Advancements in distributed ledger technology for Internet of Things

Internet of Things (IoT) is paving the way for different kinds of devices to be connected and properly communicated at a mass scale. However, conventional mechanisms used to sustain security and privacy cannot be directly applied to IoT whose topology is increasingly becoming decentralized. Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) on the other hand comprise varying forms of decentralized data structures that provide immutability through cryptographically linking blocks of data. To be able to build reliable, autonomous and trusted IoT platforms, DLT has the potential to provide security, privacy and decentralized operation while adhering to the limitations of IoT devices. The marriage of IoT and DLT technology is not very recent. In fact many projects have been focusing on this interesting combination to address the challenges of smart cities, smart grids, internet of everything and other decentralized applications, most based on blockchain structures. In this special issue, the focus is on the new and broader technical problems associated with the DLT-based security and backend platform solutions for IoT devices and applications.WOS:000695693900012Scopus - Affiliation ID: 60105072Science Citation Index ExpandedArticleUluslararası işbirliği ile yapılan - EVETMart2020YÖK - 2019-2

The AbU Language: IoT Distributed Programming Made Easy

Event-driven programming based on Event-Condition-Action (ECA) rules allows users to define complex automation routines in a simple, declarative way; for this reason, in recent years ECA rules have been adopted by the majority of companies in the Internet of Things (IoT) industry as a promising paradigm for implementing ubiquitous and pervasive systems. Unfortunately, programming simplicity comes to a price: most implementations of ECA rules are bound to a strongly centralized communication infrastructure, that poses serious limitations on the application scenarios for the IoT, due to scalability, security and availability issues. To mitigate these issues, recent works introduced abstractions for communication and coordination of ensembles of IoT devices in a decentralized setting, effectively moving the computation towards the edge of the network without sacrificing the programming simplicity prerogative of ECA rules. In particular, Attribute-based memory Updates is a communication model transparently enhancing ECA rules-based systems with an interaction mechanism where communication is similar to broadcast but actual receivers are selected on the spot, by means of predicates (i.e., properties) over devices attributes. In this paper, we introduce AbU-dsl, a Domain Specific Language for the IoT that compiles on top of an implementation of Attribute-based memory Updates. In this way, AbU-dsl provides a practical development interface, based on ECA rules, to effectively program IoT devices in a fully decentralized setting, by exploiting a full-fledged attribute-based interaction model. Thus, programmers can specify interactions between devices in a declarative way, abstracting from details such as devices identity, number, or even their existence, without the need for a central controlling service

Behavioral equivalences for AbU: Verifying security and safety in distributed IoT systems

Attribute-based memory Updates ([Formula presented]in short) is an interaction mechanism recently introduced for adapting the Event-Condition-Action (ECA) programming paradigm to distributed reactive systems, such as autonomic and smart IoT device ensembles. In this model, an event (e.g., an input from a sensor, or a device state update) can trigger an ECA rule, whose execution can cause the state update of (possibly) many remote devices at once; the latter are selected “on the fly” by means of predicates over their state, without the need of a central coordinating entity. However, the combination of different [Formula presented]systems may yield unexpected interactions, e.g., when a new device is added to an existing secure system, potentially hindering the security of the whole ensemble of devices. This can be critical in the IoT, where smart devices are more and more pervasive in our daily life. In this paper, we consider the problem of ensuring security and safety requirements for [Formula presented]systems (and, in turn, for IoT devices). The first are a form of noninterference, as they correspond to avoid forbidden information flows (e.g., information flows violating confidentiality); while the second are a form of non-interaction, as they correspond to avoid unintended executions (e.g., leading to erroneous/unsafe states). In order to formally model these requirements, we introduce suitable behavioral equivalences for [Formula presented]. These equivalences are generalizations of hiding bisimilarity, i.e., a kind of weak bisimilarity where we can compare systems up to actions at different levels of security. Leveraging these behavioral equivalences, we propose (syntactic) sufficient conditions guaranteeing the requirements and, then, effective algorithms for statically verifying such conditions

A Constrained ECA Language Supporting Formal Verification of WSNs

Modern wireless sensor and actuator networks (WSANs) are composed of spatially distributed low cost nodes that can contain different sensors and actuators. Event condition action (ECA) based languages have been widely proposed in order to program WSANs. Implementing applications by using ECA rules is an error-prone process thus various formal methods have been proposed. In spite of this great variety, formal verification of ECA rules has not been tailored to the context of WSANs. In this paper we present IRON, an ECA language for programming WSANs. IRON allows the automatic verifications of ECA rules. These are used by the IRON run-time platform in order to implement the required behaviour