Discovering Hazards in IoT Architectures: A Safety Analysis Approach for Medical Use Cases

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) systems are becoming increasingly safety-critical as the 'Things' become an integral part of everyday life and are given control over life-sustaining processes. As such, these products will need safety-aware analysis during the software development life cycle to ensure they operate successfully without harming users. The overall objective of this study is to construct an approach for conducting safety analysis on the IoT systems in the design phase of the Software Development Life Cycle. The increasing complexity of the IoT raises concerns with respect to properly assuring IoT safety, since more interaction among components and tighter coupling may result in increased logical errors, posing new safety risks. To show the effect of these problems, we have analyzed several medical systems using our proposed methodology. In this study, we present a methodology to implement IoT systems which takes into account errors and potential hazards at design time. To increase the adoptability of our approach, we use standardized languages/model to represent errors. The suggested approach's viability is substantiated by analyzing diverse medical use cases, wherein different types of software faults have occurred. These faults have resulted in harm or potentially hazardous situations in medical IoT products. The results of our study show that tracing errors via our method leads to the discovery of hazards in IoT architectures without requiring specialized domain knowledge. The results also are validated based on the traceability criteria. By providing a new hazard analysis method based on early design knowledge and validating early in the Software Development Life Cycle, we discover more hazards and safety constraints to ensure the success of safety critical IoT systems.