An important challenge for supporting multimedia applications in the Internet of Things is the security heterogeneity of wired and wireless sensor and actuator net- works. In this work, we design a new and efficient media-aware security frame- work for facilitating various multimedia applications in the Internet of Things. First, we present a novel multimedia traffic classification and analysis method for han- dling the heterogeneity of diverse applications. Then a media-aware traffic security architecture is proposed based on the given traffic classification to enable various multimedia services being available anywhere and anytime. Furthermore, we pro- vide a design rule and strategy to achieve a good trade-off between a system’s flexibility and efficiency. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to pro- vide general media-aware security architecture by jointly considering the character- istics of multimedia traffic, security service, and the Internet of Things.