Resilience of the Internet of Things (IoT) from an Information Assurance (IA) Perspective

Internet infrastructure developments and the rise of the IoT Socio-Technical Systems (STS) have frequently generated more unsecure protocols to facilitate the rapid intercommunication between the plethoras of IoT devices. Whereas, current development of the IoT has been mainly focused on enabling and effectively meeting the functionality requirement of digital-enabled enterprises we have seen scant regard to their IA architecture, marginalizing system resilience with blatant afterthoughts to cyber defence. Whilst interconnected IoT devices do facilitate and expand information sharing; they further increase of risk exposure and potential loss of trust to their Socio-Technical Systems. A change in the IoT paradigm is needed to enable a security-first mind-set; if the trusted sharing of information built upon dependable resilient growth of IoT is to be established and maintained. We argue that Information Assurance is paramount to the success of IoT, specifically its resilience and dependability to continue its safe support for our digital economy

Digital Twins and Blockchain for IoT Management

We live in a data-driven world powered by sensors getting data from anywhere at any time. This advancement is possible thanks to the Internet of Things (IoT). IoT embeds common physical objects with heterogeneous sensing, actuating, and communication capabilities to collect data from the environment and people. These objects are generally known as things and exchange data with other things, entities, computational processes, and systems over the internet. Consequently, a web of devices and computational processes emerges involving billions of entities collecting, processing, and sharing data. As a result, we now have an internet of entities/things that process and produce data, an ever-growing volume that can easily exceed petabytes. Therefore, there is a need for novel management approaches to handle the previously unheard number of IoT devices, processes, and data streams. This dissertation focuses on solutions for IoT management using decentralized technologies. A massive number of IoT devices interact with software and hardware components and are owned by different people. Therefore, there is a need for decentralized management. Blockchain is a capable and promising distributed ledger technology with features to support decentralized systems with large numbers of devices. People should not have to interact with these devices or data streams directly. Therefore, there is a need to abstract access to these components. Digital twins are software artifacts that can abstract an object, a process, or a system to enable communication between the physical and digital worlds. Fog/edge computing is the alternative to the cloud to provide services with less latency. This research uses blockchain technology, digital twins, and fog/edge computing for IoT management. The systems developed in this dissertation enable configuration, self-management, zero-trust management, and data streaming view provisioning from a fog/edge layer. In this way, this massive number of things and the data they produce are managed through services distributed across nodes close to them, providing access and configuration security and privacy protection