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IoT European Security and Privacy Projects: Integration, Architectures and Interoperability

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Abstract and Figures

The chapter presents an overview of the eight that are part of the European IoT Security and Privacy Projects initiative (IoT-ESP) addressing advanced concepts for end-to-end security in highly distributed, heteroge- neous and dynamic IoT environments. The approaches presented are holistic and include identification and authentication, data protection and prevention against cyber-attacks at the device and system levels. The projects present architectures, concepts, methods and tools for open IoT platforms integrating evolving sensing, actuating, energy harvesting, networking and interface technologies. Platforms should provide connectivity and intelligence, actu- ation and control features, linkage to modular and ad-hoc cloud services, The IoT platforms used are compatible with existing international developments addressing object identity management, discovery services, virtualisation of objects, devices and infrastructures and trusted IoT approaches.
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7
IoT European Security and Privacy
Projects: Integration, Architectures
and Interoperability
Enrico Ferrera1, Claudio Pastrone1, Paul-Emmanuel Brun2,
Remi De Besombes2, Konstantinos Loupos3, Gerasimos Kouloumpis3,
Patrick O’ Sullivan3, Alexandros Papageorgiou3,
Panayiotis Katsoulakos3, Bill Karakostas4, Antonis Mygiakis5,
Christina Stratigaki5, Bora Caglayan6, Basile Starynkevitch7,
Christos Skoufis8, Stelios Christofi8, Nicolas Ferry9, Hui Song9,
Arnor Solberg10, Peter Matthews11, Antonio F. Skarmeta12,
Jos´
e Santa12, Michail J. Beliatis13, Mirko A. Presser13,
Josiane X. Parreira14, Juan A. Mart´
ınez15, Payam Barnaghi16,
Shirin Enshaeifar16, Thorben Iggena17 , Marten Fischer17,
Ralf T¨
onjes17, Martin Strohbach18, Alessandro Sforzin19,
Hien Truong19, John Soldatos20, Sofoklis Efremidis20,
Georgios Koutalieris21, Panagiotis Gouvas22, Juergen Neises23,
George Hatzivasilis24, Ioannis Askoxylakis24, Vivek Kulkarni25,
Arne Broering25, Dariusz Dober26, Kostas Ramantas27,
Christos Verikoukis28, Joachim Posegga29, Domenico Presenza30,
George Spanoudakis31, Danilo Pau32, Erol Gelenbe33,34,
Sl
-
awomir Nowak34, Mateusz Nowak34, Tadeusz Czach´
orski34,
Joanna Doma´
nska34, Anastasis Drosou35, Dimitrios Tzovaras35,
Tommi Elo36, Santeri Paavolainen36, Dmitrij Lagutin36,
Helen C. Leligou37, Panagiotis Trakadas37 and George C. Polyzos38
1Istituto Superiore Mario Boella, Italy
2AIRBUS CyberSecurity, France
3INLECOM Systems Ltd, United Kingdom
4VLTN BVBA, Belgium
5CLMS Hellas, Greece
1
2IoT European Security and Privacy Projects
6IBM Ireland Ltd, Ireland
7Basile Starynkevitch, CEA, France
8EBOS Technologies Ltd, Cyprus
9SINTEF, NO
10TellU, NO
11CA Technologies, SP
12Department of Information and Communication Engineering,
University of Murcia, Spain
13Department of Business Development and Technology,
Aarhus University, Denmark
14Department of Corporate Technology, SIEMENS, Austria
15Odin Solutions S.L, Spain
16Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Surrey,
United Kingdom
17University of Applied Sciences Osnabr¨
uck, Germany
18AGT International, Germany
19NEC Laboratories Europe, Germany
20Athens Information Technology, Greece
21Intrasoft International, Luxembourg
22UBITECH LTD, Greece
23FUJITSU Europe, Germany
24Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas (FORTH), Greece
25Siemens AG, Germany
26BlueSoft SP. z o.o., Poland
27Iquadrat, Spain
28Telecommunications Technological Centre of Catalonia (CTTC), Spain
29University of Passau, Germany
30Engineering Ingegneria Informatica S.p.A., Italy
31Sphynx Technology Solutions AG, Switzerland
32ST Microelectronics Srl., Italy
33Imperial College London, Great Britain & IITiS PAN, Poland
34IITiS PAN, Poland
35ITI-CERTH, Thessaloniki, Greece
36Aalto University, Finland
37Synelixis Solutions S.A., Greece
38Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece
7.1 BRAIN-IoT 3
Abstract
The chapter presents an overview of the eight that are part of the
European IoT Security and Privacy Projects initiative (IoT-ESP) addressing
advanced concepts for end-to-end security in highly distributed, heteroge-
neous and dynamic IoT environments. The approaches presented are holistic
and include identification and authentication, data protection and prevention
against cyber-attacks at the device and system levels. The projects present
architectures, concepts, methods and tools for open IoT platforms integrating
evolving sensing, actuating, energy harvesting, networking and interface
technologies. Platforms should provide connectivity and intelligence, actu-
ation and control features, linkage to modular and ad-hoc cloud services, The
IoT platforms used are compatible with existing international developments
addressing object identity management, discovery services, virtualisation of
objects, devices and infrastructures and trusted IoT approaches.
7.1 BRAIN-IoT
7.1.1 BRAIN-IoT Project Vision
In line with the optimistic forecasts released in last years, Internet of
Things (IoT) products and services are being more and more deployed in
mass-market and professional usage scenarios, becoming a reality in our day-
by-day life. Commercial and pilot deployments world-wide are progressively
demonstrating the value of IoT solutions in real conditions, but also rising
some concerns with respect to dependability, security, privacy and safety
constraints.
The IoT technology and market landscape will become increasingly
complex in the longer term i.e. 10+ years from now, especially after IoT
technologies will have proven their full potential in business-critical and
privacy-sensitive scenarios. An important shift is expected to happen as
technology evolutions will allow to safely employ IoT systems in scenarios
involving actuation and characterized by stricter requirements in terms of
dependability, security, privacy and safety constraints, resulting in conver-
gence between IoT and Cyber Physical Systems (CPS). Attracted by the
trend, several organizations have started studying how to employ IoT systems
also to support tasks involving actuation and control in business-critical
conditions, resulting in a demand for more dependable and “smart” IoT
systems. However, in order to turn such vision in reality, many issues must
still be faced, including:
4IoT European Security and Privacy Projects
Heterogeneity and (lack of) interoperability: a wide number of IoT
platforms exist on the market, both cloud- based and locally hosted.
Standardization and open-source initiatives are facilitating convergence
among available platforms, which now employ similar usage patterns
and increasingly converging sets of protocols, APIs, device models
and data interchange formats. Nevertheless, full interoperability across
platform still needs to be tackled on a case by case, platform by platform
basis, due the wide amount of possible applications, design choices,
customization options, formats and configurations that can be adopted
by IoT developers and adopters.
Difficulty of implementing “Smart Behaviours” in open collaboration
context: while Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI)
techniques are rapidly evolving to provide smart behaviours and solu-
tions to increasingly complex problems, it is intrinsically difficult to
generically “bind” such solutions to generic concrete IoT and CPS plat-
forms and to make them collaborate for common tasks, since possible
interactions between platforms remain unforeseen a priori.
Security and safety: the distributed nature of IoT makes enforcement
of good security practices intrinsically challenging. The market asks for
IoT solutions suitable to safely support business-critical tasks, which can
be deployed rapidly and with low costs. The emerging availability of
actuation features in IoT systems calls for stricter security requirements.
Nevertheless, many of today’s IoT-based products are implemented
with low awareness of potential security risks. As a result, many
IoT products lack even basic, state-of-the-art security mechanisms,
resulting in critical effects when such flaws deployed to mass-market
scenarios.
Enforcement of Privacy and Data Ownership policies: as IoT products
are increasingly purchased and deployed by corporate and private users
in their homes, work places, factories and commercial areas, privacy
issues and violations become more frequent. While policies are quickly
catching up by enforcing a suitable framework of rules within the EU,
a comprehensive solution able to give back control of privacy aspects to
users is still missing – creating significant issues when unaware users
accept that their data is moved in foreign countries, outside the safe
shield provided by EU regulations.
Business models colliding with long-term resilience and survivability
of IoT services: many IoT solutions on the market adopt fully cen-
tralized, cloud-oriented approaches. This is often done e.g. to ensure
7.1 BRAIN-IoT 5
that customers’ devices are forced to use forever a single commercial
back-end service. Such lock-in approaches create artificial monopolies,
negatively affecting user rights and the overall market competitiveness.
This practice introduces singular point of failures in IoT systems, mak-
ing survivability and resiliency features difficult to be granted in the
long term, therefore sometimes resulting in negative experiences for
end users.
Market Fragmentation and incumbency of large players: the current
market of IoT platform solution is still affected by fragmentation among
the many IoT platforms available each focused in specific application
domain or associated technology stacks. Moreover, some market seg-
ments (i.e. the cloud-based IoT platforms market) are notably dominated
by few dominant players – often based outside the EU, thus hampering
the potential business opportunities for EU companies.
While EU-based initiatives and policies are doing significant amount of work
to tackle such issues, often with very positive results, solutions suitable to
tackle challenges arising for futuristic IoT usage scenarios are still missing.
Future critical issues may be hiding under the hood already now and be
ready to appear in the close future, putting at stake user acceptance and the
credibility of the whole eco-system of IoT solutions vendors, integrators and
adopters and hindering wider adoption of IoT solutions in potentially valuable
markets.
7.1.2 Objectives
In order to tackle the aforementioned challenges, the BRAIN-IoT (model-
Based fRamework for dependable sensing and Actuation in INtelligent decen-
tralized IoT systems) project focuses on complex scenarios, where actuation
and control are cooperatively supported by populations of heterogeneous IoT
systems. In such a complex context, many initiatives fall into the temptation
of developing new IoT platforms, protocols, models or tools aiming to deliver
the ultimate solution that will solve all the IoT challenges and become “the”
reference IoT platform or standard. Instead, usually they result in the creation
of “yet-another” IoT solution or standard.
BRAIN-IoT will establish the principle that future IoT applications
should never be supported by a single, unique, irreplaceable IoT platform.
Rather future IoT services should exist within a federated/evolving environ-
ment that not only leverages current Industry Standards but is also capable of
adapting to embrace future unforeseen industry developments. BRAIN-IoT
6IoT European Security and Privacy Projects
aims at demonstrating that the lack of a single IoT standard and platform,
which is generally recognized as the most notable weakness of IoT, can be
turned into a strength and a guarantee for market competitiveness and user
protection – if the proper framework for IoT dynamicity, security and privacy
is in place.
The breakthrough targeted by BRAIN-IoT is to establish a practical
framework and methodology suitable to enable smart cooperative behaviour
in fully de-centralized, composable and dynamic federations of heteroge-
neous IoT platforms. BRAIN-IoT builds on model-based approaches and
open industry standards and aims at supporting rapid development and
deployment of applications and services in professional usage scenarios
characterized by strict constraints in terms of dependability, safety, security
and privacy. The BRAIN-IoT vision is realized through seven Technical
Objectives (TOs), as described in Table 7.1.
Table 7.1 BRAIN-IoT technical objectives
Technical Objective (TO) Description
TO1: to enforce interoperability
across heterogeneous IoT
devices autonomously
cooperating in complex tasks.
BRAIN-IoT approach to interoperability is
based on the adoption of shared semantic
models, dynamically linked to concrete IoT
devices (sensors, actuators, controls, etc.)
operating autonomously in complex scenarios.
Binding of models to concrete implementations
leverages mapping to open industry standards
for semantic device description.
TO2: to enable dynamic smart
autonomous behaviour
involving actuation in IoT
scenarios
Building upon shared models (TO1)
BRAIN-IoT facilitates the deployment of smart
cooperative behaviour, realized by means of
modular AI/ML features which can be
dynamically deployed to heterogeneous IoT
devices in mixed edge/cloud IoT environments.
Smart behaviour features are enriched by
distributed data processing, federated learning,
virtualization/aggregation of
data/events/objects, resolution of
mixed-criticality situations and conflicts,
verification and context-aware self-adaptation
of connectivity and real-time event-oriented,
reactive approaches.
(Continued)
7.1 BRAIN-IoT 7
Table 7.1 Continued
Technical Objective (TO) Description
TO3: to enable the emergence
of highly dynamic federations
of heterogeneous IoT platforms
able to support secure and
scalable operations for future
IoT use cases
This is achieved by leveraging fully
de-centralized peer-to-peer approaches
providing linkage between modular, ad-hoc IoT
self-hosted and cloud-based services through
existing open standards.
TO4: to establish
Authentication, Authorization
and Accounting (AAA) in
dynamic, distributed IoT
scenarios
BRAIN-IoT introduces a holistic end-to-end
trust framework for IoT platforms suitable to be
employed in scenarios characterized by strict
security and safety requirements, associated
with actuation and semi-autonomous
operations, and by special needs for secure
identification, authentication of data and
devices, encryption, non-deniability, as well as
detection of cyber-attacks and protection
against them. This is done by adopting
established security protocols, joint with
distributed security approaches derived by
peer-to-peer systems e.g. block-chain.
TO5: to provide solutions to
embed privacy-awareness and
privacy control features in IoT
solutions
BRAIN-IoT develops new patterns for
interaction between users and IoT solutions,
leveraging semantic mapping of privacy
requirements towards data and service models
in use in each specific use case, introducing
privacy-related APIs and models. This enables
the possibility to programmatically inform users
about privacy policies in place, as well as
enabling them to exercise fine-grained privacy
controls.
TO6: to facilitate rapid
model-based development and
integration of interoperable IoT
solutions supporting smart
cooperative behaviour
BRAIN-IoT provides tools to ease rapid
prototyping (development, integration) of smart
cooperative IoT systems. This is achieved by
extending available tools for development,
integration, commissioning and management of
IoT and Cyber-Physical systems.
TO7: to enable commissioning
and reconfiguration of
decentralized IoT-based
applications
BRAIN-IoT enables end-users to dynamically
commission and reconfigure their modular IoT
instances, choosing among the available
platforms, modules implementations and
services. This is achieved by extending existing
open marketplace of IoT services and data
jointly with available catalogues providing open
IoT enablers and integrating them with its
federation framework.
8IoT European Security and Privacy Projects
7.1.3 Technical Approach
The overall BRAIN-IoT concept is depicted in Figure 7.1 following the
reference model proposed by Recommendation ITU-T Y.2060. BRAIN-IoT
looks at heterogeneous IoT scenarios where instances of IoT architectures
can be built dynamically combining and federating a distributed set of IoT
services, IoT platforms and other enabling functionalities made available in
marketplaces and accessible by means of open and standard IoT APIs and
protocols.
At the bottom of the conceptual architecture, the IoT Devices and Gate-
ways layer represents all physical world IoT devices with sensing or actuating
capabilities, computing devices and includes complex subsystems such as
autonomous robots and critical control devices. It is worth observing that
BRAIN-IoT specifically aims to support the integration into an IoT environ-
ment of devices and subsystems with actuation features that could possible
give rise to mixed-criticality situations and require the implementation of
distributed processing approaches. The BRAIN-IoT Management capabilities
includes all the features needed to support the envisioned fully decentralized
scenario dynamically integrating heterogeneous IoT Devices and Gateways
as well as:
IoT Services – third party services accessible through open interfaces
and offering data or various functionalities including data storage, data
statistics and analytics, data visualization;
IoT Devices
and Gateways
Sensors
Computing Devices
Control System
Actuators
Authentication
Authorisation
Identity Management
Privacy and Data
Ownership Control
Trust Features
Accounting
Decentralized
Security and Privacy
Capabilities
sledoMdnaseiralubacoVnepO
BRAIN-IoT
Management
Capabilities
Decentralized IoT
Instances Management
BRAIN-IoT Marketplace
IoT Service
IoT Modules
Search
Composition
Discovery
MonitoringDeployment
Open & Standard IoT API
API
IoT Platforms
Orchestration
IoT S10
IoT S3
IoT Instances
Service Robotics
Application
Scenarios
Critical
Infrastructure
Management
Other LSP
Applications
IoTP1
b
Io
b
b
b
b
b
b
b
b
b
b
b
b
b
a
Io
T
P
Io
a
a
a
a
a
a
cIoTP5
Io
T
P
b
f
IoTP2
Io
T
e
IoTP7
Io
T
P
b
f
Figure 7.1 The high-level BRAIN-IoT concept.
7.1 BRAIN-IoT 9
IoT Platforms – instances of open IoT platforms whose configuration
and functionalities can be dynamically updated;
IoT Modules – enabling functionalities (e.g., smart control features, data
processing, data storage) that can be associated to a specific IoT platform
instance and composed in order to meet given functional requirements.
Concerning the IoT Modules, the ones supporting smart control features
are particularly relevant for the BRAIN-IoT challenging scenarios encom-
passing heterogeneous sensors and actuators autonomously cooperating in
complex, dynamic tasks, possibly across different IoT Platforms. BRAIN-
IoT will then develop a library of IoT modules implementing algorithms
promoting collaborative context-based behaviours, control solutions based on
Machine Learning Control, real-time data analysis and knowledge extraction
techniques. Concerning the IoT Platforms, BRAIN-IoT will support different
existing IoT solutions including e.g., FIWARE and SOFIA. All the above
IoT building blocks can be described by a set of open and extendable
vocabularies as well as semantic and behavioural models. This actually
allows moving forward an easier, automated and dynamic integration within
the BRAIN-IoT environment of new and existing IoT Services, Platforms
and Modules available for traditional IoT applications. In fact, BRAIN-IoT
defines a new meta-language, namely the IoT Modelling Language (IoT-ML),
which uses the above set of vocabularies and models to formally describe
an IoT Instance i.e., how a given set of IoT services and Platforms are
interconnected with each other and federated and which IoT Modules are
associated to the considered IoT Platforms. IoT-ML will base on existing
solutions provided by OMG and W3C. The Decentralized IoT Instances
management is instead in charge of offering the capabilities needed to support
the dynamic composition of a given set of IoT building blocks into a specific
IoT Instance. The vision is to progress from the fog computing paradigm
and create distributed IoT Micro-cloud environments hosting IoT Platforms
and IoT Modules and advertising their runtime capabilities. The resulting
Micro-cloud environments are enhanced with management capabilities that
allow search and discovery operations and their dynamic federation to form a
specific IoT instance. These capabilities pave the way toward highly dynamic
scenarios where IoT Modules and relevant functionalities can be composed
and migrated runtime from one IoT Platform to another, complex tasks can
be dynamically distributed between the edge and the cloud IoT Platforms
depending on variable requirements and where IoT Instances can be fully
reconfigured adding/removing runtime new IoT building blocks from the
federation. BRAIN-IoT will also provide peculiar management strategies and
10 IoT European Security and Privacy Projects
techniques permitting the dynamic deployment/transfer of Smart Control IoT
Modules across mixed edge and cloud environments. The Decentralized IoT
Instances management also handles advanced IoT Instances configurations,
properly orchestrating external IoT services with other IoT building blocks
active in the resulting BRAIN-IoT fog environment. Finally, monitoring
components allow to continuously supervise the overall IoT Instance and
relevant composite application. In this way, it is possible to check the status
of the federated building blocks, provide alerting, reporting and logging
mechanisms and, if needed, trigger an IoT Instance reconfiguration e.g.,
because of a failure in one of the adopted IoT Modules, Platforms or Services.
