Cs with different trade-offs. To guarantee a realistic and practical evaluation, the constrained resources of IoT-mu Cs require that defenses must be evaluated with respect to not only security, but performance, memory, and energy as well. Evaluating security mechanisms for IoT-mu Cs is limited by the lack of realistic benchmarks and evaluation frameworks. This burdens researchers with the task of developing not only the proposed defenses but applications on which to evaluate them. As a result, security evaluation for IoT-mu Cs is limited and adhoc. A sound benchmarking suite is essential to enable robust and comparable evaluations of security techniques on IoT-mu Cs. This paper introduces BenchloT, a benchmark suite and evaluation framework to address pressing challenges and limitations for evaluating IoT-mu Cs security. The evaluation framework enables automatic evaluation of 14 metrics covering security, performance, memory usage, and energy consumption. The BenchloT benchmarks provide a curated set of five real-world IoT applications that cover both IoT-mu Cs with and without an OS. We demonstrate BenchIoT's ability by evaluating three defense mechanisms. All benchmarks and the evaluation framework is open sourced and available to the research community(1).