Network Service Dependencies in Commodity Internet-of-Things Devices

We continue to see increasingly widespread deployment of IoT devices, with apparent intent to embed them in our built environment likely to accelerate if smart city and related programmes succeed. In this paper we are concerned with the ways in which current generation IoT devices are being designed in terms of their ill-considered dependencies on network connectivity and services. Our hope is to provide evidence that such dependencies need to be better thought through in design, and better documented in implementation so that those responsible for deploying these devices can be properly informed as to the impact of device deployment (at scale) on infrastructure resilience. We believe this will be particularly relevant as we feel that commodity IoT devices are likely to be commonly used to retrofit "smart" capabilities to existing buildings, particularly domestic buildings. To the existing body of work on network-level behaviour of IoT devices, we add (i) a protocol-level breakdown and analysis of periodicity, (ii) an exploration of the service and infrastructure dependencies that will implicitly be taken in "smart" environments when IoT devices are deployed, and (iii) examination of the robustness of device operation when connectivity is disrupted. We find that many devices make use of services distributed across the planet and thus appear dependent on the global network infrastructure even when carrying out purely local actions. Some devices cease to operate properly without network connectivity (even where their behaviour appears, on the face of it, to require only local information, e.g., the Hive thermostat). Further, they exhibit quite different network behaviours, typically involving significantly more traffic and possibly use of otherwise unobserved protocols, when connectivity is recovered after some disruption.