All the described management capabilities will base on relevant industry
standards i.e., W3C Web of Things and OSGi, and will be extended to support
agile composition and orchestration. The scalability aspects will be taken into
careful consideration to support effective discovery and search of a potential
high number of IoT building blocks. The orchestration process is conceived
in such a way that it is possible to import/link IoT Modules, Platforms
and Services made available from a BRAIN-IoT Marketplace characterized
by a relevant set of open APIs. One of the most peculiar aspects being
considered in BRAIN-IoT is the management of actuation capabilities in the
considered Fog environment. In this context, the possibility to easily develop
the previously introduced smart control features is pretty relevant. To this
aim, BRAIN-IoT will evolve from already existing solutions, such as Eclipse
Papyrus, and develop Model Binding and Synthesis tools extended to support
the BRAIN-IoT open vocabularies and models, the IoT-ML and other IoT
related standards. The resulting toolset will be used to develop novel Smart
Control Features that could be possibly published as IoT Modules in the
BRAIN-IoT Marketplace, as depicted in Figure 7.2.
Finally, Figure 7.3. summarizes the above description of the BRAIN-IoT
environment offering a view of possible configurations of an IoT Instance
with different distribution of the IoT building blocks between edge and cloud.
BRAIN-IoT
Marketplace
Open
Vocabularies
and Models
AI Features
ML Features
s
Smart Dynamic
Behaviour
Model Binding &
Synthesis Tools
Figure 7.2 BRAIN-IoT development concept.
7.1 BRAIN-IoT 11
Decentralized Security and Privacy Capabilities
BRAIN-IoT
Management
Capabilities
WoT
Open Vocabularies
and Models
ab
Edge
IoTP1
BRAIN-IoT Marketplace
Decentralized IoT
Instances Management
ab
Cloud IoTP2
IoTS1
S1
IoTS2
S2
a
b
Cloud IoTP2
IoT Devices
and Gateways
Edge
IoTP1
a
Edge
IoTP1
IoT Instance
Conf #1 IoT Instance
Conf #2 IoT Instance
Conf #3 IoT Instance
Conf #4 IoT Instance
Conf #5
Behaviour
Distribution
Figure 7.3 BRAIN-IoT deployment concept.
7.1.4 Security Architecture Concept
From the security and privacy perspective, IoT currently presents two main
inherent weaknesses:
Security is not considered at the design phase,
As of today, no solution is offering a complete end-to-end security
approach for any kind of devices (from the temperature sensor, the
smoke detector, to the robot).
Existing systems don’t apply the “secure-by-design” concept where security
is seen as one of the major constraint of the system. To provide secure IoT
solutions, modelling and analysis need to be integrated in the design and
validation of application scenarios and IoT architectures. If the focus moves
to a scenario where different heterogeneous building blocks are dynamically
composed, additional security and privacy concerns arise. As a consequence,
BRAIN-IoT provides a methodology to address security in the considered
fog environment, based on an iterative process, allowing to take into account
new scenarios. More specifically, BRAIN-IoT extend the successful methods
of attack tree modelling and quantitative analysis to support secure com-
posable IoT systems. This extension enables transparent risk assessment
of IoT security architectures, i.e., it will address the needs and potential
risks involved in an IoT environment specifying when and where to apply
security controls in an understandable way thus raising user-awareness and
trustworthiness. The results of the analysis are specific technical require-
ment to implement for each use case/scenario in order to reach the targeted
security level.
12 IoT European Security and Privacy Projects
Use Case
Assets
Identification
Threats and
Vulnerabilities
Identification
Security
Objectives
Security
Requirements
Figure 7.4 Iterative risk analysis methodology.
Second, existing security solution for IoT have many weaknesses, such as:
Lot of flow disruption (with network component accessing data in clear
text)
Some protocol chooses to downgrade security algorithm to fit perfor-
mance constraints,
State-of-the-art solution are complex to set up in decentralized environ-
ment.
In order to provide a new approach, BRAIN-IoT integrates innovative
Decentralized Security and Privacy Capabilities including Authentication,
Authorization and Accounting for the overall distributed fog environment
and end-to-end security for IoT data-flows. This security layer is based on a
combination of well-established standards, such as PKI, with more innovative
solution, stateless oriented, to fit the constraints of any kind of IoT (low
power, low bandwidth, etc.)
A cross-platforms framework facilitating the adoption of privacy control
policies is also hosted in the BRAIN-IoT environment. The objective is to
provide end users with the means to easily monitor and control which data
to – collect and to who make it available.
7.1 BRAIN-IoT 13
Overhead (<8o)
TLS Overhead (~6 000o)
Useful data
(~50o)
PKI based technology
Useful data
(~50o)
Stateless technology
CPU computation time :
~700ms to establish the session
(ARM M3 - LPC1768)
CPU computation time :
2ms to secure the message
(ARM M3 - LPC1768)
CPUCPU
3 transmissions needed
Only 1 transmission needed
Figure 7.5 Decentralised security and privacy capabilities.
7.1.5 Use Cases and Domain Specific Issues
The overall depicted concept draws requirements and challenging use cases
from IoT applications in two usage scenarios, namely Service Robotics and
Critical Infrastructure Management, which provide the suitable setting to
reflect future challenges in terms of dependability, need for smart behaviour,
security and privacy/data ownership management which are expected to
become more significant and impacting in the long-term (10+years).
7.1.5.1 Service robotics
The Service Robotics use case will involve several robotic platforms, like the
open-source Robotics Operating System (ROS), which need to collaborate to
scan a given warehouse and to assist humans in a logistics domain. The term
Service Robotics is generally related to the use of robots to support operations
done by humans and the logistics domain is one of the more interesting, for
the presence of several tasks, where the robots can help the workers, making
their tasks easier and safer. As example, they can cooperate to move a heavy
object from one place to another. At the same time, robots involved in the sce-
nario should scan the whole warehouse and update in real-time informative
interfaces for the managers and the workers (e.g. warehouse’s map), sharing
the collected information. In addition, to the information related to the maps
of the whole monitored area, the connected robots will also be equipped
with a set of sensors, which will allow collecting interesting info, like room
14 IoT European Security and Privacy Projects
temperature, presence of humans or presence of obstacles in the robot path.
Since several robots collaborate to collect the information, they can keep
the status of the area updated in real-time and balance the effort required
among them. At the beginning, the robots are configured with some default
information, like the map of the warehouse. Then, this information is updated
in real-time, while the robots perform their main tasks. The demonstration
use-case proposed will include both real-time collection of data and control
of the included robots. Particularly, the actuation of these robots will be
an interesting test-bed for the platform, to demonstrate how the solutions
developed by BRAIN-IoT allow to control remotely, in a standard way, the
complex devices involved in this scenario.
The BRAIN-IoT solution enables the service robotics scenario, demon-
strating how the tool-chain and marketplace developed by the project can
be used to enable the cooperation of the different robots. In the envisioned
scenario, the BRAIN-IoT toolkit will be leveraged to design and test all the
aspects of the use case: the behaviours of the robots, the interactions with
humans and the cooperation of involved robots, to do specific tasks. The use
of the BRAIN-IoT toolkit will enable to limit the development of new ad-
hoc software components, indeed, where possible, the solution will be based
on open-source components and services already developed in other IoT
platforms, provided to the developers through the BRAIN-IoT’s marketplace
and interconnected using the services and tools developed in the project. This
scenario described will involve also several security aspects. Mechanisms of
encryption and authentication will be adopted in the whole final solution,
to guarantee the protection of the data exchanged and of the users’ privacy.
To avoid inappropriate use of the robots by malicious users and to avoid
possible incidents due to remote control (i.e. authorized workers that try to
control the robots remotely, without a correct visual of what is happening in
the warehouse), techniques of indoor localization are considered to guarantee
that only workers located in specific zones near the robots can control them.
Furthermore, the solution will protect the privacy of users, anonymizing the
data collected, to avoid sharing users’ info, also if the data are stolen by
malicious users.
7.1.5.2 Critical infrastructure management
The Critical Water Infrastructure Monitoring and Control use case focuses
on the management of the water urban cycle in metropolitan environment
of Coru˜
na. The base of this system will be made of a complex portfolio
of probes, meters, sensors, devices and open-data sources deployed on the
7.1 BRAIN-IoT 15
field, including: water, flow and pressure meters on the water mains; smart
devices, which measure the main chemical-physical characteristics of water;
pluviometers, which can monitor the level of rainwater in a specific zone,
water circular pumps, which can be used to control the flow of liquids in heat-
ing systems. These devices will be geographically distributed, heterogeneous
and will be provided by different owners: directly by the water utility, by end-
users themselves or by third-party service providers, like, SMEs providing
ancillary water services. For this reason, there will be many different data
involved in these scenarios: meteorological open data, reservoir water level
data, purification data, distribution data in the various subsystems, customer
data in urban water supply processes, sewage collection and sewage treatment
data in different subsystems. The collection of all these data will allow to
provide value-added services, like showing to the client, commercial or not,
the quality of the water provided to them or the possibility to react quickly
to critical situation and to do predictive maintenance, through the ability to
detect anomalous behaviours and to fix them, before they become an issue
difficult to be fixed.
The BRAIN-IOT solution will enable this scenario, allowing to col-
lect data from all the different domains and to actuate the devices where
needed. The WoT-based approach used for the design of the platform, will
be leveraged to collect the data, provided by different public and private
IoT platforms, using heterogeneous protocols and data formats. Furthermore,
BRAIN-IOT focuses particularly to design and develop ways to control
devices abstracted by these solutions. For example, the system needs to
allow the managers to control the circulator pumps, regulating the fluid flow
in heating system, to avoid problems or to react to some critical situation
detected through the monitoring sensors. The collection of the data about
water consumption from different sources generates risks about privacy pro-
tection. Indeed, the data can be shared with public entities or third-party
services providers for several purposes, like statistical measures. To do this,
the data need to be associated with all the potentially interesting contextual
information (i.e. Position of the data, timeslot when the data have been
measured and so on) but removing the association with all the personal info
of the entity, related with that data. Finally, security mechanisms will be used
for the actuation of devices that is potentially a dangerous task, which must be
executed only by expert personal that need to know well what they are doing
and the context in which the device is operating. For this reason, mechanisms
of accounting, authentication and authorization will be used to guarantee that
only authorized expert users are able to do these tricky operations.
16 IoT European Security and Privacy Projects
7.2 Cognitive Heterogeneous Architecture for Industrial
IoT – CHARIOT
7.2.1 Introduction
Recently, cloud Computing as well as Internet of Things (IoT) technologies
are rapidly advancing under the concept of future internet. Numerous IoT
systems and devices are designed and implemented following industrial
domain requirements but most of the times not considering recent risk
relating to openness, scalability, interoperability as well as application inde-
pendence, leading to a series of new risks relating to information security
and privacy, data protection and safety. As a result, securing data, objects,
networks, infrastructure, systems and people under IoT is expected to have a
prominent role in the research and standardization activities over the next sev-
eral years. CHARIOT EC co-funded, research project, clearly recognises and
replies to this challenge, identifying needs and risks and implementing a next
generation cognitive IoT platform that can enable the creation of intelligent
IoT applications with intelligent shielding and supervision of privacy, cyber-
security and safety threats, as well as complement existing IoT systems in
non-intrusive ways and yet help guarantee robust security by placing devices
and hardware as the root of trust. The scope of this article is to provide a
detailed overview of the CHARIOT vision, technical objectives and overall
solution, a high-level presentation of the system architecture as the project
approaches in the design of the CHARIOT solution and platform.
7.2.2 Business Challenge and Industrial Baselines
The CHARIOT project activities are aligned with actual business and indus-
trial requirements on the recent needs on data safety, security and privacy
over modern IoT systems following demands of highly increasing numbers
of IoT devices. It is expected that by 2025, there will be 75 Billion IoT-
connected devices World Wide while spending on IoT devices and services
reached $2 trillion in 2017, with China, North America, and Western Europe
accounting for 67% of all devices [8]. This growth in connected devices is
anticipated accelerate due to a rise in adoption of cross-industry devices (LED
lighting, HVAC systems, physical security systems and lots more). On top
of this CHARIOT also recognizes various IoT security breaches that have
been dominating headlines, while 96% of security professionals expect an
increase in IoT breaches this year [13]. In the direction of a more secure IoT
infrastructure, there have been some requests for government regulation of the
7.2 Cognitive Heterogeneous Architecture for Industrial IoT – CHARIOT 17
IoT, asserting that IoT manufacturers and customers are not paying attention
to the security of IoT devices [14]. CHARIOT has clearly recognized the
above requirements and has an aligned set of objectives towards increase of
security, privacy and safety of industrial IoT networks and components.
7.2.3 The CHARIOT EC, Research Project – Vision and Scope
CHARIOT (Cognitive Heterogeneous Architecture for Industrial IoT) is an
EC, co-funded, research project granted under the IoT-03-2017 – R&I on
IoT integration and platforms as a Research and Innovation (RIA) EC topic.
The CHARIOT consortium consists of research and innovation organisations
from major research streams all merged into the CHARIOT solution pro-
viding the competence to deliver a ‘holistic approach addressing Privacy,
Security and Safety of IoT operation in industrial settings with safety critical
elements’. The consortium includes competences in the fields of Project man-
agement and IoT governance (INLECOM, UK), Cognitive Architectures &
Platforms for IoT (IBM, Ireland), Static source code analysis tools (CEA,
France), Analytics Prediction models and Dashboard development (EBOS,
Cyprus) as well as IoT deployment architectures, cloud/fog technologies
(VTLN, Belgium, TELCOSERV, Greece), security including cybersecurity
(ISC, ASPISEC, Italy) and integration aspects (CLMS, Greece).
CHARIOT provides a design method and cognitive computing platform
supporting a unified approach towards Privacy, Security and Safety (PSS) of
IoT Systems including the following innovations summarised below:
APrivacy and security protection method building on state of the
art Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) technologies to enable the cou-
pling of a pre-programmed private key deployed to IoT devices with
a corresponding private key on a Blockchain system. This includes
the implementation of security services utilising a cryptography-based
approach and IoT security profiles all integrated to the CHARIOT
platform.
ABlockchain ledger in which categories of IoT physical, operational
and functional changes are both recorded and affirmed/approved by the
various run-time engines of the CHARIOT ecosystem while leveraging
existing blockchain solutions in innovative ways.
Fog-based decentralised infrastructures for Firmware Security
integrity checking leveraging Blockchain ledgers to enhance physical,
operational and functional security of IoT systems, including actuation
and deactivation.
18 IoT European Security and Privacy Projects
An accompanying IoT Safety Supervision Engine providing a novel
solution to the challenges of securing IoT data, devices and functionality
in new and existing industry-specific safety critical systems.
ACognitive System and Method with accompanying supervision,
analytics and prediction models enabling high security and integrity of
Industrials IoT.
New methods and tools for static code analysis of IoT devices, result-
ing in more efficient secure and safer IoT software development and
V&V.
CHARIOT is closely following a business and industrially driven approach
to align the developed technologies and outcomes to actual industrial needs
in the fields of transport, logistics etc and in general domains of IoT
applications. With this vision, CHARIOT, will apply its outputs and recent
developments to three living labs in order to demonstrate its realistic and com-
pelling heterogeneous solutions through industry reference implementations
at representative scale, with the underlying goal of demonstrating that Secure,
Privacy Mediated and Safety IoT imperatives are collectively met, in turn
delivering a key stepping stone to the EU’s roadmap for the next generation
IoT platforms and services. The actual living labs will be implemented in the
industrial framework of TRENITALIA (rail), Athens International Airport
(transport) and IBM Ireland (smart buildings) [9, 10].
7.2.4 CHARIOT Scientific and Technical Objectives
We present below a summary of the CHARIOT scientific and technical objec-
tives as the main scope and outcomes of the CHARIOT unified design method
and cognitive computing platform supporting a unified approach towards
Privacy, Security and Safety (PSS) of IoT Systems, that places devices and
hardware at the root of trust, in turn contributing to high security and integrity
of industrial IoT.
Objective 1: Specify a Methodological Framework for the Design and
Operation of Secure and Safe IoT Applications addressing System
Safety as a cross cutting concern. The CHARIOT design method will
bridge the systems engineering gaps that currently exists between a) the
formal safety engineering techniques applied in the development and
testing of safety critical systems and b) the rapidly evolving and ad-
hoc manner in IoT devices are developed and deployed. This includes
classification and usage guidelines of relevant standards and platforms,
7.2 Cognitive Heterogeneous Architecture for Industrial IoT – CHARIOT 19
introduction of new concepts and methods for coupling pre-programmed
private security keys on the IoT device with a Blockchain system and
ledger to enhance its security and privacy protection and guarantee
that only authorised entities who have a matching key can influence
operation, function and change, thereby invalidating the potential for
a substantial spectrum of cyber-attacks and significantly before they
become actual exploits. Developments will also include a specialized
static source code analysis tool and cross-compiler to help avoid safety
defects and add some meta-data into the binary permitting that binary
executable to be suitably “filtered” or “authenticated” by gateways and,
in turn, shielding against cyber-attacks while consolidate all the above
into the CHARIOT IoT Design Method.
Objective 2: Develop an Open Cognitive IoT Architecture and Platform
(the CHARIOT Platform), that exhibits intelligent safety behaviour in
the diverse and complex ways in which the safety critical system and
the IoT system will interact in a secure manner. This includes the
creation of an open IoT Cognitive Architecture for a “Web-of-Things”
like environment, supporting a range of solutions and applications inter-
acting with highly distributed, heterogeneous and dynamic IoT and
critical safety system environments. Under this objective, CHARIOT
will also provide interfacing to a topological representation and func-
tional behaviour models of IoT system components and safety profiles
as well as a integrated IoT Platform by enhancing the existing state of the
art in cognitive computing platforms and build the additional CHARIOT
safety and privacy features through open APIs and including security
services utilising the Blockchain technology, the IoT security profiles
and fog computing services.
Objective 3: Develop a runtime IoT Privacy, Security and Safety Super-
vision Engine (IPSE) which will act continuously to understand and
monitor the cyber-physical ecosystem made up of the IoT devices, safety
critical systems and a PSS policy knowledge-base in real-time. This
cognitive engine will ensure that potentially endangering behaviours
of the IoT system are predicted and avoided and, where that is not
possible, handled in an agreed manner in conjunction with safety critical
systems runtime environments to avoid a breach of the safety constraints.
IPSE will include four innovative cognitive applications: A Privacy
Engine based on PKI and Blockchain technologies, a Firmware Security
integrity checking, an IoT Safety Supervision Engine (ISSE) and an
Analytics Prediction models and Dashboard.
20 IoT European Security and Privacy Projects
Objective 4: Test and validate against Industrial IoT safety in three
Living Labs (LLs) addressing different industrial areas in IoT safety:
in transport (rail and airports) and in buildings. The LLs will be used to
demonstrate the capabilities of the proposed approach and provide com-
pelling and representative industry use cases with associated test data
that will effectively demonstrate an integrated end-to-end application
for how the broader CHARIOT approach to security, privacy and safety
will be applied in different industry-representative contexts at enterprise
scale.
Objective 5: Ensure large outcomes scale up through wide dis-
semination, exploitation actions and a Capacity Building Programme
aiming at infrastructure sustainability, organisational development, and
human capital development through training on the practical use of the
CHARIOT Concepts, Capabilities, Services and Platform Offering.
7.2.5 Technical Implementation
The technical implementations in CHARIOT will be performed in a series of
phases, perfectly aligned to the project scientific objectives presented above.
These include the design, development, integration and testing of several key-
components as will be presented in the chapters that follow.
