Abstract: With the development of smart home, intelligent care and smart car, the application fields of IoT are becoming more and more widespread, and its security and privacy receive more attention by researchers. Currently, the related research on the security of the IoT is still in its initial stage, and most of the research results cannot solve the major security problem in the development of the IoT well. In this paper, we firstly introduce the three-layer logic architecture of the IoT, and outline the security problems and research priorities of each level. Then we discuss the security issues such as privacy preserving and intrusion detection, which need special attention in the IoT main application scenarios (smart home, intelligent healthcare, car networking, smart grid, and other industrial infrastructure). Though synthesizing and analyzing the deficiency of existing research and the causes of security problem, we point out five major technical challenges in IoT security. They are privacy protection in data sharing, the equipment security protection under limited resources, more effective intrusion detection and defense systems and method, access control of equipment automation operations and cross-domain authentication of motive device. We finally detail every technical challenge and point out the IoT security research hotspots in future.