Primer on attacks and countermeasures

Now that we have briefly visited threats, vulnerabilities, and risk, let's dive into greater detail on the types and compositions of attacks present in the IoT and how they can be put together to perform attack campaigns. In this section, we will also introduce attack trees (and fault trees) to help readers visualize and communicate how real-world attacks can happen. It is also our hope that they gain wider adoption and use in broader threat modeling activities, not unlike the threat model example later in this chapter.

Common IoT attack types

There are many attack types covered in this book; however, the following list provides some of the most significant as they relate to the IoT:

• Wired and wireless scanning and mapping attacks
• Protocol attacks
• Eavesdropping attacks (loss of confidentiality)
• Cryptographic algorithm and key management attacks
• Spoofing and masquerading (authentication attacks)
• Operating system and application integrity attacks
• Denial of service...