University of Advancing Technology's Official Technology Blog

Inspired by the lack of Internet of Things (IoT) security in homes and small business environments, Andrew Maddox (Network Security) created Smart House Security Solutions, a budget solution to network segmentation for home use of IoT networks. The project provides underutilized methods and tools for securing everyday IoT environments through a less expensive means of network segmentation, which is vital for the future and creates a demilitarized zone for the IoT devices.

To create the project demo, Andrew and fellow peers took advantage of the equipment in the lab and quickly got their hands dirty making IoT devices.

UAT’s segmented network was used as an example for this project. UAT’s primary segmented network leads to the primary front facing router with the switch delegating internet access based on IP range from the primary front facing router to personal computers or any computer that might be connected to the network. The IoT network has a wireless access point that facilitates all IoT communication between the devices and server.

The primary (public) router cannot ping the IoT network or device. As far as the front-facing router is concerned, the information was already passed to the IoT network router which distributes the information to the IoT devices for a more downstream flow. Without direct communication between the primary router and the IoT device/network, the IoT network becomes a demilitarized zone and handles the primary server communicating with the IoT devices and io network.

Andrew pursued the IoT project because of the experience he would gain and the opportunity it presented. The project involved systems administrative experience, network engineering, team management, problem solving and more. Throughout this project, Andrew learned a great deal about network segmentation as a component of the layers of network security, which is becoming more relevant as IoT becomes more pervasive.

Andrew is currently a Network Security major in his eighth semester at UAT, a previous CCDC team member and student ambassador and now a full-time employee at Norton LifeLock as a site reliability engineer.

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