The Mon(IoT)r Testbed is the name of the traffic capture software we have developed for the Mon(IoT)r Lab. The software is currently deployed also at Imperial College London, and a new deployment is being installed at Politecnico di Torino.
The purpose of this software is the following:
- Provide wired and wireless network connectivity to IoT devices and their companion devices in a controlled way.
- Automatically collect traffic from devices connected to the testbed.
- Automatically try to perform man-in-the-middle of TLS connections, depending on the TLS interception policy. For example, if the auto-exception policy is used: if interception is possible, the decrypted data is collected, if not possible, disable the man-in-the-middle for devices and destination domains that do not allow it.
- Provide an arbitrary number of different independent connectivities that guarantee no interference among them. This allows researchers to run multiple independent experiments at the same time. In our specific setup at Northeastern, we use three connectivities.
- Allow researches to specify a different gateway for each connectivity. This allows the use of different WAN connections, including VPNs with remote locations, without having to reconfigure any IoT device.
- Automatically organize the data by device and automatically tag it by MAC Address, IP address, and a customized device name.
- Allow researchers to mark experiments with arbitrary keywords to help relating collected traffic to what caused such traffic. This simplifies the organization of experiments.
- Allow to block the traffic for specific IoT devices using DNS override technique (i.e., override the answer of the DNS service to block or redirect IoT devices connections).
- Block IP traffic by device. Use a high-level interface for filtering IP traffic of individual IoT devices without having to interact directly with the firewall.
Current users and vision
The Mon(IoT)r Testbed is currently being used at Northeastern University, Imperial College London, and soon at Politecnico di Torino. All the labs where The Mon(IoT)r Lab is deployed can be connected using a VPN to each other, making it possible to run IoT experiments with connectivity of each other lab. Our ambition is to have our testbed deployed in as many IoT lab as possible to facilitate research about IoT behavior in international contexts.
HOW TO GET THE SOFTWARE
Latest version
The Mon(IoT)r Testbed is under constant development. The latest release we use in our Mon(IoT)r Lab and its installation manual are available for download at Github: https://github.com/djdubois/moniotr-core
IMC 2019 version
The Mon(IoT)r Testbed version we used for our IMC 2019 paper (which also includes the code for running the automated experiments that are part of the paper) is publicly available for download at Github: https://github.com/NEU-SNS/intl-iot/tree/master/moniotr
LICENSE: Apache License v2.0