Smriti Bhatt, Evolving Security Landscape in the Agentic AI-Enabled IoT Era

The rapid evolution of connected devices and technologies has transformed the Internet of Things (IoT) into increasingly intelligent and autonomous systems. This talk focuses on the progression from traditional IoT to the Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT), and further toward Agent-Based IoT (AB-IoT), also referred to as Agentic AI-enabled IoT. As intelligent agents become embedded within IoT ecosystems, they introduce new capabilities for autonomy and decision-making, but also significantly reshape the security landscape. In this talk, I first outline the technological evolution from IoT to AIoT and Agentic AI-enabled IoT systems. I then discuss how the adoption of agentic intelligence in IoT environments introduces emerging security risks and threats with particular emphasis on challenges related to authentication, access control, and trust management in highly distributed and autonomous environments. I also present potential approaches to address these challenges, including zero-trust security frameworks and context-aware machine learning–based access control mechanisms. Finally, this talk highlights current research challenges and open problems in securing Agentic AI-enabled IoT systems, outlining future directions for building resilient, trustworthy, and secure next-generation Agentic AI-enabled IoT infrastructures. About the speaker: Dr. Smriti Bhatt is an Assistant Professor of Cybersecurity in the School of Applied and Creative Computing at Purdue University. She has received her Ph.D. and M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at San Antonio and did her doctoral research at the Institute for Cyber Security (ICS) and NSF CREST Center for Security and Privacy Enhanced Cloud Computing (C-SPECC). Dr. Bhatt's research focuses on security and privacy in the Internet of Things (IoT) and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) leveraging Cloud and Edge Computing. Her research interests also include the application of AI and Machine Learning to secure IoT and CPS infrastructures in various application domains, such as Smart Health, Smart Home, and Wearable IoT. Some of her current research work includes access control models, secure data communication, and anomaly detection for different domains in Cloud-Enabled IoT. She has several conference and journal publications, and also continually serves as an expert reviewer for various journals and technical program committees for several conferences and workshops.