Threat Modeling of Edge-Based IoT Applications

The Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) computing model provides on-demand cloud resources and services to the edge of the network, to offer storage and computing capacity, mobility, and context awareness support for emerging Internet of Things (IoT) applications. On the other hand, its complex hierarchical model introduces new vulnerabilities, which can influence the security of IoT applications. The use of different enabling technologies at the edge of the network, such as various wireless access and virtualization technologies, implies several threats and challenges that make the security analysis and the deployment of security mechanisms a technically challenging problem. This paper proposes a technique to model Edge-based systems and automatically extract security threats and plan possible security tests. The proposed approach is tested against a simple, but significant case study. The main contribution consists of a threat catalog that can be used to derive a threat model and perform a risk analysis process of specific MEC-based IoT scenarios.