7.2.5.1 The CHARIOT Open IoT cognitive cloud platform
The CHARIOT cognitive platform comprises of a set of functions, logical
resources and services hosted in a cloud data centre supporting a range
of cognitive solutions and application interacting with an ecosystem of
highly distributed, heterogeneous and dynamic IoT and critical safety system
environments. This module provides connectivity and intelligence, support-
ing actuation and control features as required by the final applications. It
takes advantage of an existing IoT platform (IBM’s Watson IoT [15]) to
demonstrate concept and capability and will also support integration with
other safety, privacy and machine-learning cloud services via relevant open
APIs, thus supporting third party integration and innovation. Through such
interfaces, the CHARIOT platform will subsequently be compatible with
existing international developments, addressing object identity management,
fog, discovery services, virtualisation of objects, devices and infrastructures
and trusted IoT approaches. The CHARIOT platform is being designed
respecting open principles.
7.2 Cognitive Heterogeneous Architecture for Industrial IoT – CHARIOT 21
While the open nature of the architecture does not preclude the adoption
of specific vendor technologies in the initial platform Proof-of-Concept (PoC)
implementation for the living labs, the architecture will be intentionally
designed with open interfaces such that individual middleware and compo-
nents can be easily substituted with alternatives in future implementations.
The platform will also explore the development and deployments of probes
to provide methods of collecting information on the IoT devices and on
the safety-critical-systems in real time, in turn facilitating the creation of a
topological representation and functional behaviours of the IoT systems by
the Safety Supervision Engine.
The cognitive engine will be used to test the concept of adapting
autonomously, instructing the “system” to behave in intended ways and
perform required updates and changes through authorised actors. Based on a
pattern of events evidenced in ledgers, the cognitive system will adapt/instruct
the IoT system(s) to adapt in appropriate ways based on leveraging innovative
machine learning and data mining approaches.
PKI and Blockchain Technologies
Leveraging existing blockchain technologies along with traditional PKI
schematics enables CHARIOT to revolutionize the field of identity manage-
ment and access control. Blockchain acts as the backbone of the system by
enabling trust between the various CHARIOT services as well as between the
gateways and the IoT sensors within the network. The implementation will
be based on a permissioned blockchain that will become the mediator of any
communications occurring within the network.
7.2.5.2 Static code analysis and firmware security tool
A significant component of the CHARIOT overall solution is the development
and enhancement of a free software cross-compilation toolset – leveraging on
existing open source technologies – for IoT engineers designing IoT systems
and developing source code running on them. Strong highly safety-critical
IoT software requires a costly, but extensive, formal methods approach [11],
in which developers agree to put a lot of efforts in formally specifying then
analysing their source code and using proof assistants to ensure lack of
bugs (w.r.t. some explicitly, detailed and formalized specification). But the
CHARIOT project aims to help less life-critical IoT software developers
by providing them with a tool to help them in developing IoT software
and better use of existing free software IoT frameworks. This will be an
open software toolset that assists IoT software developers, particularly as
22 IoT European Security and Privacy Projects
not experts in computer science but a competent engineer in a specific
industrial domain (railroad, automotive, smart building, maritime, etc.), so
even heuristic source code analysis techniques (leveraging above some formal
methods approaches) can improve his/her coding productivity. This tool will
be developed as part of the CHARIOT solution and a plugin/extension mod-
ule for GCC based compilers that the software industry is currently using and
will be executed at compilation/linking stage and will use meta-programming
techniques to foster “declarative” high-level programming styles. This will
enable the developers (as the IoT device firmware developers) to identify
most safety critical functions executed at the IoT device or gateway level.
Also, firmware compiled with that toolset will carry some cryptographic
signature to enable filtering of firmware updates in the gateway.
7.2.5.3 Integrated IoT privacy, security and safety supervision
engine
This engine is a set of novel runtime components which act in concert to
understand and monitor the cyber-physical ecosystem made up of the IoT
gateway and devices, the safety critical systems and safety/security policy
knowledge-base. The Privacy Engine utilises existing security protocols and
technologies such as Blockchain to provide a strong foundation for the
trusted interchange of information about and between the participants in the
system-of-systems. The Safety Engine also analyses the IoT topology and
signal metadata relative to the relevant safety profiles and applies closed-loop
machine-learning techniques to detect safety violations and alert conditions.
The objective of this engines is to develop a cognitive engine that will lever-
age the Cyber-Physical topological representation of the system-of-systems
combined with the security/safety-polices to provide a real-time risk map
will allow for both static analysis and continuous monitoring to assess safety
impact and appropriate response actions.
The supervision engine will be responsible for interacting with the
CHARIOT IoT platform, providing the centralised intelligence and control
functionality for applying the necessary privacy, security, and safety policies
to all components in the IoT system of systems, monitor IoT devices and
systems to detect abnormalities in their behaviour and analyse their causes,
maintain an internal topological representation of the constantly evolving
IoT system of systems and collect and represent PSS policies and the
threat intelligence in the topology to provide a real-time risk map, impact
assessment and triggering of appropriate response actions. The engine will
also maintain safety, security and privacy even when unknown devices and
7.2 Cognitive Heterogeneous Architecture for Industrial IoT – CHARIOT 23
sensors are connected to the network, ensuring that they do not interfere
to the normal operation of existing IoT components, assess the topology to
detect whether the IoT ecosystem has entered or is predicted to be advancing
towards an abnormal (unsafe/insecure) state, and automatically activate a
safety remediation in response to this unsafe state, to reduce the impacts on
users and other IoT components and restrict abnormal operations and allow
operations of safe functions to maintain at reduced level the operation of the
controlled system.
7.2.5.4 Analytics prediction models user interface
This system component is an innovative cognitive web application, which
constitutes together with other relevant components – such as the Privacy and
the IoT Safety Supervision Engine – the IPSE. The application collects the
data received by the various IoT gateways and sensors in the fog network and
using appropriate algorithms, Analytics Prediction models will be created and
presented through a user friendly configurable dashboard.
This module will be the advanced-intelligence dashboard for both under-
standing of the IoT ecosystem topology and for post data analytical purposes
to assist in the refinement and improvements of PSS policies while at the
same time act as the interface between the CHARIOT platform and the system
operator/user.
7.2.6 System Demonstration, Validation and Benchmarking
The overall system operation will be demonstrated and validated via full
integration to the actual operating environments and infrastructures of three
industrial sites over precise key-performance-indicators that contribute to the
separate business environment and value. The three key selected sites (living
labs, LLs) will be: a) Trenitalia (transport – rail) b) IBM Ireland business
campus (smart buildings) and c) Athens international airport (transport –
airport). Details on the three separate cases have been included below:
7.2.6.1 Living lab 1: Trenitalia
The primary objective in this LL is to enhance the safe operation of the
Italian railways service. This includes, reduction of risk to passengers and
personnel, compliance with appropriate regulations, and creation of a safe
and efficient operating environment in the railways. At the same time this
use case will focus on utilizing the feed from IoT used to monitor electrical
and mechanical components dedicated on assessing energy consumption and
24 IoT European Security and Privacy Projects
dispatch them to the on-board control servers and the land-based central con-
trol system. The application of the CHARIOT tool will facilitate the timely
recognition of sensors malfunction, along with prediction of maintenance
requirements.
7.2.6.2 Living lab 2: IBM business campus
In this LL, the objective will be to enable the continued IoT evolution of
the IBM technology campus from a set of individuals “automated/smart”
buildings into to a truly cognitive IoT environment that provides a safer and
more efficiently managed working environment for all IBM staff, customers
and visitors and also to use the knowledge gained to help drive advancements
in Cognitive IoT to a global scale by reflecting it in IBM products and
services.
7.2.6.3 Living lab 3: Athens international airport
The application of CHARIOT in this Living Lab will address safety of
airport Infrastructures, enhance protection of Athens airport’s facilities
from physical and cyber threats. To achieve this, CHARIOT will enhance
airports capability on early detection/prediction of hazardous situations,
in parallel with reduction in false positive alarms that disrupt airport
operations.
7.2.7 Summary and Discussion
This chapter provides the overall concept of the CHARIOT project and
business orientation. It summarizes the project scope and business value as
derived from actual industrial needs in the framework of safety, security and
privacy of industrial IoT. CHARIOT started in January 2018 and it currently
in the stage of requirements extraction and definition of the system overall
architecture as this is aligned with the project end-users (living labs) that
drive and validate the technological developments. Currently, CHARIOT is
also defining the technical and methodological framework of the overall
solution adapted for the cases of the three living labs that is going to evolve
into the concise implementations for the next project phases, in a systematic
approach to Privacy, Security, and Safety in Industrial IoT environments,
using a strategic/objectives driven systematic way, in a process of continuous
improvement. CHARIOT intends to have a first implementation of the system
within the first months of 2019 and will integrate this to all infrastruc-
tures involved and as planned. This project has received funding from the
7.3 ENACT: Development, Operation, and Quality Assurance 25
European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under
grant agreement No 780075”. The authors acknowledge the research out-
comes of this publication belonging to the CHARIOT consortium.
7.3 ENACT: Development, Operation, and Quality
Assurance of Trustworthy Smart IOT Systems
Until now, IoT system innovations have been mainly concerned with sensors,
device management and connectivity, with the mission to gather data for
processing and analysis in the cloud in order to aggregate information and
knowledge [16]. This approach has conveyed significant added value in
many application domains, however, it does not unleash the full potential of
the IoT [82]. The next generation IoT systems need to perform distributed
processing and coordinated behaviour across IoT, edge and cloud infras-
tructures [17], manage the closed loop from sensing to actuation, and cope
with vast heterogeneity, scalability and dynamicity of IoT systems and their
environments. Moreover, the function and correctness of such systems has
a range of criticality from business critical to safety critical. Thus, aspects
related to trustworthiness such as security, privacy, resilience and robustness,
are challenging aspects of paramount importance [16]. Therefore, the next
generation of IoT systems must be trustworthy above all else. In ENACT, we
will call them trustworthy smart IoT systems, or for short; trustworthy SIS.
Developing and managing the next generation trustworthy SIS to oper-
ate in the midst of the unpredictable physical world represents daunting
challenges. Challenges, for example, that include that such systems always
work within safe operational boundaries [18] by controlling the impact that
actuators have on the physical world and managing conflicting actuation
requests. Moreover, the ability of these systems to continuously evolve and
adapt to their changing environments are essential to ensure and increase
their trustworthiness, quality and user experience. DevOps is a philosophy
and practices that covers all the steps from concept to delivery of a software
product. In ENACT we see DevOps advocating a set of software engineering
best practices and tools, to ensure Quality of Service while continuously
evolving complex systems, foster agility, rapid innovation cycles, and ease of
use [19]. DevOps has been widely adopted in the software industry. However,
there is no systematic DevOps support for trustworthy smart IoT systems
today [18–20]. The aim of ENACT is to enable DevOps in the domain of
trustworthy smart IoT systems.
26 IoT European Security and Privacy Projects
7.3.1 Challenges
The key research question of ENACT is thus the following: “how we can
tame the complexity of developing and operating smart IoT systems, which
(i) involve sensors and actuators and (ii) need to be trustworthy?”. Our
fundamental approach is to evolve DevOps methods and techniques as base-
line to address this issue. We thus refine the research question as follows:
how we can apply and evolve the DevOps tools and methods to facilitate the
development and operation of trustworthy smart IoT applications?”.
Challenge 1: Support continuous delivery of trustworthy SIS. Currently
there is little effort spent on providing solutions for the delivery and deploy-
ment of application across the whole IoT, edge and cloud space. In particular,
there is a lack of languages and abstractions that can be used to support
the orchestration of software services and their continuous deployment on
heterogeneous devices [21] together with the relevant security mechanisms
and policies.
Challenge 2: Support the agile operation of trustworthy SIS. The opera-
tion of large-scale and highly distributed IoT systems can easily overwhelm
traditional operation teams. Other management models such as NoOps and
Serverless Computing are evolving to solve this problem. Whatever the oper-
ations management model the major challenges will be to improve efficiency
and the collaboration with development teams for rapid and agile evolution of
the systems. Currently, there is a lack of mechanisms dedicated to smart IoT
systems able to (i) monitor their status, (ii) indicate when their behaviour is
not as expected, (iii) identify the origin of the problem, and (iv) automate
typical operation activities. Furthermore, the impossibility of anticipating
all the adaptations a system may face when operating in an open context,
creates an urgent need for mechanisms that will automatically maintain the
adaptation rules of a SIS.
Challenge 3: Support continuous quality assurance strengthening trust-
worthiness of SIS. Maintaining quality of service is a complex task that
needs to be considered throughout the whole life-cycle of a system. This
complexity is increased in the smart IoT system context where it is not
feasible for developers and operators to exhaustively explore, anticipate or
resolve all possible context situations that a system may encounter during its
operation. This is due to the open context in which these systems operate and
as a result can hinder their trustworthiness. Quality of Service is particularly
important when the system can have an impact on the physical world through
7.3 ENACT: Development, Operation, and Quality Assurance 27
actuators. In addition, testing, security assurance as well as the robustness of
such systems is challenging [20].
7.3.2 The ENACT Approach
DevOps seeks to decrease the gap between a product design and its operation
by introducing software design and development practices and approaches
to the operation domain and vice versa. In the core of DevOps there are
continuous processes and automation supported by different tools at various
stages of the product life-cycle. In particular, the ENACT DevOps Framework
will meet the challenges below and support the DevOps practices during
the development and operation of trustworthy smart IoT systems. ENACT
will provide innovations and enablers that will feature trustworthy IoT sys-
tems built by implementing the seven stages of the process as depicted
in Figure 7.6.
Plan: The ENACT approach is to introduce a new enabler to support the risk-
driven and context-aware planning of IoT systems development, including
mechanisms to facilitate the selection of the most relevant and trustworthy
devices and services to be used in future stages.
Risk-Driven
Design Planning
Language to specify
Devices behavior and
security behavior
Automated deployment
of Smart IoT systems
and security mechanisms
Simulation and Test environment for Smart IoT applications.
Simulate and test security mechanisms.
Security, robustness and context monitoring
and root-cause analysis
r
-aware orchestration of Secure and context
sensors, actuators and software services.
Actuation conflict identification
Dynamic adaptation in open
contexts and actuation
conflicts handling
Figure 7.6 ENACT support of DevOps for trustworthy smart IoT systems.
28 IoT European Security and Privacy Projects
Code: The ENACT approach is to leverage the model-driven engineering
approach and in particular to evolve recent advances of the ThingML [21]
language and generators to support modelling of system behaviours and
automatic derivation across vastly heterogeneous and distributed devices both
at the IoT and edge layers.
Build and Deploy: The ENACT approach is to provide a new deploy-
ment modelling language to specify trustworthy and secure orchestrations
of sensors, actuators and software components, along with the mechanisms
to identify and handle potential actuation conflicts at the model level. The
deployment engine will automatically collect the required software compo-
nents and integrate the evolution of the system into the run-time environment
across the whole IoT, Edge and Cloud space.
Test: ENACT enablers will allow continuous testing of smart IoT systems in
an environment capable of emulating and simulating IoT and edge infrastruc-
ture by targeting the constraints related to the distribution and infrastructure
of IoT systems. This system is intended to be able to simulate some basic
attacks or security threats.
Operate: The ENACT approach will provide enablers for the automatic
adaptation of IoT systems based on their run-time context, reinforced by
online learning. Such automatic adaptation will address the issue of the
management complexity. The complexity of open-context IoT systems can
easily exceed the capacity of human operation teams. Automatic adaptation
will improve the trustworthiness of the smart IoT system execution.
Monitor: The ENACT approach is to deliver innovative mechanisms to
observe the: status, behaviour, and security level of the running IoT systems.
Robust root cause analysis mechanisms will also be provided.
In addition to the DevOps related contributions identified above, the
ENACT DevOps Framework will provide specific cross-cutting innovations
related to trustworthiness, which can be seamlessly applied, in particular
based on the following ENACT concepts:
Resilience and robustness: The ENACT approach is to provide novel
solutions to make the smart IoT systems resilient by providing enablers
for diversifying IoT service implementations, and deployment topologies
(e.g., implying that instances of a service can have a different implementa-
tion and operate differently, still ensuring consistent and predictable global
behaviour). This will lower the risk of privacy and security breaches and
significantly reduced impact in case of cyber-attack infringements.
7.3 ENACT: Development, Operation, and Quality Assurance 29
Security, privacy and identity management: The ENACT approach is to
provide support to ensure the security of trustworthy SIS. This not only
includes smart preventive security mechanisms but also the continuous moni-
toring of security metrics and the context with the objective to trigger reactive
security measures.
7.3.3 ENACT Case Studies
Three use cases from the Intelligent Transport Systems (Rail), eHealth and
Smart Building application domains will guide, validate and demonstrate the
ENACT research.
7.3.3.1 Intelligent transport systems
This use case will assess the feasibility of IoT services in the domain of
train integrity control, in particular for the logistics and maintenance of the
rolling stock and on-track equipment. In this domain, the infrastructure and
the resources that should be used are usually expensive and require a long-
time in planning and execution. Therefore, the usage of the rail systems must
be optimised at maximum, following security and safety directives due to
the critical and strategic characteristics of the domain. This use case will
involve logistic and maintenance activities. Within the ENACT scope, it will
be focused on the logistics activities.
A logistic and maintenance scenario will be defined with the aim to
provide information about the wagons that form the rolling stock. This
scenario will cover not only optimizing cargo storing and classification, but
also providing the appropriate resources to assure the correct functioning of
the system. These will be only possible if the train integrity is confirmed
when the different wagons are locked and moving together. This situation
will assure the proper transportation of cargo or passengers, avoiding possible
accidents. This use case will involve an infrastructure consisting of large
sets of on-board sensors (e.g., Integrity Detector, Asset data info, Humid-
ity and temperature sensors) and multiple gateways interacting with cloud
resources.
7.3.3.2 eHealth
The eHealth use case will develop a digital health system for supporting and
helping various patients staying at home to the maximum extent possible
either during treatment or care. Elderly people are one type of subject in this
case study. The Digital health system will feature elderly care to allow the
30 IoT European Security and Privacy Projects
subjects to live at home as long as possible. Another type of patients that
we consider is Diabetes patients that need to follow their glucose level and
regularly be followed up by health personnel.
The digital health system will both control equipment normally present
in smart homes to make life comfortable (automatic light control, door locks,
heater control, etc.), and control various types of medical devices and sensors.
These devices and sensors support the care and wellness for the specific
patient and consist of a wide variety of types, including: blood pressure meter,
scales, fall detection sensors, glucose meter, video surveillance, medicine
reminder, indoor and out-door location etc). In addition, the system needs to
integrate with other systems to provide information or alarms for example
to response centres, care-givers, physicians, next of kin etc., and to feed
information to medical systems such as electronic patient journals (EPJ). The
pivotal role of the system’s Edge Computing will be what we denote “the
medical gateway” which integrates sensors and devices, controls the edge
and ensures the right data are provided to the various stakeholders and to
integrated systems such as EPJ.
7.3.3.3 Smart building
This use case will make use of smart building sensors, actuators and services.
To this aim two sets of applications covering Smart Energy Efficiency and
Smart Elderly Care will be developed within a Care Centre environment.
Energy efficiency of new and existing buildings is crucial to achieve carbon
emission reduction, and as we increasingly spend more time indoors, ade-
quate levels of user comfort need to be guaranteed by the smart buildings.
This implies a trade-off between energy use and the different aspects of
users’ comfort. They will be tested in the KUBIK, a smart building especially
designed for testing new solutions for sustainable buildings. The use case will
simulate a care centre consisting of small apartments where a group of elderly
people live together. This care centre use case includes sensors and actuators
that monitor and control the environment in order to ensure the safety of
the facilities, to perform energy efficiency measures and also to support the
care-takers in monitoring the wellbeing of users.
