Context-Aware Security in the Internet of Things: What We Know and Where We are Going

Context awareness has been on the grow for the last couple of years and part of the reason for the emergence of this technology is the nature and dynamic of the Internet of Things (IoT) itself. Context awareness provides an additional layer of security for the ever-changing IoT entourage by providing an aware approach to security decisions. Traditional security mechanisms might not be always suitable for the context of IoT, thus context-aware security mechanism comes out as a suitable solution. Context awareness is a technique for identifying contextual circumstances using a particular context framework model of awareness, followed by identifying an appropriate solution that is centred on the findings. This paper presents a holistic view of context awareness for IoT security. Specifically, we intend to analyze how context awareness contributes to IoT security, we focus on investigating the context-aware security solutions proposed in the literature and exploring the techniques and approaches used to enhance IoT security based on contextual information, their effectiveness and benefits together with impediments of these solutions. In addition, we discuss the challenges associated with using context-aware security in the IoT and future research directions that need to be addressed in order to make contextual information more effective for security solutions in IoT.