Unified Architecture for Security, Reliability, and Trust in Internet of Things

Internet of Things (IoT) technology is poised to revolutionize a multitude of application sectors in the next few years. IoT refers to networks of autonomous and uniquely identifiable “smart” objects with embedded processors that have sensing, computing, communicating, and service discovery capabilities. IoT promises enormous application benefits in the areas of smart critical infrastructure such as power grids, water supply, nuclear plants, connected health, telecommunications, environment, agriculture and defence. Security, reliability, and trust stand out as three critical research areas in the design of IoT before the technology can be successfully deployed. While there is a broad corpus of independent solutions for addressing security, reliability and trust in IoT networks, an integrated approach has met with limited success due to many inherent challenges. Firstly, IoT devices mainly consist of small sensors with limited computational power, storage and bandwidth which makes the deployment of traditional security algorithms infeasible. Secondly, threat exposure of IoT systems increases due to their integration with different wireless technologies, each with its own vulnerability. Thirdly, nonuniform traffic, unpredictable topology changes, differing node densities, high degree of mobility, and high bit error rates dictate communication among IoT devices. Finally, there is little consensus among trust mechanisms for IoT.

The overarching goal of this research proposal is to build a unified architecture that integrates security, reliability and trust mechanisms in IoT networks. Towards the realization of this objective, this proposal will a) Investigate vulnerabilities, security threats, reliability and trust requirements specific to IoT; b) Perform analytics on IoT traffic data for modelling of attack and reliability vectors; c) Develop a context-aware framework for the design of a unified architecture for secure, reliable and trustworthy delivery of information over IoT networks; d) Experimentally validate the proposed architecture by developing and testing candidate applications on an IoT test bench. The novelty of the proposal is the design of an unified architecture that uses a context-aware framework consisting of three modules, namely, a cognitive module, an adaptive module, and an authentication module.

There is a major demand for the design of mechanisms for secure, reliable and trustworthy information transfer in IoT networks, especially since such networks are being increasingly deployed for business, healthcare, government and defence applications. This would be one of the first research proposals to integrate a set of lightweight mechanisms for security, reliability and trust in IoT. Thus, this research will not only train valuable HQP by giving them the unique combination of knowledge and expertise in this area but also has the potential to pave the way for the design of next generation wireless networks.