The trend for smart buildings is to provide an increasing range of services
supported by an increasing number of IoT sensors and actuators. Example of
such services or applications include thermal comfort, visual comfort, energy
efficiency, security, etc. Applications in this space need to share building
infrastructure and may have conflicting objectives. The solution requires a
clear hierarchy between the different actuation scenarios.
7.4 Search Engines for Browsing the Internet of Things – IoTCrawler 31
7.4 Search Engines for Browsing the Internet of Things –
IoTCrawler
Efficient and secure access to Big IoT Data will be a pivotal factor for the
prosperity of European industry and society. However, today data and service
discovery, search, and access methods and solutions for the IoT are in their
infancy, like Web search in its early days. IoT search is different from Web
search because of dynamicity and pervasiveness of the resources in the net-
work. Current methods are more suited for fewer (hundreds to millions), static
or stored data and services resources. There is yet no adaptable and dynamic
solution for effective integration of distributed and heterogeneous IoT con-
tents and support of data reuse in compliance with security and privacy needs,
thereby enabling a true digital single market. Previous reports show that a
large part of the developers’ time is spent on integration. In general, the
following issues limit the adoption of dynamic IoT-based applications:
The heterogeneity of various data sources hinders the uptake of innova-
tive cross-domain applications.
The large amount of raw data without intrinsic explanation remains
meaningless in the context of other application domains.
Missing security and neglected privacy present the major concern in
most domains and are a challenge for constrained IoT resources.
The large-scale, distributed and dynamic nature of IoT resources
requires new methods for crawling, discovery, indexing, physical loca-
tion identification and ranking.
IoT applications require new search engines, such as bots that auto-
matically initiate search based on user’s context. This requires machine
intelligence.
The complexity involved in discovery, search, and access methods
makes the development of new IoT enabled applications a complex task.
Some ongoing efforts, such as Shodan and Thingful provide search solutions
for IoT. However, they rely mainly on a centralised indexing and manually
provided metadata. Moreover, they are rather static and neglect privacy and
security issues. To enable the use of IoT data and to exploit the business
potential of IoT applications, an effective approach needs to provide:
An adaptive distributed framework enabling abstraction from heteroge-
neous data sources and dynamic integration of volatile IoT resources.
Security, privacy and trust by design as integral part of all the processes
from publication, indexing, discovery, and subscription to higher-level
application access.
32 IoT European Security and Privacy Projects
Scalable methods for crawling, discovery, indexing and ranking of IoT
resources in large-scale cross-platform and cross-disciplinary systems
and scenarios.
Machine initiated semantic search to enable automated context depen-
dent access to IoT resources.
Monitoring and analysing the Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of
Information (QoI) to support fault recovery and service continuity in IoT
environments.
IoTCrawler is an EU H2020 project that addresses the above challenges
by proposing efficient and scalable methods for crawling, discovery, index-
ing and ranking of IoT resources in large-scale cross-platform and cross-
disciplinary systems and scenarios. It develops enablers for secure and
privacy-aware discovery and access to the resources, and monitors and analy-
ses QoS and QoI to rank suitable resources and to support fault recovery and
service continuity. The project evaluates the developed methods and tools in
various use-cases, such as Smart City, Social IoT, Smart Energy and Industry
4.0. The key elements of IoTCrawler are shown in Figure 7.7.
The project aims to create scalable and flexible IoT resource discovery
by using meta-data and resource descriptions in a dynamic data model. This
means, for example, that if a user is interested in measuring temperature in
a certain location, the result (e.g. list of sensors) should only contain sensors
Smart Energy Industry 4.0
S
e
c
u
r
i
t
y
,
P
r
i
v
a
c
y
&
T
r
u
s
t
.
.
.
.
.
.
Smart City Social IoT
Distributed IoTCrawler Framework
Monitoring &
Fault Recovery
Enablers
Machine
Initiated
Semantic
Search
IoT Crawling,
Indexing &
Ranking
Figure 7.7 Key concepts of the IoTCrawler proposal. [40] c
2018 IEEE.
7.4 Search Engines for Browsing the Internet of Things – IoTCrawler 33
that can measure temperature, but the user may accept sensors that closely
fulfil her/his application requirements even though all other characteristics
may not be favourable (e.g. cost of acquisition may be high and sensor
response time may be slow). For this reason, the system should understand
the user priorities, which are often machine-initiated queries and search
requests, and provide the results accordingly by using adaptive and dynamic
techniques.
7.4.1 Architecture of IoTCrawler
IoTCrawler provides novel approaches to support an IoT framework of
interoperable systems including security and privacy-aware mechanisms, and
offers new methods for discovery, crawling, indexing and search of dynamic
IoT resources. It supports and enable machine-initiated knowledge-based
search in the IoT world. Figure 7.8 depicts the IoTCrawler framework and
highlights its key components, which are detailed next.
7.4.1.1 IoT framework of interoperable (distributed) systems
The diversity of the market has resulted in a variety of sophisticated IoT
platforms that will continue to exist. However, to evolve and enable the full
benefits of IoT, these platforms need access to data, information and services
across various IoT networks and systems within an integrated ecosystem of
IoT resources. IoTCrawler envisions a cooperation of platforms and systems
to provide smart integrated IoT based services. Nevertheless, instead of
defining an overarching hyper-platform on top, the integration proposed by
IoTCrawler is carried out by the definition of a common interface, enabling
this way cooperation and interconnection of various platforms by making
their data and services discoverable and accessible to other applications and
services. An IoTCrawler-enabled platform can internally be implemented in
different ways, since it only has to support the common and open interfaces
to join the ecosystem. The open IoT interfaces are split in two planes that are
called control and data planes. The control plane will coordinate and control
the data and information processing in the platforms (monitoring and quality
analysis). The data plane will allow for IoT data flow exchange between
platforms (crawling, indexing and search).
7.4.1.2 Holistic security, privacy and trust
An ecosystem of IoT platforms brings immense benefits but also potential
risks for users and stakeholders. The very principle that makes the IoT so
34 IoT European Security and Privacy Projects
Security
, Privacy & Trust
IoT Resources: sensors and actuators
Use cases
Machine initiated semantic search
IoT discovery
Context management
Monitoring & fault recovery
Multi-criteria ranking
Adaptive indexing
Edge
broker
Edge
broker
Edge
broker
Cloud
broker
Distributed
IoT framework
pti
ve
indexi
ng
r
Dynamic
crawling
Search
Data analysis
API
Smart city Social IoT Smart
energy
Industry
4.0
Figure 7.8 Overall architecture of the IoTCrawler framework. [40] c
2018 IEEE.
powerful – the potential to share data instantly with everyone and every-
thing – creates huge security and privacy risks. Since IoT systems are, by
their nature, distributed and operate often in unprotected environments, the
maintenance of security, privacy, and trust is a challenging task. IoTCrawler
addresses quality, privacy, trust and security issues by employing a holistic
and end-to-end approach to the data and service publication to search and
access workflow. Device and connectivity management will ensure that the
end devices only connect to trusted access networks. IoTCrawler develops
solutions for mitigating privacy intrusion and data correlation based on data
collected from multiple sources. Both technical and information governance
7.4 Search Engines for Browsing the Internet of Things – IoTCrawler 35
procedures and guidelines are defined and implemented. This makes sure that
the technical solutions are in place for avoiding the security and privacy risks,
and also appropriate information governance procedures and best practices
and measures are followed in development, deployment and utilisation of the
use-cases and third-party applications.
7.4.1.3 Crawling, discovery and indexing of dynamic IoT
resources
Information access and retrieval on the early days of the Internet and the
Web mainly relied on simple functions and methods. For example, Yahoo’s
first search engine was simply based on the “grep” function in Unix or the
AltaVista search engine initially did not have a ranking mechanism. The Inter-
net and the Web have gone a long way in the past two decades to improve the
way we access the information on the Web. While the current information and
search retrieval on the Web is far from ideal, there are several sophisticated
methods and solutions that provide crawling, indexing, ranking and search
and retrieval of extremely large volumes of information on the Internet. The
new generations of Web search engines have now focused on information
extraction, personalised and customised knowledge and extraction techniques
and solutions. Some early works are demonstrated by Google’s knowledge
graph, Wolfram Alpha and Microsoft Bing. The current information access
and retrieval methods on the IoT are still at the same stage that the Web
and the Internet were in their early days. Information retrieval on the large-
scale IoT systems is currently based on the assumption that the sources are
known to the devices and consumers or it is assumed that opportunistic
methods will send discovery and negotiation messages to find and interact
with other relevant resources in their outreach (e.g. Google’s recent Physical
Web project is designed based on this assumption). Overall, IoT systems
have more ad-hoc resources that do not comply with document and URL
processing and indexing norms; the resources, such as mobile phones and
sensing devices, can publish data and then move to another location or
disappear. Service and data crawling and discovery for smart connected
devices and services will also involve automated associations and integration
to provide an extensible framework for information access and retrieval in
IoT. IoTCrawler focuses on providing reliable, quality and resource-aware
and scalable mechanisms for data and services publishing, crawling, indexing
in very large-scale distributed dynamic IoT environments.
36 IoT European Security and Privacy Projects
7.4.1.4 Machine-Initiated semantic search
In the past, search engines were mainly used by human users to search for
content and information. In the newly emerging search model, information is
provided depending on the users’ (human user or a machine) context and
requirements (for example, location, time, activity, previous records, and
profile). The information access can be initiated without the user’s explicit
query or instruction but used on its necessity and relevance (context-aware
search). This will require machine interpretable search results in semantic
forms. Moreover, social media, physical sensors (numerical streaming val-
ues), and Web documents must be better integrated, and the search results
should become more machine interpretable information rather than remaining
as pure links (e.g. the Web search engines mainly return a list of links
to the pages as their results; with some exceptions on popular questions
and topics).
IoTCrawler enables context-aware search and automated processing of
data by semantic annotation of the data streams, thus making their charac-
teristics and capabilities available in a machine processable way. There are
several existing works that provide methods and techniques for semantic
annotations and description of the IoT devices, services and their messages
and data. However, most of these methods rely on centralised solutions
and complex query mechanisms that hinder their scalability and wide scale
deployment and use for the IoT. IoTCrawler supports an ecosystem of
multiple platforms and develops dynamic semantic annotation and reason-
ing methods that will allow continuous and seamless integration of new
devices and services by exploiting and adapting existing annotations based
on similarity measures.
The automatic discovery has to consider the current context. Context-
awareness requires the integration and analysis of social, physical and cyber
data. IoTCrawler develops enablers for context-aware IoT search. Hence the
requirements of the different applications are mapped to the solutions by
selecting resources considering parameters such as security and privacy level,
quality, latency, availability, reliability and continuity. IoTCrawler improves
reliability and robustness by fault recovery mechanisms and mitigation of
malfunctioning devices using device activation/deactivation in the associated
area. The fault recovery also requires mechanisms to support communication
among networked IoT resources located in diverse locations and across
different platforms, and to provide secure and efficient re-distribution of
information in case of failure.
7.4 Search Engines for Browsing the Internet of Things – IoTCrawler 37
7.4.2 Use Cases
IoTCrawler is currently evaluating its technologies in four real world
use-cases: Smart Cities, Social IoT, Smart Energy, and Industry 4.0 (see
Figure 7.9). Further use-cases will be identified and ranked in co-creation
workshops with the relevant stakeholders within the project.
7.4.2.1 Smart city
The city of Aarhus has been considered as a target for smart city deployment
in the project. IoTCrawler helps to overcome the negative perceptions of
Internet of Things and Smart Cities by developing smart city experimentation
Figure 7.9 IoTCrawler use cases at a glance.
38 IoT European Security and Privacy Projects
tools for Aarhus’ City Lab that can make citizens and companies engaged and
be curious about smart city solutions. IoTCrawler also provides the enabling
technologies to discover new data sources in Aarhus for Open Data platforms
and has the potential to become a reference platform supporting IoT data and
service sharing as part of the sharing economy. To track the performance of a
smart city, IoTCrawler develops enablers for monitoring activity and quality
of the sensors. This can be used to set up KPI’s for City Labs and to track
its performance. The smart city deployment of Murcia is also considered in
IoTCrawler, exploiting the large sensor platform installed.
7.4.2.2 Social IoT
Social IoT relates to using sensors deployed at sports and entertainment
events in order to quantify the performance of professionals or experience
of participants. This enables participants to engage in events beyond simply
watching, thus creating a unique personal record of their experience, and in
combination with social and digital media allows event manager to create
new insights and content for their audience. IoTCrawler has access to over
800 events, including fashion events (e.g. New York Fashion week), culinary
events, sports events (e.g. Basketball Final Four), or events such as Miss
Universe. For each event, sensors are deployed at local venues and partic-
ipants and spectators are equipped with wearable devices. This results in a
range of diverse data sets that are collected, analysed, stored, and used, e.g.
for content creation. Discovering and semi-automatically describing existing
sensors, data sets and streams using IoTCrawler technologies has the poten-
tial to significantly increase the overall value of the dataset access and their
integration, making it accessible to a larger group of people and enabling
new applications. As described above, the data sets include raw sensor data
and processed analytic results. However, data processing often involves data
from other third-party sources. For this reason, play-by-play data is used to
correlate analytical results to match events, and social media sources can
be used to link to user generated content. IoTCrawler’s discovery, indexing
and search enablers have the potential to significantly reduce the effort
associated with the integration of sensor technologies, and other external
data sources.
7.4.2.3 Smart energy
Smart Buildings play an important role in distributed energy systems as
they turn from energy consumers to the so-called “energy prosumers”. In
future energy systems, Smart Buildings actively interact with the Smart
7.4 Search Engines for Browsing the Internet of Things – IoTCrawler 39
Grids in order to stabilise them or participate in energy trading as well
as for structural condition monitoring and proactive maintenance. For this
purpose, buildings offer semantically annotated properties of the technical
equipment within especial energy flexibilities (i.e. for shifting electrical
and thermal loads). In this frame, this use-case employs the technologies
developed in IoTCrawler to dynamically discover the flexibilities of Smart
Buildings and analyse their potential as well as their demand for applications
that are necessary to manage and offer energy to the Smart Grid or the
energy market. This information can be used by energy retailers or grid
operators to deploy best fitting applications to individual buildings. The
project uses semantic enrichment of grid data and data analytics to enhance
smart grid applications and reduce the need for manual engineering and setup
of systems.
7.4.2.4 Industry 4.0
Industry 4.0 includes advances such as predictive maintenance, energy pre-
diction, or human-robot collaboration. The results of IoTCrawler will be used
to improve predictive maintenance planning for horizontal machining centres
in aerospace and Die&Mould industries. Currently, data integration consumes
more than 80% of the time in the industry. IoTCrawler has the poten-
tial to significantly accelerate the development and deployment of Industry
4.0 analytics solutions, by discovering and semi-automatically integrating
machine metadata, sensor data provided by the machines and information
stored in related enterprise databases. Extending the discovery to actuator
services (e.g. air conditioning, heating, and machine operation) allows to link
actions for avoiding load peaks to energy analytics pipeline. IoTCrawler also
increases workers’ safety by identifying critical conditions (e.g. gas exposi-
tion) in the permanent sensor data stream of drones, and forward such condi-
tion markers to monitoring teams and production management subsystems.
7.4.3 Main Innovations in the Areas of Research
The literature within key areas of the IoTCrawler proposal is reviewed next,
indicating the main innovations of the work within the general framework
described above.
7.4.3.1 Search and discovery
Being essential for any network architecture, one of the key components of
the proposed architecture is the search and discovery operation. Distributed
40 IoT European Security and Privacy Projects
Hash Table (DHT) is used to provide a high scalability in storage and a
flexible support for query and update operations. DHT is a totally decen-
tralised system that stores data objects for easy and quick access (query)
and update (store). DHTs are built on top of overlay networks into which
network objects are spread and identified with unique keys, e.g. the well-
studied overlay network and DHT Chord mechanism [22], which is the direct
ancestor of Kademlina [23] (BitTorrent’s DHT). Overlay networks and DHTs
are well suited to form the basement of a proper discovery mechanism,
such as the Overlay Management Backbone (OMB) approach [24]. To add
suitable schema evolution to the information/content discovery, description
mechanisms such as the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and JSON-
LD [25] are needed. Combining a DHT mechanism with RDF, the work in
[26] proposes to use an adapted version of RDQL [27] to perform the queries.
The main problems of this approach are that it consumes a lot of storage
space and that it is not efficient for simple searches. SPARQL [28] is the de
facto query language for RDF, by providing a coherent and simple search
mechanism.
The IoTCrawler approach exploits the remarkable qualities of the overlay
network and DHT described above to build a distributed discovery infrastruc-
ture. However, the nodes are deployed in separate domains to distribute both
the storage/finding load and the management of information access.
7.4.3.2 Security for IoT
In spite of the emergence of different cross-world initiatives in recent years
(IERC, ITU-T SG20, IEEE IoT Initiative4 or IPSO Alliance are just some
of them), there is a lack of a unified vision on security and privacy con-
siderations in the IoT paradigm, which embraces the whole lifecycle of
smart objects that are making up the digital landscape of the future. In the
IoT, data confidentiality and authentication, access control within the net-
works, privacy and trust among users and things are among some of the key
issues [29].
IoTCrawler explores the use of advanced cryptographic techniques based
on Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE). Specifically, it analyses the appli-
cation and extension of the Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption
(CP-ABE) as a flexible and promising cryptographic scheme in order to
enable information to be shared while confidentiality is still preserved. In CP-
ABE, the cipher-text embeds the access structure to describe which private-
keys can decrypt it, and the same private-key is labelled with descriptive
attributes. IoTCrawler addresses the integration of CP-ABE with different
7.4 Search Engines for Browsing the Internet of Things – IoTCrawler 41
signatures schemes to provide end-to-end integrity to the information that is
shared for anticipatory purposes. Users are given means to define how their
personal information is shared and under which circumstances using a policy-
based approach. Additionally, IoTCrawler investigates the integration of this
solution within the search and discovery process for IoT.
The Blockchain paradigm [30] is also included in IoTCrawler.
A Blockchain is a distributed database that maintains a continuously growing
set of transactions in a way that is designed to be secure, transparent, highly
resistant to outages, auditable, and efficient, at the same time it is distributed.
However, despite the benefits that Blockchain technologies offer, we still
need to overcome two major challenges in IoTCrawler. First, privacy, since
transactions tend to be public, and encryption to protect transactions’ contents
is not enough because it still allows the remaining nodes in the system to learn
about the occurrence of a particular exchange in the system; and, second,
scalability, because existing permission-less blockchains (e.g. Bitcoin) are
only able to scale to a considerable number of nodes at the expense of attained
throughput, e.g. Bitcoin’s throughput is about seven transactions per second.
Moreover, IoTCrawler will leverage Trusted Execution Environments
(TEEs) to enhance the security primitives deployed in the proposed frame-
work, given that existing TEEs suffer from a number of shortcomings,
especially with respect to their security and privacy provisions.
In the area of Authentication, Authorisation and Accounting (AAA),
IoTCrawler proposes a lightweight access control scheme based on Capa-
bility Tokens for IoT as presented in [31, 32], where these tokens act as a
proof of possession providing a straightforward validation mechanism with-
out requesting a third party. We propose a mechanism for interoperability of
different authentication and authorisation solutions based on a bridge to third
party elements, such as the standard stacks as LDAP and FIWARE Service
Enablers to support a lightweight federation-like approach.
