A Multi-criteria Weighting Approach with Application to Internet of Things

The diversity of Internet of Things (IoT) systems can be viewed from two points of view, one that consists of providing the necessary applications and another that can lead to a large number of security threats and attacks. The analysis of the influence between different IoT security requirements (IoT-SR) as well as the determination of the importance of each security requirement play a vital role in the issue of the effective evaluation of an IoT system. The diverse nature, importance, evaluation and influence of multiple IoT-SR are the main issues that make this problem a multi-criteria problem. Considering the qualitative nature of IoT-SR and the advantages of fuzzy sets in efficiently dealing with uncertainty, fuzzy subjective weighting methods can be used to address the problem. The paper proposes a Multi-Criteria Weighting Approach (MCWA) based on the Fuzzy DEMATEL method in combination with two weighting methods, aiming to analyze cause-and-effect relationships for a set of criteria and to calculate the criteria weights. An application of MCWA for IoT-SR is realized. The obtained results can open new ways for system security specialists to focus on security requirements determined to be of increased importance.