Enhancing MUD policy management in a Smart Home Gateway environment

The widespread use of Internet of Things (IoT) technology has brought unparalleled ease and comfort, but it has also triggered significant worries about security and privacy. The intricate and diversified nature of IoT ecosystems, encompassing various device categories and manufacturers, necessitates the formation of proper security measures to fend off potential threats. One of the promising solutions to tackle this issue is the Manufacturer Usage Description (MUD) standard. MUD enables manufacturers to specify the endpoints that a MUD-enabled device can access, thus blocking all other unwanted connections. Its implementation enhances security and privacy in IoT environments, ensuring that devices only communicate with authorized endpoints. This thesis aims to optimize a recently proposed approach to merge developer-specified reachable endpoints into a single gateway-level MUD file for devices and for software plugins that lack inherent MUD support. With the ongoing expansion of IoT ecosystems comes the possibility of overlapping rules and conflicts that need addressing when merging several files. Our study tackles this challenge resolving conflicts and optimizing the rules within the gateway-level MUD file. Nonetheless, it is crucial that the rules are written accurately to enable the MUD manager, which enforces the MUD policies, to process them without error. This requires a meticulous inspection to confirm that every policy adheres to a valid structure while containing no forbidden elements according to MUD standards. Ensuring the integrity of these policies is crucial for maintaining the security and reliability of the IoT network. The aim of this research is to produce a final MUD file that is conflict-free and optimized to enhance rule application speed and efficiency. This thesis demonstrates that, through optimization, the final number of rules is reduced, and with conflict management, there are no rules that can be interpreted ambiguously, resulting in a robust and secure framework for IoT device communication.