7.4.3.3 Data validation and quality analysis
The assessment of Quality of Data can basically be evaluated in five common
dimensions: Completeness, Correctness, Concordance, Plausibility and Cur-
rency. In [33] the authors provide a table of different terms used to describe
one of the dimensions of data quality. Furthermore, they provide a mapping
between data quality dimensions and data quality assessment methods. In
[34] Sieve is introduced, a framework to flexibly express quality assessment
methods and fusion methods. The STAR-CITY project [35] describes a
system for semantic traffic analytics. Based on various heterogeneous data
42 IoT European Security and Privacy Projects
sources (e.g., Dublin bus activity, events in Dublin city), their system is able
to predict future traffic conditions with the goal to make traffic management
easier and to support urban planning.
One of the major challenges in the assessment of quality metrics to
sensory IoT data is the lack of ground truth. The authors of [36] and [37]
developed and evaluated a concept for the assessment of node trustwor-
thiness in a network based on data plausibility checks. They propose that
every node performs a plausibility check to identify malicious nodes sending
faulty data. Similar to this work, they use data sources in order to find
“witnesses” for a given sensor reading. The authors in [38] propose three
different approaches to deal with a missing ground truth in social media:
spatiotemporal, causality, and outcome evaluation. Their concept to use
spatiotemporal evaluation to predict future behaviour of humans is like the
proposed IoTCrawler approach, disregarding that we evaluate past events.
Prior work of the authors emphasised the importance of an appropriate
distance model reflecting infrastructure, e.g., roads, and physics, i.e. traffic
or air movements [39]. The approach in IoTCrawler refines the state of the
art by utilising sensor and domain independent correlation and interpolation
models whilst incorporating knowledge of the city infrastructure to evaluate
data stream plausibility.
7.4.4 Conclusion
This part presents the key ideas and the architecture of a crawling and discov-
ery engine for the Internet of Things resources and their data. We describe
our work in the context of the H2020 IoTCrawler project, which proposes
a framework to make possible the effective search over IoT resources. The
system goes beyond the state of the art through adaptive, privacy-aware
and secure algorithms and mechanisms for crawling, indexing and search in
distributed IoT systems. Innovative technological developments are proposed
as enablers to support any IoT scenario. We discuss four use cases of the
platform, which are presented in the areas of Smart Cities, Social IoT, Smart
Energy and Industry 4.0. The project is currently implementing the envisaged
framework, at the same time the main interoperability issues are considered
to support the real-life uses cases identified. This work has been sponsored
by the European Commission, through the IoTCrawler project (contract
779852), and the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness through
the Torres Quevedo program (reference PTQ-15-08073).
7.5 SecureIoT: Multi-Layer Architecture 43
7.5 SecureIoT: Multi-Layer Architecture for Predictive
End-to-End Internet-of-Things Security
The proliferation and rising sophistication of Internet of Things (IoT)
infrastructures and applications comes with a wave of new cybersecurity
challenges. This is evident in several notorious security incidents on IoT
devices and applications, which have occurred during the last couple of years.
These include the “Lizard Stressor” attacks on home routers (January 2015),
the 1.4 million cars that were recalled by Chrysler due to potential hacking of
their control software (July 2015), Tesla’s autopilot crash (July 2016), as well
as the first large scale distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack based on
IoT devices (October 2016). Most of these incidents are directly associated
with the complexity, heterogeneity and dynamic behaviour of emerging IoT
deployments, which poses security challenges, which can be hardly addressed
by state of the art platforms. Some of the most prominent of these challenges,
include:
The fact that they provided limited support for end-to-end security,
since they lack mechanisms that address IoT security at all levels, i.e.
from the field and devices level to the edge and cloud levels. Moreover,
existing security solutions tend to be framed within a single platform and
ecosystem and cannot effectively operate in scenarios involving multiple
platforms and ecosystems [41].
Their inability to deal with very volatile and dynamic environments
comprising networks of smart objects. State-of-the-art IoT platforms
and their security mechanisms provide within cloud-based environments
that ensure cybersecurity for large numbers of IoT devices. Never-
theless, they make only limited provisions for dynamic applications
involving networks of smart objects (i.e. objects with (semi)autonomous
behaviour). In the latter, IoT devices and smart objects are likely to join
or leave, while security and privacy policies can also change dynami-
cally and without prior notice. Hence, to support large scale interactions
across multiple IoT platforms and networks of smart objects, there
should be some means of predicting and anticipating the security
behaviour and trustworthiness of an IoT entity (e.g., device, platform,
groups of objects) prior to interacting with it.
SecureIoT is motived by the need to support cyber-security in scenarios
involving cross-platform interactions and interactions across networks of
smart objects (i.e. objects with semi-autonomous behaviour and embedded
44 IoT European Security and Privacy Projects
intelligence), which require more dynamic, scalable, decentralized and intel-
ligent IoT security mechanisms. To this end, it introduces a multi-layer,
data-driven security architecture, which collects and processes information
from the field, edge and cloud layers of an IoT system, in order to identify
security threats at all these layers and accordingly to drive notifications
and early preparedness to confront them. Furthermore, SecureIoT foresees
cross-layer coordination mechanisms and will employees advanced analytics
towards a holistic and intelligent approach that will predict and anticipate
secure incident in order to timely confront them. Also, SecureIoT intro-
duces a range of security interoperability mechanisms in order to support
cross-vertical and cross-platform cyber-security scenarios. The SecureIoT
architecture serves as basis for the provision of security services to IoT
developers, deployers and platform providers, including a risk assessment,
a compliance auditing and a secure programming support service. In this
context, the rest of this chapter is structured as follows: Section 2 introduces
the SecureIoT architecture and its main principles. Section 3 discusses the
security services to be offered by the project, while Section 4 presents some
use cases that will be used to validate the project’s results.
7.5.1 SecureIoT Architecture
7.5.1.1 SecureIoT architecture overview
Figure 7.10. provides a high-level overview of the security architecture of the
project. The architecture provides placeholders for predictive IoT security
mechanisms, which can be contributed by different security experts in order
to protect IoT infrastructures and services. In the scope of SecureIoT the
partners will specify and implement such mechanisms in the areas of security
monitoring and predictive analysis, which will serve as a basis for supporting
the project’s use cases. Nevertheless, the project’s architecture is more general
and therefore able to accommodate additional algorithms and building blocks.
The architecture complies with the reference architectures specified by the
Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) and the OpenFog consortium [42], as
it specifies: (i) The field level, where IoT devices (including smart objects)
reside; (ii) The fog/edge level, which controls multiple devices close to the
edge of the network. Note that the fog/edge level might be the first security
layer in an IoT application, especially when resource constrained devices are
deployed; (iii) The enterprise and platform levels, which reside at the core
and where application and platform level security measures are applicable.
Moreover, the SecureIoT architecture will also specify:
7.5 SecureIoT: Multi-Layer Architecture 45
Field Level
(Smart Objects
and CPS
Systems)
Edge Node #1 Edge Node #2 Edge Node #n
Fog/Edge Data Collection
(Monitoring probes)
Actuation
Level
Fog/Edge
Level
(Edge)
Enterprise
Level
(Core)
Energy
Management
System
Enterprise
Resource
Planning (ERP)
Healthcare
Information
System (HIS) Application Data Collection
(Monitoring probes)
IoT Platform
Level
(Core)
Factory
Automation
System
Urban
Mobility
System
Platform Level Security
Services
(Monitoring probes)
Developers and
Innovators Compliance Auditing
SecureIoT Services Security-as-a-Service (SECaaS)
Data
Protection
ecnegilletnIy
tiruceSlacitreV
Developers Support Services Risk Assessment and Mitigation
Regulations (e.g., GDPR) – Directives (e.g., NIS) - Standards (e.g., ISO27001)
Cross-platform and Cross Vertical Security Intelligence (IoT chains) – Policies Harmonization
Enhanced level-
specific
intelligence
Insights
SecureIoT Registry and
Knowledge Base
(Things and Platforms)
Application Behaviour
Analysis
Edge
Behaviour
Analysis
Smart Objects Data Collection
(Monitoring probes)
Data
Protection
Device
Behaviour
Analysis
AI & Predictive
analytics
AI & Predictive
analytics
AI & Predictive
analytics
AI & Predictive
analytics
Enhanced level-
specific
intelligence
Enhanced
level-specific
intelligence
Enhanced
level-specific
intelligence
Insights Insights
Annotations and APIs
Policy
Enforcement
Policy
Enforcement
Policy
Enforcement
Deployers and End-users of IoT Solutions
Figure 7.10 Overview of SecureIoT Architecture.
Interfaces for (security) data collection at all levels of the security
architecture, including monitoring probes that are deployed at all levels.
Data analytics modules (including AI and predictive analysis) at all
levels, which extract insights about the future security state of the IoT
infrastructure and applications.
Semi-automated Policy Enforcement Points (PEPs), which are driven by
predictive insights and enforce policies at different levels. PEPs will pro-
vide the means for enforcing security and cryptographic functionalities,
configuring IoT platforms and devices for enhanced security, as well as
for distributing security sensitive datasets.
Multi-level security mechanisms and measures, which combine security
monitoring, analytics and insights from multiple levels.
Applicable policies and security measures are driven by regulations
(e.g., GDPR), directives (e.g., NIS, ePrivacy) and standards (such as
ISO27001 [43]). The ultimate goal of the architecture is to provide con-
crete services such as the SECaaS. The delivery of these services is
facilitated by the development and maintenance of a security knowledge
base, where metadata about IoT entities (i.e. objects platforms etc.) are
registered along with knowledge collected and summarized based on mul-
tiple publicly available threat intelligence sources. Note that the security
46 IoT European Security and Privacy Projects
services of the architecture are offered as a service based on a Security-
as-a-Service (SECaaS) paradigm. This however does not imply that the
security services are solely deployed in the cloud. Rather, they can be
offered based on a combination of cloud-based SaaS (Software-as-a-Service)
security services and FaaS (Fog-as-a-Service) functions provided at the
fog level.
7.5.1.2 Intelligent data collection and monitoring probes
Assessing and optimizing the security posture of IoT components require the
collection and the processing of their respective monitoring and configuration
data. The produced monitoring data will allow IoT stakeholders to assess the
security posture of their IoT platforms, to predict security issues, to enforce
policies for hardening systems, to prevent network misuse, to quantify busi-
ness risk, and to collaborate with partners to identify and mitigate threats. The
collection of these data requires the development of dedicated probes and
monitoring layers at different levels of the deployed IoT platform (device,
network, edge and core) to capture a comprehensive and a complete view
of its operations and interactions. In SecureIoT, monitoring probes will be
provided to support the collection of log data, including network flows and
software configurations, at the component, services and network levels.
A key characteristic of SecureIoT’s security monitoring infrastructure
(and related probes) will be its built-in intelligence in the data collection and
pre-processing mechanisms, which will be implemented over the SecureIoT
monitoring probes that will interfaces to different IoT platforms. As part of
this intelligence, the data collection mechanisms will ensure data quality, data
filtering, as well as adaptive selection of the needed data sources based on
dynamic changes to the configuration of the IoT platforms, applications and
smart objects. In order to implement this intelligence, the monitoring probes
will be enhanced with data streaming analytics mechanisms, which will be
able to process security-related information sources on the fly (i.e. almost
at real-time) in order to adapt the filtering and data collection accordingly.
This data collection intelligence will facilitate fast processing, as well as the
implementation of predictive analytics schemes.
7.5.1.3 SecureIoT systems layers and information flows
Figure 7.11. presents the layers of a SecureIoT compliant system, with
emphasis on the flow of information from an IoT platform to the SecureIoT
SECaaS services. The following layers are presented:
7.5 SecureIoT: Multi-Layer Architecture 47
Data collection
layer
Single IoT
Platform
SecureIoT
Monitoring
Engine
Per layer
Cross layer
Alerts
Cross platform
layer
Network
Device
Edge
Cloud
App
Analytics
layer
IoT
platforms
Management
layer
Contextualization
IoT Security
Templates
Figure 7.11 Layers of SecureIoT systems.
A layer of an individual IoT platform or system, which typically
comprises network, devices/field, edge/fog, cloud and application-level
components. These components are usually part of the target IoT
platform or systems that needs to be secured based on SecureIoT.
A data collection layer, which comprises the above-mentioned security
monitoring probes. Note that probes will be specified and developed for
all parts and components of the IoT system i.e. from the network and
devices components all the way up to the IoT applications’ components.
A data analytics layer, which is destined to process the data derived
from the various probes. This layer is empowered by data analytics
algorithms, but also by a range of cybersecurity templates, which specify
rules and patterns of the security incidents that are to be identified.
Taking network-level attacks as example, templates for specific types of
network attacks will be specified such as TCP SYN attacks, UDP flood
attacks, HTTP POST DoS (Denial of Service) attacks [43]. Each of the
templates will comprise the rules and conditions under which the attacks
will be identified. Likewise, templates for other types of attacks, includ-
ing application specific ones will be specified and used. Along with these
templates, the data analytics layer will comprise a contextualization
48 IoT European Security and Privacy Projects
component, which will be used to judge whether the attacks indicators
are abnormal for the given IoT platform and application context.
A cross-platform layer, which is destined to aggregate and correlate
information derived from multiple-IoT platforms. It will serve as a basis
for identifying attack indicators in cross-platform scenarios.
All of the above layers and components will leverage the services of a
knowledge base that will comprise information and knowledge about IoT-
related cybersecurity attacks. It will be also used to drive the operation of the
IoT security templates and the contextualization component.
7.5.1.4 Mapping to RAMI 4.0 layers
SecureIoT is destined to support cybersecurity scenarios in both consumer
and industrial settings. In order to strengthen the industrial relevance of the
project’s architecture, the project will provide a mapping of the main building
blocks of the SecureIoT architecture to the Reference Architecture Model
Industry4.0 (RAMI 4.0) [45]. While this mapping is work in progress, the
following associations and mappings are envisaged:
The SecureIoT field layer, maps to the Field and Control Device
hierarchy levels of RAMI4.0, as well as to its Asset Integration layer.
The SecureIoT edge layer, maps tot eh Station and Workcenter hier-
archy levels of RAMI4.0, as well as to its Asset, Integration and
Communication layers.
The SecureIoT cloud layer, maps to the Workcenter, Enterprise and
Connected World hierarchy levels of RAMI4.0, as well as to its
Information, Functional and Business layers.
The SecureIoT application layer, maps to the Enterprise and Con-
nected World hierarchy levels of RAMI4.0, as well as to its Business
layer.
The SecureIoT data collection layer, maps to the Field Device, Control
Device, Station and Work Centers hierarchy levels of RAMI4.0, as well
as to its Communication and Information layers.
The SecureIoT analytics layer, maps to the Enterprise and Connected
World hierarchy levels of RAMI4.0, as well as to its Information layer.
The SecureIoT management layer, maps to the Enterprise and Con-
nected World hierarchy levels of RAMI4.0, as well as to its Information,
Functional and Business layers.
7.5 SecureIoT: Multi-Layer Architecture 49
7.5.2 SecureIoT Services
Based on its architecture, the project will offer risk assessment, compliance
auditing and programmers’ support services as outlined in the following
paragraphs.
7.5.2.1 Risk assessment (RA) services
The SecureIoT RA services will aim at an efficient balance between realizing
opportunities for gains, while minimizing vulnerabilities and losses. They
will strive to ensure that an acceptable level of security is provided at an
affordable cost. The SecureIoT framework will quantify risks in terms of
a “likelihood factor”, which will be calculated based on combination of
the probability and impact of any identified vulnerabilities. This “likelihood
factor” will be appropriately weighted and ultimately normalized based on
a risk calculation model in-line with NIST’s Common Vulnerability Scoring
System (CVSS). Special emphasis will be paid in evaluating the criticality
of risks associated with the behaviour and the operation of smart objects, as
well as of services spanning multiple platforms. SecureIoT will therefore for-
mulate a formal methodology and an accompanying model that will produce
risk quantifications based on the identified vulnerabilities, potential threats
and the impact estimation per potentially successful exploitation. SecureIoT
will develop a risk quantification engine based on an expert system, which
will provide flexibility in implementing different rules and assign different
rates to the various risks.
7.5.2.2 Compliance auditing services
This service will be delivered as a tool available to solution deployers,
operators and end-users. Based on information collected through the secu-
rity analytics, including the information of the IoT knowledge base. It will
provide support for a set of security and privacy controls on the IoT infras-
tructures at multiple levels. The tool will be configured to support auditing
of IoT infrastructures and services, against existing sets of security and
privacy controls. The auditing will identify non-compliant behaviours and
will provide recommendations about areas that require attention. Several
prominent sets of security and privacy rules that will be supported concerning
controls and measures specified in the scope of the GDRP regulation, NIS and
ePrivacy directives.
50 IoT European Security and Privacy Projects
7.5.2.3 Programming support services
This service will enable developers to secure applications as part of their
programming efforts. In particular, it will enable them to: (a) Enforce Dis-
tributed Access Control; (b) Ensure the cryptographic protection of data; and
(c) Physical distribute sensitive data for enhanced security. These activities
will be supported based on programming annotations, which will specify
distributed access control, cryptographic protection and physical data distri-
bution activities. A series of source generation, bytecode transformation and
runtime reflection actions will be undertaken at specified Policy Enforcement
Points (PEPs), which will be implemented at various levels i.e. the device,
edge, core and application layers of the SecureIoT architecture. To this end,
along with the security monitoring probes, the SecureIoT architecture will
provide the means for configuring elements at the PEPs.
7.5.3 Validating Use Cases
The project’s architecture and services will be validated in three use cases,
which are briefly discussed in the following paragraphs.
7.5.3.1 Industrial plants’ security
The use case will focus on plant networks for operations and support –
e.g. SCADA, MES, PLCs, etc. – and enterprise networks connected to IoT-
platforms providing support for automation and supply chain collaboration.
The technical approach of the industrial IoT use case is twofold as reliability
and availability of real world production must not be brought at risk. The
following security challenges will be addressed, based on the SecureIoT
services:
Secure operations of connected factories with thread prediction:
The SecureIoT risk assessment service will be therefore used to pre-
dict security issues arising from deployed automation technologies in
a multi-vendor environment. Furthermore, SecureIoT’s prediction and
mitigation services will enable the plant control to draw the right
conclusions and prepare for attacks before they emerge.
Compliance and Protection of product/user data in a multi-vendor
environment: Factories need to protect product and user data sets.
SecureIoT will be used in order to enforce privacy and data protection
policies. Likewise, the compliance auditing SecureIoT service will be
also used to identify and remedy gaps in the industrial IoT environment.
Predictive Maintenance and Avoiding Machine Break-Downs in
“Human in the Loop” Scenarios: Predictive maintenance requires
7.5 SecureIoT: Multi-Layer Architecture 51
trustworthy exchange, storage and processing of sensor and asset man-
agement datasets. Security analytics of IoT application level entities will
be exploited as part of the SecureIoT risk assessment service in order to
proactively identify issues with transmission and protection of datasets
involved in the predictive maintenance process, in order to ensure the
reliability of the process and avoid damages/losses in scenarios where
machines foretell their lifetime and initiative actions in the supply chain
(e.g., ordering of spare parts, scheduling of maintenance).
7.5.3.2 Socially assistive robots
This use case will focus on security challenges associated with the integration
of a socially assistive robot (i.e. QT robot from SecureIoT partner LuxAI)
with a cloud-based IoT platform. This integration will target the delivery
of personalized ambient assisted living functionalities, such as personalized
rehabilitation and coaching exercises. In order to support these applications
a dense IoT network, enable continuous interaction between IoT devices,
robots, human users and the environment will be established. The integration
challenge will however lie on keeping track of the state of the robot and
the environment, as well as on implementing distributed task assignment
strategies (such as the Consensus-Based Bundle Algorithm (CBBA)), which
enable the distribution of application logic across different smart objects. The
following security challenges will be addressed:
Network and message security: The SecureIoT risk assessment and
mitigation services will be used to identify threats associated with com-
munications and network performance in order to appropriately adapt
the operation of the application (e.g., stop the training if needed and
deliver proper alerts to users).
