Secure Resilient Reproducible IoT-Smart Home Testbed for Cybersecurity Research

The growing integration of IoT devices in residential homes has driven research into their behavior and security. As a result, we designed and developed a reproducible smart home IoT cybersecurity testbed, along with a corresponding simulation twin to evaluate resilience and security end-to-end without sacrificing practical deployability. The testbed proposes how to integrates heterogeneous devices Raspberry Pi (gateway/MQTT broker–client), ESP32/ESP32-CAM, and Arduino over a segmented LAN with Wi-Fi/BLE at the edge and Zigbee for low-power sensing/actuation; Chapter 3 details the unified IoT framework covering system components, the communication/network layer (topic-namespace MQTT over IP, Zigbee APS security, VLAN/firewall isolation, time sync), and the security-and-monitoring plane (MQTT authentication/TLS, BLE whitelisting, key provisioning, broker and host logs, PCAP capture, and an IDS pipeline feeding dashboards). Adversarial evaluation is built into the architecture: scripted spoofing/replay, DoS against broker/Wi-Fi, and Zigbee contention/jamming are injected while telemetry records latency, packet-delivery ratio, throughput/goodput, recovery time, and energy per message. To choose and parameterise protocols for secure, efficient device communications, we simulate Zigbee in ns-3 and MQTT in OMNeT++/INET under realistic traffic, aligning simulator parameters with the lab setup and validating results against analytical bounds and synchronised traces. Findings show clear trade-offs: Zigbee’s low-power, short-range links with predictable latency tails versus MQTT’s IP-based flexibility and scalability that require careful hardening (auth/TLS, ACLs, sane QoS) and confirm that both are efficient for the testbed while exposing distinct, useful attack surfaces. Overall, the platform provides a modular, validated foundation for future intrusion-detection and secure-communication studies in IoT-driven smart homes.