EDUCATIONAL MATERIAL DEVELOPMENT FRAMEWORK BASED ON LINKED DATA FOR IOT SECURITY

This paper discusses one of the activities of a collaborative research project titled “Security in the Internet of Things Space” between IIT Delhi and Kyushu University. Recently, Cybersecurity has become very popular because of the many cyberattacks around the world. Similarly, IoT (Internet of Things) Security has become very important because more and more devices are connected to the Internet in order to collect various types of data. IoT space is sometimes referred to as a smart society consisting of smart cities, intelligent transportation systems and smart homes. Thus, IoT Security education is of great importance. This education-research focuses specifically on the ‘Security of Smart Building/Smart Home’ because these are closely related to our lives.

One of the key challenges addressed in this paper is the development of educational contents related to IoT security. As a first step, a database about IoT security will be built that contains the following information:
1. What kinds of IoT (systems, devices, sensors) would be present in a Smart Building/Smart Home
2. What kinds of attacks can be perpetrated on such IoT spaces
3. What kinds of damages could be caused by such attacks and what would be the associated cost
4. What kinds of preventive measures can be taken to thwart such attacks
The primary work of building such a database is to provide the various kinds of IoT threat information. The other research agenda is to provide an authoring tool that enables educators to easily develop educational materials about IoT security using the database.

A database that is built based on Linked Data mechanism is easy to update in terms of its contents and to share them easily with other researchers/educators. Therefore, the authors propose the idea of Linked Data in order to build a database about the IoT threat information. The Linked Data concept was originally proposed by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the WWW (World Wide Web). The Linked Data mechanism can be realized by several primitive ideas and implementations such as RDF (Resource Description Framework), SPARQL Protocol, RDF Query Language and SPARQL endpoint. In our educational tool development framework, the following steps are proposed:
Firstly, the metadata is collated according to RDF model (subject-predicate-object model). This is followed by building a database of IoT threat information, specifically in the context of Smart Building/Smart Home. This database draws upon some of the recent contents taken from several research papers already published. After that, the database is transformed into RDF data using the metadata. Finally, the SPARQL endpoint will be built using Virtuoso or Fuseki. This leads to the RDF database being accessible by SPARQL on WWW.
For the authoring tool, the authors have already developed a prototype system. This tool will be augmented so that the authoring tool is suitable for IoT Security applications.

Conclusion: In this paper, the authors propose a novel framework for the development of educational materials related to IoT Security. We propose the use of a database that contains IoT threat information, realized as Linked Data. We also propose an authoring tool that enables educators to easily develop educational materials related to IoT security. In the conference, the authors will report how to develop educational materials related to IoT security effectively, using the proposed database and the authoring tool.