Prediction and avoidance of dangerous/risky situations: SecureIoT
will monitor the robots’ operation both at the software level (i.e. through
information flow tracking) in order to identify possible hacking of the
robot, but also at the application level in order to detect abnormal
operation/behaviour that can lead at risk.
Secure programming environment for robotics missions: The pro-
gramming interfaces of the robot will be enhanced with SecureIoT
programming model and annotations in order to enable the developer
of a rehabilitation mission to enforce policies specified in some pol-
icy language such as XACML (eXtensible Access Control Markup
Language).
52 IoT European Security and Privacy Projects
Compliance to GDPR: An analysis of the application for GDPR
compliance will take place, including automated identification of non-
compliance risks (based on the SecureIoT risk assessment) and subse-
quent implementation of GDRP compliant policies based on the secure
programming XACML-based mechanisms.
7.5.3.3 Connected car use cases
This use case concerns security in connected cars scenarios, including:
(i) Usage Based Insurance scenarios where vehicle data are analysed to
assess driver behaviour and hence determine risks in order to better tailor
insurance premiums for the customers; and (ii) Warnings on traffic and
road conditions, that involve analysing data coming from multiple vehicles
to understand the traffic conditions in different locations. From the point of
view of cybersecurity for the usage-based insurance, it is important to ensure
that the data transmitted is only accessible by the responsible organisation
(privacy) and that the system cannot be corrupted such that a risky driver
appears to be low risk. Moreover, the integrity of the data is a key requirement
to ensure that insurance premiums are calculated fairly based on objectively
assessed risk using accurate and trusted data. Likewise, for the traffic and
road condition warnings it is vital that the data sent to the car is an accurate
interpretation of the data provided from each vehicle. It This is because the
system could be used maliciously to create congestion if the data is corrupted.
Moreover, integrity of software running in the connected car is crucial. Recent
attacks or security alarms raised has been focused on taking control over
IoT devices and gateways. Over the air firmware update could be used as
a countermeasure mechanism after an anomalous (or malware) detection.
To address these challenges, the SecureIoT risk assessment framework
will be employed, including predictive risk assessment functionalities. In case
of identified issues, preventive measures will be activated (i.e. enforcement
of data protection policies, provision of alerts to end-users, instigation and
scheduling of over the air updates).
7.5.4 Conclusion
SecureIoT is a first of a kind attempt to introduce a standards-based architec-
ture for end-to-end IoT security. The project’s architecture is aligned to recent
standards for industrial IoT security, including standards of the Industrial
Internet Consortium and the OpenFog consortium. It makes provisions for
7.6 SEMIoTICS 53
collecting and analysing data from all layers of an IoT platform, while at
the same time catering from cross platform and cross layer security analysis.
Moreover, the SecureIoT architecture provides the means for defining and
executing security actions at specific PEPs, as a means of enforcing policies
and instigating mitigation actions. Based on this architecture, the project
will implement risk assessment, compliance and the programming support
services.
SecureIoT is currently in its requirements engineering and specification
phase, while it has also commenced its architecture specification activities.
As part of the latter, the project will provide a mapping of its architectural
concepts to the RAMI4.0 reference model. Moreover, the project will start
the implementation of the data collection and data analytics mechanisms
that will underpin the realization of the architecture and of its services.
The project holds the promise to enhance the functionalities and lower the
costs for securing IoT applications spanning multiple IoT platforms and
smart objects. We will aspire to disseminate more detailed results through
publications, presentations and other activities of the IERC cluster in the
coming ten months. This work has been carried out in the scope of the
H2020 SecureIoT project, which is funded by the European Commission in
the scope of its H2020 programme (contract number 779899). The authors
acknowledge valuable help and contributions from all partners of the project.
7.6 SEMIoTICS
7.6.1 Brief Overview
SEMIoTICS aims to develop a pattern-driven framework, built upon existing
IoT platforms, to enable and guarantee secure and dependable actuation and
semi-autonomic behaviour in IoT/IIoT applications. Patterns will encode
proven dependencies between security, privacy, dependability, and interop-
erability (SPDI) properties of individual smart objects and corresponding
properties of orchestrations involving them. The SEMIoTICS framework will
support cross-layer intelligent dynamic adaptation, including heterogeneous
smart objects, networks and clouds, addressing effective adaptation and auto-
nomic behaviour at field (edge) and infrastructure (backend) layers based on
intelligent analysis and learning. To address the complexity and scalability
needs within horizontal and vertical domains, SEMIoTICS will develop
and integrate smart programmable networking and semantic interoperability
mechanisms. The practicality of the above approach will be validated using
54 IoT European Security and Privacy Projects
three diverse usage scenarios in the areas of renewable energy (addressing
IIoT), healthcare (focusing on human-centric IoT), and smart sensing (cov-
ering both IIoT and IoT); and will be offered through an open Application
Programming Interface (API). SEMIoTICS consortium consists of strong
European industry (Siemens, Engineering, STMicroelectronics), innovative
SMEs (Sphynx, Iquadrat, BlueSoft) and academic partners (FORTH, Uni
Passau, CTTC) covering the whole value chain of IoT, local embedded
analytics and their programmable connectivity to the cloud IoT platforms
with associated security and privacy. The consortium is striving for a common
vision of creating EU’s technological capability of innovative IoT landscape
both at European and international level.
7.6.2 Introduction
Global networks like IoT create an enormous potential for new generations
of IoT applications, by leveraging synergies arising through the convergence
of consumer, business and industrial Internet, and creating open, global
networks connecting people, data, and “things”. A series of innovations
across the IoT landscape have converged to make IoT products, platforms,
and devices, technically and economically feasible. However, despite these
advancements the realization of the IoT potential requires overcoming sig-
nificant business and technical hurdles. This includes several system aspects,
including dynamicity, scalability, heterogeneity, and E2E security and privacy
[46–48], as they are described below.
IoT are dynamic, ever-evolving and often unpredictable environments.
This relates to both IoT infrastructures as a whole (e.g. rapid development
of new smart objects and IoT applications introducing new requirements
to existing infrastructures and networks) and individual IoT applications
(e.g. new users and types of objects connecting to said applications). This
necessitates dynamically adaptive behaviour at runtime, at the IoT infras-
tructure, the IoT applications, and locally at the smart objects integrated by
them. Intrinsic requirements (e.g. scale, latency) dictate the need for, at least,
semi-autonomic adaptation at all layers.
The fast-growing number of interconnected users, smart objects and
applications requires high scalability of the IoT infrastructure and network
layers. At the network, the vastly increased demands require highly effi-
cient programmable connectivity, service provisioning and chaining in ways
that guarantee the much-needed end-to-end (E2E) optimizations, addressing
dynamic IoT application requirements. Scalability at the IoT infrastructure
7.6 SEMIoTICS 55
level requires seamless discovery and bootstrapping of smart objects, as
well as highly efficient orchestration, event processing and analytics and IoT
platform integration.
Despite advancements in standardization, there is still limited seman-
tic interoperability within IoT applications and platforms. Semantic inter-
operability requires three key abilities: (a) to recognize and balance the
heterogeneous capabilities and constraints of smart objects, (b) to interpret
data generated by such objects correctly, and (c) to establish meaningful
connections between heterogeneous IoT platforms.
Smart objects, IoT applications, and their enabling platforms are often
vulnerable to security attacks and changing operating and context conditions
that can compromise their security [49]. They also generate, make use of, and
interrelate massive personal data in ways that can potentially breach legal and
privacy requirements [49]. Preserving security and privacy properties remains
a particularly challenging problem, due to the difficulty of: (a) analysing vul-
nerabilities in the complex E2E compositions of heterogeneous smart objects,
(b) selecting appropriate controls (e.g., different schemes for ID and key
management, different encryption mechanisms, etc.), for smart objects with
heterogeneous resources/constraints, and (c) preserving E2E security and
privacy under dynamic changes in IoT applications and security incidents,
in the context of the ever-evolving IoT threat landscape [50].
The above challenges give rise to significant complexities and relate to the
implementation and deployment stack of IoT applications to address them.
The overall aim is: demands without considering the data volume. Taking into
consideration this ratio, green IT technologies have important environmental
and economic benefits. Circular Economy (CE) advocates a continuous devel-
opment cycle that reforms the currently prominent ‘take-make-dispose’ linear
economic mode by preserving and enhancing the natural capital. SEMIoTICS
will also provide the intelligence analytics capabilities and Information Com-
munication Technologies (ICT) that are required for turning IoT data into a
worthy asset for CE-centric businesses (e.g. [51]).
7.6.3 Vision
The main goal of the SEMIoTICS project is to develop a pattern-driven
framework, built upon existing IoT platforms. The proposed framework
will enable and guarantee the secure and dependable actuation and semi-
automatic behaviour in IoT/IIoT applications. Specifically, the SEMIoTICS
vision in delivering smart, secure, scalable, heterogeneous network and
data-driven IoT is based on two key features:
56 IoT European Security and Privacy Projects
Pattern-driven approach: Patterns are re-usable solutions to common
problems and building blocks to architectures. In SEMIoTICS, patterns
encode proven dependencies between security, privacy, dependabil-
ity and interoperability (SPDI) properties of individual smart objects
and corresponding properties of orchestrations (composition) involving
them. The encoding of such dependencies enables: (i) the verifica-
tion that a smart object orchestration satisfies certain SPDI properties,
and (ii) the generation (and adaptation) of orchestrations in ways that
are guaranteed to satisfy required SPDI properties. The SEMIoTICS
approach to patterns is inspired from similar pattern-based approaches
used in service-oriented systems [52, 53], cyber physical systems [54]
and networks [55, 56].
Multi-layered Embedded Intelligence: Effective adaptation and auto-
nomic behaviour at field (edge) and infrastructure (backend) layers
depends critically on intelligent analysis and learning the circumstances
where adaptation actions did not work as expected. Intelligent analysis
is needed locally for semi-autonomous, prompt reaction, but taking into
account IoT smart objects limited resources (thus requiring specialized
lightweight algorithms) [55, 57]. It should also be possible to fuse local
intelligence to enable and enhance analysis and intelligent behaviour at
higher levels (e.g. using results of local analysis of “thing events” to
globally predict and anticipate failure rates) [58].
7.6.4 Objectives
The SEMIoTICS project will target IoT applications with heterogeneous
smart objects, various IoT platforms and different SPDI requirements. Seven
main objectives are identified by the SEMIoTICS project including:
The development of patterns for orchestration of smart objects and IoT
platform enablers with guaranteed SPDI properties
The development of semantic interoperability mechanisms for smart
objects, networks, and IoT platforms, like semantic information broker
that resolve the semantics of correlated ontologies and common APIs
that enable cross-platform programming and interaction
The development of dynamically and self-adaptable monitoring mecha-
nisms, supporting integrated and predictive monitoring of smart objects
in a scalable manner
7.6 SEMIoTICS 57
The development of core mechanisms for multi-layered embedded intel-
ligence, IoT application adaptation, learning and evolution, and E2E
security, privacy, accountability and user control
The development of IoT-aware programmable networking capabilities
based on adaptation and Software-Defined Networking (SDN)/Network
Function Virtualization (NFV) orchestration
The development of a reference prototype open architecture demon-
strated and evaluated in both IIoT (renewable energy) and IoT (health-
care), as well as in a horizontal use case bridging the two landscapes
(smart sensing), and delivery of the respective open API
The adaptation of EU technology offerings internationally
These objectives are accomplished, considering the intrinsic requirements of
three main use case scenarios for an industrial wind park, an e-health system,
and a smart sensing setting.
7.6.5 Technical Approach
Figure 7.12 shows our initial vision of the logical architecture of SEMIoTICS
framework and how it relates to smart objects, IoT applications, and existing
IoT platforms, and how does it map onto a generic deployment infrastructure
consisting of private and public clouds, networks, and field devices. Within
the figure, blue boxes show components of the framework that are to be devel-
oped by SEMIoTICS; white boxes indicate components of IoT applications
managed by the framework. The key role of the SEMIoTICS framework in
the IIoT/IoT implementation stack is to support the secure, dependable and
privacy-preserving connectivity and interoperability of IoT applications and
smart objects used by them, and the management, monitoring and adaptation
of these applications, objects and their connectivity.
7.6.5.1 Enhanced IoT aware software defined networks
The sheer number of smart objects that are expected to connect to the Internet
by 2020 (more than 50bn smart objects) will increase network traffic dramat-
ically and introduce more diversity of network traffic (from elephant flows
to mice flows). This makes the development of networking techniques that
are significantly more scalable and agile than today’s networks an absolute
necessity. Networks will need to dynamically reconfigure their resources and
maintain network connectivity. Also, applications running on top of smart
connected devices will need to be resource and network-aware, in order to
58 IoT European Security and Privacy Projects
IoT/IIoT Gateway
IIoT
Edge instance
SDN/N FV bas ed in dustria l netw orks
SDN
Controller 1
SDN
switch
SDN
switch
SDN
switch
Sens or /
Actuator
SDN
Controller N
Industrial Private Cloud
Field Network Backend/Cloud
IIoT Applications
Logical ViewDeploymen t View
IIoT
Backend instance
Cloud App1 Cloud AppN
Public Cloud
Cloud App1 Cloud A ppN
End-to-End Security Mechanisms
Sens or /
Actuator
Sens or /
Actuator
IIoT Enhanced SDN and
NFV Networks
IIoT Application and Smart Object Management
Discovery and
Sema ntic
Interoperability
Monitoring
Management and
Analytics
Control
and
Adaptation
Learning
and
Evolutio n
Smart Objects Manager
IoT Platforms
Local. IIoT Application and Smart Object Management
Local Analytics Control and Adaptation
IIoT Components (Smart Objects)
Semi-autonomous IoT devices
IoT/IIoT Gateway
Sens ors Actuat ors
Open IoT Plarfor ms
(FIWARE)
Domain Specific IoT
Platforms (e.g. MindSphere)
IIoT
SPDI Patte rns
Things
Events
Figure 7.12 SEMIoTICS architecture (deployment and logic views).
take full advantage of underlying network programmability. In summary, IoT
requires more agile networks.
SDN can provide a solution to this problem. It allows network pro-
grammability, which can be used to decouple network control from the
forwarding network (aka data) plane and to make the latter directly pro-
grammable by the former. Integrating IoT and SDN will increase network
efficiency as it will make it possible for a network to respond to changes or
events detected at the IoT application layer through network reconfiguration.
If a spontaneous concentration of people in a specific place is detected by
an IoT application, for example, the application can send a request to the
SDN controller to reconfigure the network and provide more bandwidth to
the area before network congestion occurs. As another example, consider
an IoT application where sensor readings are transmitted periodically. In
such cases, network resources on the path connecting the sensors to the
backend IoT application can be reserved during the reporting cycles to enable
efficient flows and released outside them. SEMIoTICS aims to develop a
middleware layer between the IoT applications and the SDN-controlled field
7.6 SEMIoTICS 59
network, abstracting the underlying protocol implementations and SDN APIs.
This will allow IoT applications to trigger the network reconfiguration
through pattern-driven adaptations. In this view, SDN becomes another
component in the IoT implementation stack which, like other components,
can be dynamically configured through SPDI patterns [56].
7.6.5.2 Localized analytics for Semi-Autonomous IIoT operation
An IDC FutureScape report [59] for IoT reported that by 2018, 40 percent of
IoT data will be stored, processed, analysed and acted where they are created
before they are transferred to the network. There are two main reasons for
this: big data volume and fast reaction.
First of all, IoTs/IIoTs are generating an unprecedented volume and
variety of data depending on the vertical use case. Not all these data need to
be sent always to the cloud for storage and processing. Indeed, the volume of
the data makes it in many cases extremely difficult to process them globally
in an efficient manner and hinders learning the relations that are hidden in
the data. For this reason, we need to enrich the generated and collected data
with semantic information at the source and intermediate stations, process
them locally with machine learning algorithms to extract the most important
features of the data and only then transfer the learned local features to
the cloud for further, global, processing and feature analysis. Hence, new
approaches, techniques, and corresponding designs need to be developed to
store, analyse, and derive insight from these data sets. This has already been
identified as a challenge by the industry, e.g. Forrester [60] highlighting the
need of IoT applications for distributed analytics since centralized analytics
cannot cope for many IoT usage scenarios, and Gartner [61] emphasizing the
importance of IoT edge architecture and IT/OT integration for achieving such
distributed and layered data analysis.
The second reason driving the need for localized analytics is fast reaction.
By the time the data makes its way to the cloud for analysis and some analysis
results have been obtained and transferred back to the field layer, so much
time has passed that the opportunity to act effectively on the obtained analysis
results at the field layer (e.g. smart actuation) is usually long gone. Again,
this is a crucial requirement for the industry – Forbes and Moor Insights &
Strategy (MI&S) [62] expects that machine learning-enabled reaction to
changes in the current environmental/system context to be essential for IoT
solutions. By 2020 MI&S believes that the machine learning at edge com-
bined with central machine learning in cloud arrangements will exist in a
large number of solutions and will account for a great deal of the innovation
60 IoT European Security and Privacy Projects
in IoT world – giving a substantial market advantage to the providers of such
solutions. By doing a fast analysis on the local data (whose volume is much
reduced compared to the entire data produced by the IIoT/IoT system and thus
should be analysable with substantially fewer resources), an IIoT/IoT system
can react quickly to context changes and adapt to them, in ways that optimise
the use of both its own resources and the environment’s, and eventually
improving the overall user experience. SEMIoTICS will develop localized
analytics at the edge for semi-autonomous operation with smart actuation
and use the results of the localized analytics to help improve the subsequent,
global analysis that will be performed on the cloud for learning across the
whole system and extraction of global patterns – itself a task whose results
can be used by local analytics mechanisms to improve their performance and
be able to proactively react to situations that had not been observed at that
local point in the past but had occurred at other parts of the system.
7.6.6 Security Architecture Concept
As aforementioned, the SEMIoTICS vision is articulated around the develop-
ment of a framework for smart object and IIoT/IoT application management
based on trusted patterns, monitoring and adaptation mechanisms, enhanced
IoT centric networks and multi-layered embedded intelligence. These core
elements of our approach are described below.
7.6.6.1 Pattern-based trustworthy IIoT/IoT
The key element enabling the SEMIoTICS approach is the use of archi-
tectural SPDI patterns. These patterns define generic ways of composing
(i.e., establishing the connectivity between) and configuring the hetero-
geneous smart objects and software components that may exist at all
layers of the IoT applications implementation stack, including: sensors and
actuators; smart devices; software components at the network, cloud, IoT
enabling platforms and/or other middleware layer; as well as software com-
ponents at the IoT application layer. To do so, patterns specify abstract and
generic smart object interaction and orchestration protocols, enhanced
(if necessary) by transformations to ensure the semantic compatibility of
data. Furthermore (and more importantly), the smart object interaction and
orchestration protocols encoded by the patterns must have proven ability
(i.e., an ability proven through formal verification or demonstrated through
testing and/or operational evidence) to achieve not only a semantically viable
interoperability between the smart objects that they compose but also specific
7.6 SEMIoTICS 61
SPDI properties, which may be required of compositions. The compositions
defined by patterns are both vertical and horizontal, i.e., they can involve
smart objects at the same (horizontal) or different layers (vertical) layer of the
IoT implementation stack. As an example of a pattern that guarantees “data
integrity” – i.e., absence of unauthorized modifications of data – consider the
integrity preserving cascade composition pattern discussed in [63, 64].
