🤖 AI Summary
This study addresses the methodological gap in IoT security research between low-fidelity simulations and costly, hard-to-reproduce physical testbeds. To bridge this divide, the authors propose BYOT-CPS, a hybrid cyber-physical testbed that integrates real IoT devices—such as smart bulbs and cameras—with virtual networks emulated in GNS3. Designed to meet core requirements of fidelity, heterogeneity, scalability, reproducibility, and isolation, the platform implements a structured experimental environment comprising enterprise, service, attack, and monitoring zones. The system successfully demonstrates mixed physical-virtual networking, penetration testing, Mirai-style DDoS attack emulation, and fine-grained traffic monitoring. BYOT-CPS effectively narrows the gap between simulation and physical experimentation, offering a robust infrastructure for IoT security research, education, and third-party evaluation.
📝 Abstract
Internet of Things (IoT) security research continues to face a methodological gap between scalable virtual experimentation and realistic device behaviour. While pure simulation and emulation platforms provide control, repeatability, and scale, they do not fully reproduce firmware-specific behaviours, hardware characteristics, and vendor implementation weaknesses that frequently determine real-world exploitability. Conversely, physicalonly testbeds provide realism but are costly to assemble, difficult to reconfigure, and hard to replicate across institutions. This paper presents Build Your Own Cyber-Physical Systems Testbed (BYOT-CPS), a hybrid cyber-physical testbed that connects real IoT devices to virtualised network infrastructure built on GNS3. BYOT-CPS is designed to support security experimentation, education, and independent evaluation of commercial IoT security platforms within a controlled environment that preserves authentic device behaviour. Six requirements for such a testbed are defined: fidelity, heterogeneity, scalability, reproducibility, extensibility, and independence. A prototype deployment integrating smart bulbs, smart plugs, switches, and IP cameras with virtual enterprise, server, attack, and monitoring zones is used to demonstrate hybrid connectivity, penetration testing workflows, a Mirai-style denial-of-service attack, traffic monitoring, and controlled device manipulation. The evidence presented constitutes a feasibility validation of the framework rather than a largescale comparative benchmark. Within that scope, BYOT-CPS offers a practical middle ground between emulation-only research environments and costly physical laboratories while positioning vendor-neutral platform evaluation as a forward-looking design objective.