Deep Dive into the IoT Backend Ecosystem

Deep Dive into the IoT Backend Ecosystem

Saidi, Said Jawad (Saarland University)
Matic, Srdjan (IMDEA Software Institute)
Gasser, Oliver (Max Planck Institut für Informatik)
Smaragdakis, G. (TU Delft Cyber Security)
Feldmann, Anja (Max Planck Institut für Informatik)

2022

Internet of Things (IoT) devices are becoming increasingly ubiquitous, e.g., at home, in enterprise environments, and in production lines. To support the advanced functionalities of IoT devices, IoT vendors as well as service and cloud companies operate IoT backendsÐthe focus of this paper. We propose a methodology to identify and locate them by (a) compiling a list of domains used exclusively by major IoT backend providers and (b) then identifying their server IP addresses. We rely on multiple sources, including IoT backend provider documentation, passive DNS data, and active scanning. For analyzing IoT traffic patterns, we rely on passive network flows from a major European ISP. Our analysis focuses on the top IoT backends and unveils diverse operational strategiesÐfrom operating their own infrastructure to utilizing the public cloud. We find that the majority of the top IoT backend providers are located in multiple locations and countries. Still, a handful are located only in one country, which could raise regulatory scrutiny as the client IoT devices are located in other regions. Indeed, our analysis shows that up to 35% of IoT traffic is exchanged with IoT backend servers located in other continents. We also find that at least six of the top IoT backends rely on other IoT backend providers. We also evaluate if cascading effects among the IoT backend providers are possible in the event of an outage, a misconfiguration, or an attack.

IoT operation
IoT security and privacy
internet measurement
internet of things (IoT)

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:ac948bf4-d850-4d66-b30c-d5ff451a922a

https://doi.org/10.1145/3517745.3561431

Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), New York, NY, USA

9781450392594

Proceedings of the 22nd ACM Internet Measurement Conference

Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference, IMC

Institutional Repository

conference paper

© 2022 Said Jawad Saidi, Srdjan Matic, Oliver Gasser, G. Smaragdakis, Anja Feldmann