According to this pattern in a sequential composition of processes P1, . . . , Pn
where the input data of Piare meant to be the output data of Pi1, and the
communication between Pi1to Pi(i=2,. . . , n) is based on an orchestrator
O which facilitates data transfers from Pi1to Pi,overall data integrity is
preserved if data integrity is preserved within each Pi, within O and across
all communications from PiS to O and vice versa. The integrity cascade
composition pattern applies both to horizontal compositions (e.g., in software
services workflows as in [63, 64]) and vertical composition (e.g., in transfer
of data in invocation of operations of IoT enabling middleware).
Another (more complex) example of a pattern fitting the SEMIoTICS
vision is the synchronously controlled distribution line (SCDL) pattern
discussed in [54]. SCDL guarantees that a distributed asynchronous sensor
system installed upon a physical pipeline (e.g., a pipeline of an electricity
distribution network) will operate in virtual synchrony and provide a guar-
anteed density of readings (i.e., a bounded minimum number of readings
per distant and per time unit). The pattern suggests a composition consisting
of: (i) sensors connected to a controller through a middleware component that
realizes a bounded reliable message delivery protocol; (ii) a controller with
the capability to authenticate sensors, store readings received from them in
fixed length intervals, and substitute missing or corrupted sensor readings
with synthetic readings computed through the linear interpolation of readings
from their closest adjacent sensors and the end of reading intervals. The
application of the SCDL pattern is proven to guarantee the consumption
of readings at the end of the reading interval where they fit, make them avail-
able in a synchronous manner, filter out illegitimate readings and produce
readings of the required density for the pipeline. In SCDL pattern, these
properties are guaranteed even in the presence of missing or corrupted
raw data, as long as there is a minimal number of legitimate sensor readings.
Examples of additional patterns have been given in [52] and [56]. These
include patterns for confidentiality in service orchestrations and patterns for
availability in Software Defined Networks, respectively.
Inspired by these earlier works, SEMIoTICS patterns will develop pat-
terns specifying:
62 IoT European Security and Privacy Projects
Composition structures for integrating smart objects and components
of IoT enabling platforms (e.g., platform enablers) in a manner that
guarantees SPDI properties.
The E2E SPDI properties that the compositions expressed by the
pattern preserve.
The component level SPDI properties that the types of smart objects
and/or components orchestrated by the pattern, must satisfy in order to
preserve the end-to-end SPD properties.
Additional conditions that need to be satisfied for guaranteeing end-
to-end SPDI properties. These may, for example, include configuration
conditions that need to be satisfied by the IoT platforms and the networks
providing the connectivity between them, for guarantying the end-to-end
availability properties of IoT application (composition).
Monitoring checks that must be monitored at runtime in order to verify
that any assumptions about the individual smart objects and components
that are orchestrated by a pattern or other operational conditions, which
are critical for the preservation of the end-to-end SPDI properties of the
pattern, hold at runtime.
Adaptation actions that may be undertaken to adapt IoT applications,
which realise the composition structure of the pattern, at runtime. Such
actions may, for example, include the replacement of individual smart
objects within a composition; the adaptation of the process realizing
the composition; the modification of the configuration of the network
services used to connect the smart objects of the composition and/or the
deployment platforms upon which these objects run. Adaptation actions
are specified along with guard conditions determining when they can be
executed (guards are monitored, and adaptation is triggered when they
are satisfied).
SEMIoTICS will also develop a generic engine supporting the execution of
patterns at runtime to realize the overall process of monitoring, forming,
adapting and managing smart object orchestrations in IoT applications.
7.6.6.2 Monitoring and adaptation
The SEMIoTICS framework will support evolving runtime management
and adaptation of IoT applications and smart objects [55–58]. Adaptation
will be triggered by monitoring the guard conditions of the patterns used
by the IoT application of interest, and applying the actions defined in the
patterns when such conditions are satisfied. The SEMIoTICS framework will
also monitor and analyse the effectiveness of patterns and the adaptation
7.6 SEMIoTICS 63
actions undertaken in reference to the contextual and operational conditions
in which they were undertaken. This will be to identify deficiencies or
failures in applying the patterns, to diagnose the reasons which may have
caused deficiencies or failures and avoid the application of the same pat-
tern(s) under the same conditions in subsequent phases. The use of a specific
type of network connectivity or a specific type of sensor object amongst
alternative options may, for example, prove to be a non-optimal option for
network performance or sensor signal reliability under particular conditions.
Similarly, certain data transformations may prove excessively time consum-
ing for achieving the required scalability in an IoT application. Monitoring
will also be necessary to ensure that any component level SPDI properties
assumed by the pattern are upheld whilst the pattern is active (i.e., in use) in an
IoT application.
Beyond the basic monitoring of the contextual circumstances surrounding
the operation of different smart objects and IoT applications, the SEMIoTICS
framework will incorporate learning and evolution mechanisms supporting
the analysis of any adaptation and configuration actions undertaken for an IoT
application. This will be necessary in order to identify whether the application
of patterns is effective over time (e.g., it does indeed prevent the occurrence
of breaches of SPDI properties) and what might be the reasons for not being
effective when this is the case.
7.6.7 Use Cases
SEMIoTICS will target three IoT application scenarios: two verticals in the
areas of energy and health care and one horizontal in the areas of intelligent
sensing. These scenarios have been selected since they involve: (a) differ-
ent and heterogeneous types of smart objects (i.e., sensors, smart devices,
actuators) and software components; (b) different vertical and horizontal
IoT platforms; and (c) different types of SPDI requirements. Due to these
dimensions of variability, our scenarios provide comprehensive coverage of
technical issues, which should be accounted for in developing the SEMI-
oTICS approach and infrastructure, and to this end provide an effective way
for driving the R&D work programme of SEMIoTICS and evaluating and
demonstrating its outcomes.
7.6.7.1 Renewable energy – Wind energy
Current state of the art of Wind Turbine Controller in a Wind Park
control network is typically an embedded or highly integrated operating
system, which follows rigorously development and pre-qualification prior
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to deployment in the real world. As a result of this slow process, new
features, adding new sensors, actuators and related advancements require
several months or even years to be fully matured and operational in
the field.
Taking local action on sensing and analysing structured data to
find the inclination of a steel tower – When the nacelle is turned
during a cable untwisting event (Sensing), the gravity acceleration (Ag)
component measured by an accelerometer in longitude direction (Ay)
will vary as a function of the inclination (Inc) of the steel tower. O&M
personnel in remote control center wants to know the inclination of all
the steel towers on a number of specific wind farms, as these details
will have to be shared with the customer to monitor the deformation
and fatigue of the steel. To find the inclination of a steel tower, a full
cable-untwist procedure has to be activated. This happens, depending
on wind conditions, 3–4 times a month. It is also possible to manually
instruct the wind turbine to perform the unwind procedure. At the time
of the unwindingprocedure a hi-frequency set of data is recorded. A rel-
atively large amount of data is required to calculate the inclination. This
datasheet needs to be sent back to the remote control center to model
and calculate the inclination. In SEMIoTICS, localized edge analytics
will be applied which will result in semi-autonomous IIoT behavior as
only the container containing the algorithm and result of the inclination
calculation is transferred to between the wind turbine and the remote
control centre. The unnecessary data traffic between each turbine and
remote control centre is greatly reduced. Without the localized analytics
functionality, all the hi-frequency acceleration and nacelle position data
should have transferred to remote control centre resulting in suboptimal
operation.
Smart Actuation by sensing unstructured video/audio data – Within
the turbine, there are many events which can be captured by IIoT
sensors such as Grease leakage detection during normal operation or
unintended noise detection when the turbine rotor is changing the direc-
tion in the line of wind to maximize energy production. The sensing
of this unstructured data and acting locally to prevent any damage to
the parts of the turbine in the long run will be of key importance.
Localized analytics, as proposed in SEMIoTICS, which will lead in
smart actuation to protect the critical infrastructure of renewable energy
resources.
7.6 SEMIoTICS 65
SEMIoTICS implements:
Industrial Things semantic discovery, Bootstrapping of IIoT devices and
Gateway
Inventory of the things at the SDN controller
REST-based Intent interface for network-agnostic cloud applications
Security at every layer
Local data analytics at the Sensors, Actuators and Gateway
7.6.7.2 Healthcare
This healthcare use case is an attempt to come up with usable, acceptable and
sustainable IoT solution for assisted mobility through falls prevention leading
to active and healthy ageing. Falls in older adults are a significant cause of
morbidity and mortality and are an important class of preventable injuries.
This use case specifically focuses on advanced fall prevention and manage-
ment solution aimed at both senior citizens and adults with Mild Cognitive
Impairment or mild Alzheimer’s disease and their (informal) caregivers. The
objective of this scenario is to extend the existing IoT platform like AREAS
with Assisted Mobility Module (AMM) which is a dedicated module for
the management of, and integration of information from, a network of IT
services and hardware devices constituting an advanced fall prevention and
management solution aimed at both senior citizens and adults with Mild
Cognitive Impairment or mild Alzheimer’s disease and their (informal) care-
givers. Given the figures introduced at the beginning, the social dimension
of the solution is reflected in the improved quality of life for people that
are susceptible to falls, given that AMM will prolong the time they can
work and live independently. The envisaged evolution of the AMM will
see the inclusion of additional robotic elements, in particular, the system
will include a:
Robotic Assistant (RA) connected to a network of embedded IoT
devices and services for monitoring (and maintaining a diary of)
apatient’s activities, health status and treatment, as well as for
supporting cognitive skills training, notifying/reminding the patient of
upcoming treatments (e.g. medication schedules) and visits.
Personal assistant robots may help the patients with their daily activities
like walking trail and other routine.
66 IoT European Security and Privacy Projects
SEMIoTICS will contribute in the:
Integration of distributed IoT devices with higher degree of autonomy
(i.e. robotic devices)
Exploitation of computational resources both in the cloud and at the edge
Security and privacy of patient data, safety of a patient
7.6.7.3 Generic IoT & smart sensing
Today’s IoT embedded devices are often described as smart devices. “Smart”
usually shall be associated to some Things that show some form of intel-
ligence, bright behaviour during their operations. Unfortunately, current
meaning and their reality is that they are locally programmable and always
connected to some cloud infrastructure (e.g. typically through a wireless con-
nection such as Wi-Fi or Bluetooth Low Energy) to send raw data. Therefore,
these devices transmit sensed data to the cloud without any analytic being
performed locally and without showing remarkable forms of computational
intelligence. An IoT thing is intelligent is it has capabilities to learn from
and act upon the data (at least without supervision) it is sensing. Some-
times, they also receive back from the cloud some form of actuation (control)
instructions, which are determined by a centralized server-based analysis of
sensed and other data. A typical example, on domotic applications, is the one
where several sensing nodes stream some relevant raw data at given interval
(e.g. temperature, humidity, pressure) to a cloud service. An example is the
Microsoft Azure or IBM Bluemix cloud platforms and related ecosystem.
In this scenario, the intelligent data processing always resides remotely, and
the communication channel is (implicitly) assumed to be always present and
open.
The use case provides:
Evolution of platform technologies enabling local analytics computing
(i.e. edge computing)
Enhanced IoT system scalability and increased robustness
Open market enhanced middleware portfolio for intelligent embedded
devices and innovative businesses opportunities
SEMIoTICS’s research efforts focus in the:
Support for tight integration at device level of sensing and computational
elements in close tight cooperation on dedicated embedded HW (i.e.
edge computing)
7.7 SerIoT 67
Increased system scalability and computational partitioning to enhance
system responsiveness and stability by exploiting self-adapting online
learning mechanisms
Enhanced architectural models redefining system from bottom to top for
handling the continuous and discrete sensing.
7.6.8 Summary
SEMIoTICS aims to develop an open IIoT/IoT framework, interoperating
with existing IIoT/IoT platforms (e.g. FIWARE, MindSphere) and pro-
grammable networking, through their exposed APIs. The SEMIoTICS frame-
work will also integrate IIoT and IoT sensing and actuating technologies.
A core element of the SEMIoTICS approach is the development and use
of patterns for orchestration of smart objects and IoT platform enablers
in IoT applications with guaranteed SPDI properties. Patterns constitute an
architectural concept well founded in software systems engineering. SEMI-
oTICS advocates the patterns approach to systems engineering, but uses a
novel pattern type (i.e., SPDI patterns) to guarantee semantic interoperabil-
ity, security, privacy and dependability in large scale IIoT/IoT applications
integrating smart objects. Said patterns will be supported by mechanisms
featuring integrated and predictive monitoring of smart objects of all layers
of the IoT implementation stack in a scalable manner, as well as core mech-
anisms for multi-layered embedded intelligence, IoT application adaptation,
learning and evolution, and end-to-end security, privacy, accountability, and
user control. This approach will enable and guarantee secure and dependable
actuation and semi-autonomic behaviour in IoT/IIoT applications, supporting
cross-layer intelligent dynamic adaptation, including heterogeneous smart
objects, networks and clouds.
7.7 SerIoT
The Internet of Things or Internet of Everything envisages billions of phys-
ical things or objects (sensors and actuators) connected to the Internet via
heterogeneous access networks. IoT is emerging as the breakthrough tech-
nology introducing the next wave of innovations, including revolutionary
applications, significantly improving and optimizing our daily life.
The IoT is capable to create a complex Network of Networks system
through IP protocol and Mobile Network connectivity, allowing “things” to
be read, controlled and managed at any time and at any place. This brings
68 IoT European Security and Privacy Projects
such technical issues as the lack of a shared infrastructure, lack of common
standards, problems with the flexibility, scalability, adaptability, maintenance,
and updating the IoT devices, etc.
Especially important are security concerns, resulting from all of the listed
technological aspects [77, 78]. In case of lack of the IoT related security stan-
dards and commonly accepted technological solutions, every vendor creates
their own solutions. Moreover, the solutions currently used in IT systems are
mostly unsuitable for direct application in IoT, e.g. authentication based on
central server that works well for small scale systems but does not provide
sufficient mechanisms for future large scale IoT ecosystems. On the other
hand, attacks on the IoT platforms will have significant economic, energetic
and physical security consequences, beyond the traditional Internet lack of
security.
7.7.1 SerIoT Vision and Objectives
SerIoT aims to conduct research for the delivery of a secure, open, scalable
and trusted IoT architecture. The solution will be implemented and tested
as a complete, generic solution to create and manage large scale IoT envi-
ronment operating across IoT platforms and paying attention on security
problems.
A decentralized approach, based on peer to peer, overlay communication
is proposed [69]. SerIoT will optimize the security of IoT platforms in a cross-
layered manner. The concept of Software Defined Networks (SDN) is used
and SDN controllers are organized in hierarchical structure [74, 75]. The
objectives of SerIoT include to provide the prototype implementation of a
self-cognitive [66–68], SDN based core network, easily configurable to adapt
to any IoT platform, including advanced analytics modules, self-cognitive
honeypots and secure routers. The solution will be supported by appropriate
technologies such as Decision Support System (DSS) supplementing con-
troller’s functionality. The DSS will be able to detect the potential threats
and abnormalities. The system will be supplemented with comprehensive and
intuitive visual analytics and mitigation strategies that will be used according
to the detected threats. It will be validated in the final phase of the project
through representative use cases scenarios, involving heterogeneous EU wide
SerIoT network system.
7.7 SerIoT 69
7.7.2 SerIoT Architecture Concept
The SerIoT architecture [65] is based on a software-managed network
implementing SDN technology and is divided into the following layers and
modules (See Figure 7.13.).
The IoT Data Acquisition layer is comprised of the low-level IoT-
enabled components that create the infrastructure backbone, including honey-
pots, dedicated engines and storage capabilities and the SDN secure routers.
The SDN routers will use OpenFlow communication and will be based on
Open Switch implementation being significantly extended to cooperate with
related SerIoT modules and security mechanism.
The backbone network will be divided into domains (subnets). Every sub-
net constitutes an autonomic SDN network, controlled by the SDN controller
and extended according to SerIoT needs. Controllers will be organized into
hierarchical structure [76]. The first level controller is responsible for the
routing within the subnet using gathered data. It will be also able to route
packets to neighbouring subnets (via the appropriate border node). In the case
of destinations outside their own subnet and neighbouring subnets, routing
requests will be sent to a second (or third, fourth, etc.) level controllers. The
controllers will continuously gather information to feed the analytics module.
Figure 7.13 The structure of layered SerIoT architecture.
70 IoT European Security and Privacy Projects
These components will be connected to visual analytics module and support
decision making system.
The Ad-hoc Anomaly detection layer will provide a number of
security mechanisms, executed across IoT devices, honeypots and SDN
routers. Anomaly detection techniques based on local traffic characteristics
(as dynamic changes in queue lengths) will be regularly probed by smart
“cognitive packets” sent by the SDN controller and feeding the controller
routing decisions. The controller will have the ability to detect suspicious
and risky paths, and re-schedule the routing paths over secure, preferable
connections according to secure aware routing, but also energy and Qality
of Service (QoS) aware routing [71–73].
The Visual Analytics and Decision Support tools will deal with the
interactive decision support applications that will be delivered to the end-
users, able to effectively detect potential abnormalities at different levels
of the network. The end-user tool will be developed together with a novel
visual analytics framework, dealing with the effective management and
visualization of data.
The Mitigation and Counteraction Module will be responsible for
implementing decisions taken by the Decision Support tools. The module will
use dedicated software and network components as SDN routers, honeypots
and IoT devices.
The SerIoT platform will ensure the separation of enterprise and private
data. The system will provide monitoring mechanisms and anomaly detec-
tion techniques, using a cross-layer data collection infrastructure that will
allow effective information transmission and data aggregation for analysis. A
prototype honeypot with the ability to analyse network traffic and detecting
anomalies will be developed. This new architecture for ensuring security,
based on SDN technology, should bring a significant progress in comparison
to current solutions.
The innovatory approach used in SerIoT network will be using Cognitive
Packets [70] for gathering network data on QoS, security state and energy
usage, and Cognitive Packet Network routing engine, based on Random
Neural Networks (RNN) [79, 80]. The concept is a combination of neural-
networks-based routing and source routing. It was successfully applied in
SDN network [71], and in the SerIoT project will be extended both in terms
of data used as input for routing engine and of scale of the networks. Security
data will be used as input for learning of RNN, along with QoS and energy
usage data, to allow finding secure and efficient routes for every SDN flow.
7.7 SerIoT 71
7.7.3 Use Cases
The solutions of the SerIoT project will be evaluated in individual laboratory
test-beds and also in an integrated EU wide test-bed which will interconnect
significant use cases developed by SerIoT industry partners.
SerIoT aims to design and to deploy four innovative use cases arising
from three significant for the global economy domains where the use of IoT is
rapidly increasing: (i) Smart Cities domain will be covered by two ambitious
use cases where Surveillance and Intelligent Transportation IoT networks
will be evaluated, (ii) Flexible Manufacturing domain with the detection of
physical attacks on wireless sensor networks, and finally (iii) a novel Food
Chain Scenario will be exploited demonstrating mobility security issues.
Each of the use cases considers one or several scenarios. A scenario is
intended to describe and specify the system behaviour according to a specific
situation, or in other words to describe the situation in which a specific system
should work and how the system works and interacts with the different users:
Use Case 1 (Surveillance) scenarios:
Facilities monitoring
Embedded intelligence in buses
Use Case 2 (Intelligent Transport Systems ITS in Smart Cities)
scenarios:
Automated driving
Public transport maintenance
Public transport security
Road side ITS stations
Use Case 3 (Flexible Manufacturing Systems) scenarios:
Wireless robots in warehouse
Critical infrastructure protection
Use Case 4 (Food Chain) scenario:
Fresh food deadline control
7.7.4 Industrial and Commercial Involvement
SerIoT has strong support regarding industrial know-how and imple-
mentation. Among the Consortium partners there are eight industrial or
small/medium size enterprises (SME) with diverse and complementary tech-
nological and research expertise, covering the full spectrum of research and
innovation activities anticipated in the project [65]. Six of these partners
are large industrial societies able to support the multi-disciplinary topics
72 IoT European Security and Privacy Projects
introduced in SerIoT, i.e. IoT telecom/network infrastructure & Industry 4.0
Use Cases by DT/T-Sys, IoT anomaly detection by ATOS, IoT applications &
platform by DT/T-Sys., design-driven & cross-layer analytics by ATOS.
Moreover, SMEs involved in the consortium are among the leading and
innovative companies in their sectors. Hence, a large amount of innovation
foreseen in the project will be also carried by SMEs. What all SerIoT SME
partners share in common is their proven ability to apply research results
into successful and well established commercial products (e.g. HOP Core,
Wear & Extended innovative solution by HOPU). Having in mind their strong
commitment in delivering new services in their customers, industrial & SME
partners have identified complementary private investments to support the
SerIoT business perspectives.
Moreover, specific dissemination actions will be carried out, through
already established communication channels, networks and working groups
in order to ensure that the new & open solutions of the project will be
conveyed to major stakeholders in Europe and Worldwide.
7.7.5 Summary
In this paper we outline the EU H2020 SerIoT project that addresses IoT secu-
rity challenges. As a scientific project, SerIoT will provide a new approach
to understand the threats to IoT based infrastructures and deliver methods to
solve the security problems in the IoT. Pioneering research and development
based on holistic approaches will be conducted. A generic IoT framework
based on an adaptation of the concept of Software Defined Networks with
Cognitive Packets will be developed as well as the new methods for intrusion
detection with the use of a cross-layer approach. Visual analytics tools for
analysing threats in IoT ecosystem will be used.
7.8 SOFIE – Secure Open Federation for Internet
Everywhere
The main goal of the SOFIE [83] project is to enable diversified applications
from various application areas to utilise heterogeneous IoT platforms and
autonomous things across technological, organisational and administrative
borders in an open and secure manner, making reuse of existing infrastructure
and data easy. SOFIE is guided by the needs of three pilot use cases with
diverse business requirements: food supply-chain, mixed reality mobile gam-
ing, and energy markets. Furthermore, we will explore the synergies among
7.8 SOFIE – Secure Open Federation for Internet Everywhere 73
these areas, building a foundation for cross-application-area use of existing
IoT platforms and data.
SOFIE will design, implement and pilot a systematic, open and secure
way to establish new business platforms that utilise existing IoT platforms
and distributed ledgers. With “openness”, we mean flexible and administra-
tively open business platforms, as well as technically decentralised federa-
tion to enable the interoperability of different IoT platforms, ledgers, and
autonomous devices. To realise this vision, SOFIE brings together large sys-
tem vendors and integrators (ENGINEERING and Ericsson), high tech SMEs
delivering highly innovative products and solutions (GuardTime, Synelixis)
and prestigious universities (Aalto University and the Athens University of
Economics and Business). The results of the project will be guided by these
three use cases and will be tested in an equal number of real-life trials. For this
purpose, the consortium includes ASM TERNI S.p.A., a public multi-utility
company and Emotion who will trial SOFIE developments in the energy
sector, OPTIMUM, a leading SME in the area of supply chain IT systems,
which (together with SYNELIXIS) will trial SOFIE in the realisation of a
farm-to-fork scenario and Rovio Entertainment Corporation, which will lead
the SOFIE trial in a mixed reality mobile gaming context.
7.8.1 Objectives
The SOFIE consortium has broken down the high-level goal into the
following specific and tangible objectives:
Define a secure, open, decentralised and scalable IoT federation archi-
tecture for sensing, actuation, and smart behaviour. In order to stay open
and interoperable, emerging standard interfaces should be used between
the components and towards the outside world.
Make IoT data and actuation accessible across applications and plat-
forms in a secure and controlled way. SOFIE must provide the means to
reuse data, within the limits set by its owner, across applications.
Develop a solution to provide integrity, confidentiality and auditability
of IoT data, events and actions. SOFIE shall define and implement
ledger-independent transactions that can be simultaneously entered into
various closed and open blockchains and other persistent ledgers.
Develop an IoT federation framework to facilitate creation of IoT busi-
ness platforms. The framework can be used to create business platforms,
including those for the three pilot use cases.
74 IoT European Security and Privacy Projects
Deploy and evaluate the SOFIE federation framework in three field
trials.
Evaluate the commercial viability of the SOFIE federation approach
based on the three field trials and research on business models.
Establish the SOFIE IoT federation approach as a major enabler for
the IoT industry through dissemination, standardization, education,
workshops and pilots.
7.8.2 Technical Approach
SOFIE combines several IoT platforms and distributed ledgers into a fed-
erated IoT platform supporting the reuse of existing IoT infrastructure and
data by various applications and businesses. Figure 7.14 illustrates the overall
architectural approach.
SOFIE achieves decentralization of business platforms through the use of
DLTs. Since the properties of various DLTs, such as scalability, throughput,
resilience, and openness, are significantly different, SOFIE relies on using
multiple different DLTs in parallel. To allow transactions to be recorded into
multiple blockchains or other ledgers, SOFIE will design and implement
the inter-ledger transaction layer. We will build upon existing leading-edge
work, including the W3C-associated Inter-ledger Protocol (ILP), applying the
results to the IoT domain, and developing them further. The transactions will
be implemented as multi-stage smart contracts whose resolution depends on
IoT Network
Stored Data
Abstrac!on
Services/API
Federa!on
Adapter
IoT Network
Stored Data
Abstrac!on
Services/API
Federa!on
Adapter
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IoT Network
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Federa!on
Adapter
Exisng “open”
IoT Plaorms (e.g. FIWARE)
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Figure 7.14 SOFIE Secure and Open Federation Architecture.
7.8 SOFIE – Secure Open Federation for Internet Everywhere 75
the transactions being correctly recorded in all the participating ledgers, but
without requiring that all the ledgers support smart contracts.
The inter-ledger transaction layer will be used for three main purposes:
Describe the (“things”) data in the existing IoT platforms, enabling
financially tied IoT actuation between organisations and storing
security-related data.
Enable secure and traceable IoT actuation. The idea is to negoti-
ate and use smart contracts that may span multiple ledgers to record
intention or desire to actuate, to trigger actuation, to permanently record
both actuation instances and the related sensor values, and to trigger any
financial transactions, thereby supporting smart behaviour.
Enable interoperability between diverse existing IoT platforms. This
is achieved by augmenting the existing IoT platforms with a federation
adapter.
These together allow applications to: discover what data and things are
available in the IoT platforms; acquire the necessary permissions for access
(e.g. by promising to pay or placing a pledge); access the data and/or request
actuation in a secure, recorded, and compensated manner; and verify whether
the requested actuation took place or not. Beneath the inter-ledger transaction
layer are distributed ledgers. These include commonly used blockchains such
as Ethereum, and private commercial blockchains such as KSI Blockchain
developed by SOFIE partner Guardtime [81].
The SOFIE federation approach is designed to be technology-agnostic,
allowing systems with different APIs and data formats to interoperate to
the extent allowed by the applicable security policies. Some of the existing
IoT platforms already support interoperability across different protocols and
standards. Examples of this include FIWARE through its IoT adapters [84],
such as the already existing LWM2M and oneM2M adapters, and W3C WoT,
where the IoT servient concept supports both proprietary APIs and various
protocol adapters. While most of the data will reside within existing IoT
systems, a key aspect of SOFIE is the so-called smart contract, available in
some blockchains, such as Ethereum. From the SOFIE point of view, a smart
contract is simply a computer program and its associated computational state
that “lives” in a blockchain.
76 IoT European Security and Privacy Projects
7.8.3 Security Architecture
The SOFIE security architecture provides end-to-end security (confidentiality
and integrity), identification, authentication and authorization, and supports
users’ privacy and control over their data. Most existing solutions already
provide decent end-to-end security within the system and system-specific
authentication. Therefore, SOFIE concentrates on innovating in the areas of
data sovereignty, privacy and federated key management, authentication, and
authorization.
IoT data can often be personal and therefore governed by a new EU’s
GDPR legislation. Ensuring compliance with the GDPR is a major design
requirement for the SOFIE security architecture. SOFIE plans to use MyData
[85] together with Sovrin Foundation identity blockchain [86] to allow
individuals to better control how their personal data is used.
In order to support data sovereignty and privacy, SOFIE adopts a
three-level approach to the storage of data. First, there is a private data
store managed entirely by the stakeholder. A private blockchain (such as
Guardtime’s KSI Blockchain) forms the second level data that is shared
between collaborating stakeholders (for examples producer, reseller, and
supermarket in the food chain use case). Finally, some data (such as hashes of
transaction trees from the lower level) will be stored in a public blockchain,
such as Ethereum or Bitcoin. Such an approach allows fine grained control
of the data, from total openness (e.g. to bring transparency to certain public
services) to very tight access control (e.g. to protect trade secrets or the
privacy of people). In either case, integrity and non-repudiation of the data
is guaranteed.
7.8.4 Use Cases
The SOFIE approach will be tested in three different use cases described
below. The food chain pilot aspires to demonstrate the field-to-fork scenario
towards security in food production and consumption. SOFIE applications
and realization of a community-supported heterogeneous end-to-end agri-
cultural food chain will be demonstrated and evaluated. The use case will
combine multiple types of ground, micro-climate, soil, leaf and other infor-
mation stations, existing IoT platforms, mobility, location-based services
(LBS), food tracking information, smart micro-contracts, and decentralized
autonomous organizations implemented with smart contracts. The consumer
may trace the entire history of the product based on the QR or RFID tag
on the package, even in the shop before buying the product. Consumers can
7.8 SOFIE – Secure Open Federation for Internet Everywhere 77
reliably verify not only the farmer from whom the product originates, but
also the entire production and supply chain history associated with each food
item, starting from the source of the seeds, the quality of the soil and the air
in the producer’s premises, the amount of water that has been consumed, the
fertilization process, the method and time of growing, the weather conditions,
the transportation mode and distance, the storage conditions etc. This gives
consumers the ability to make decisions about their food based on health and
ethical concerns, including environmental sustainability, fair labour practices,
the use of fertilizers and pesticides, and other similar issues.
In the Mixed Reality Mobile Gaming Pilot, virtual and real worlds
will be combined. Mobile gaming is a rapidly growing market, popular
games, such as Pok ´
emon Go, are already taking advantage of augmented
reality and SOFIE aims to take such interaction further. SOFIE will integrate
a mobile game with the real world using a federated IoT platform aiming to:
a) enable the gamers to interact with the real world via sensors and actuators,
b) take advantage of existing and emerging IoT infrastructure (e.g. building
automation), c) enable payments in virtual and real currencies between the
gamers, games, and other parties, and d) create new business opportunities
for various parties, including gaming companies, as well as the owners of
buildings and public spaces (e.g. malls) and various businesses (e.g. shops
and caf´
es). The gamers will be both moving in the physical world and
interacting with it through the games. Existing IoT infrastructure, for instance
movement sensors and control of lighting and passage, will be included in
the game world through the federated SOFIE platform. Owners of spaces and
businesses will be able to bring their existing or new IoT infrastructure into
the gaming world, while the blockchain-based marketplace will allow for all
kinds of business models, including In-Game Assets (IGA) trading.
The energy pilot aims at optimized Demand Response and at supporting
electricity marketplaces and micropayments. The energy pilot consists of two
parts: first, a real-field pilot will demonstrate the capability of creating smart
micro-contracts and micro-payments in a fully distributed energy market-
place, located in Terni, Italy. The pilot will cover the end-to-end scenario
form electricity production, distribution, storage and consumption. During
the scenario electricity produced by renewable sources (PVs) will be fed
into the low voltage (LV) electricity network. Most of this electricity will be
normally consumed by energy customers (i.e. houses, offices, etc). However,
the surplus of the generated power would generate reverse power flows
through the LV distribution network substation. The electricity distribution
network is designed to handle only unidirectional electricity flows, thus
78 IoT European Security and Privacy Projects
reverse flows may generate significant problems. To avoid this abnormal
operation, electrical vehicles (EVs) will be offered significant promotional
benefits to match their EV charging needs with the network time and space
balancing requirements. The EV chargers will be communicating with the EV
drivers, with the car battery management system, the local energy generation
and consumption, and the smart meters to predict if the requested charging
service/network grid stabilization will be available in due time. Second, a
laboratory and interoperability pilot based on real-data from smart energy
meters deployed in the greater area of Tallinn, Estonia. The trial will be
based on the Estfeed open software platform [87] for energy consumption
monitoring and management from the customer (consumers/prosumers) side,
which is capable of interacting with the power network and to provide data
feeds for efficient use of energy.
To assess cross-SOFIE interoperability, SOFIE pilots will be federated
as shown in Figure 7.15. In the cross-pilot, the emphasis will be on the
demonstration of the exploitation of data stored/cached in different locations
to be accessed across different platforms, as well as the development of
EV Chargers
Electrical
Vehicles (EV)
Smart
Meters
Photovoltaic
Cells
Smart
Agriculture IoT
Platform
Warehouse IoT
Platform
Logistics
IoT Sensors
Supermarket
IoT Platform
Foodchain
community
users
Game
servers
Shopping
mall Physical
world sensors
In-game
assets
Gaming
community
Figure 7.15 Three SOFIE pilots.
7.8 SOFIE – Secure Open Federation for Internet Everywhere 79
applications exploiting different underlying infrastructures. The SOFIE inter-
faces abstraction will allow virtual entities in one platform to be exploited
by applications from a different platform, while data semantics and analytics
will facilitate the data exploitation. Initial consideration of scenarios to be
tested include: Energy and gaming pilots exploiting data protection/privacy
(e.g., for building access), energy pilots (EV) exploiting smart agriculture
data with respect to environmental conditions and payments and contracts
across pilots (e.g., getting food discounts from gaming achievements).
7.8.5 Conclusions
The SOFIE federation approach will help make the existing siloed IoT plat-
forms interoperable, enabling cross-platform applications and reuse of data
in a secure and scalable manner. SOFIE will offer data sovereignty in GDPR-
compliant way, giving users more control of their data. Through the usage of
distributed ledgers, SOFIE will promote open business platforms, allowing
creation of new kinds of decentralised open marketplaces, which no single
entity – public or private – can technically control and thus exercise sole
pricing power over them. This in turn will lower the barrier of entry for small
businesses and individuals. The SOFIE federation framework will be released
as open-source and SOFIE partners have the capacity to deliver and boost the
penetration of SOFIE offerings in the market and relevant standardization
bodies.
List of Notations and Abbreviations
Notations Abbreviations
AAA Authentication, Authorisation and Accounting
ABE Attribute-Based Encryption
CP-ABE Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption
DHT Distributed Hash Table
IoT Internet of Things
JSON-LD JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data
KPI Key Performance Indicator
QoS Quality of Service
QoI Quality of Information
OMB Overlay Management Backbone
RDF Resource Description Framework
RDQL RDF Data Query Language
80 IoT European Security and Privacy Projects
Notations Abbreviations
TEEs Trusted Execution Environments
API Application Programming Interface
bD by-Design
CE Circular Economy
E2E End-to-End
GDPR General Data Protection Regulation
EU European Union
ICT Information Communication Technologies
IoT Internet of Things
IIoT Industrial IoT
ML Machine Learning
NFV Network Function Virtualization
SDN Software-Defined Networking
SPDI Security, Privacy, Dependability and Interoperability
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... According to a recent report by the Statista Research Department, more than 75 billion connected devices are expected to exist by 2025, that is more than three times higher than that in 2019 [11]. Simultaneously, the escalating demand for connectivity and smart services poses several challenges [12] that must be addressed, such as upgrading the capacities of IoT networks [13], strengthening network security, improving QoS [14], and improving network performance during the optimization of the energy resources of every connected device [15]. ...
... Interactions are illustrated through arrows or lines connecting the physical infrastructure, virtual picocell, and different slices, exemplifying, for instance, the connection between the eMBB [13] slice and the virtual picocell, thereby elucidating its handling of high-speed data transmission. The isolation aspect is visually emphasized using cues such as dashed lines or distinct colors, symbolizing the independence and reduced interference achieved through the innovative architecture of NS [14]. The overall diagram explains the foundational role of the physical infrastructure, the distinct virtualized nature of the pico-Cell, the unique characteristics of each slice, the communication pathways, and the visual representation of isolation to enhance clarity and understanding [15]. ...
... For example, when eMBB slices that focus on high data rates and enhanced broadband capabilities are run concurrently with an mMTC slice designed to serve many IoT objects. Using the intrinsic flexibility of network slicing, resources are adjusted in real time according to each slice's needs at any time to avoid overallocation or underutilization [14]. Moreover, the isolation provided by NS reduces interference and improves resource utilization. ...
... In this paper, the authors explore the challenges of supporting futuristic IoT environments, considering actuation in dependable fashion, by introducing the BRAIN-IoT platform [7]. It is a novel solution for building decentralized IoT platforms, based on inter-networking across heterogeneous existing IoT systems. ...
... Finally, it is important to notice that the objective of this paper is to provide an overall view of the BRAIN-IoT architecture in smart building domain without detail technical aspects for each modules such as security risk analysis, modeling language implementation etc. A more detailed description of BRAIN-IoT architecture can be found in other publication [7] [8] and will be further described in future publications that will be done until the end of the project. This paper is organized as follow: Section II, outline the challenges and motivation of BRAIN-IoT approach. ...
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Modern applications in the Smart Building andIndustry 4.0 scenarios will be complex software ecosystems withstrict requirements of geographic distribution, heterogeneity,dynamic evolution, security and privacy protection, highly morechallenging than the ones required by the current environments.Two of the main challenges arising in the current InternetOf Things scenarios, i.e., the Smart Building one, are, on oneside, the requirement of interconnecting several heterogeneousplatforms and smart Things in the same environment and, on theother side, the need to be able to evolve the complex softwareecosystem deployed, reacting automatically and at runtime toenvironmental changes, without the human intervention.To address these challenges, BRAIN-IoT establishes a frame-work and methodology supporting smart cooperative behaviourin fully de-centralized, composable and dynamic federationsof heterogeneous Internet of Things platforms. In this way,BRAIN-IoT enables smart autonomous behaviour in Internet ofThings scenarios, involving heterogeneous sensors and actuatorsautonomously cooperating to execute complex, dynamic tasks.Furthermore, BRAIN-IoT enables dynamically deploying andorchestrating distributed applications, allowing the automaticinstallation and replacement of smart behaviours reacting toenvironmental changes and User events. Finally, BRAIN-IoTprovides a set of components that guarantee the security andprivacy protection of the data exchanged using the solution.BRAIN-IoT is a general purpose solution that aims at beingadaptable for heterogeneous scenarios, from Service Roboticsto Critical Infrastructure Management. This paper introduces aSmart Building use case of the solution, which allows highlightingthe advantages given by BRAIN-IoT in such scenario.
... Consequently, we propose a modeldriven methodology for designing smart IoT systems. With this objective, the BRAIN-IoT project (Brain-IoT, 2018), funded by the European Commission, paves the way to develop and demonstrate novel IoT concepts and solutions to underpin the Next Generation Internet of Things (NGIoT) vision, which requires the definition of next generation IoT architectures focusing on self-aware and semiautonomous IoT systems, as well as the migration from centralized cloud-computing solutions towards distributed intelligent edge computing systems (Ferrera, et al., 2018). ...
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