Foggy clouds and cloudy fogs: a real need for coordinated management of fog-to-cloud computing systems

The recent advances in cloud services technology are fueling a plethora of information technology innovation, including networking, storage, and computing. Today, various flavors have evolved of IoT, cloud computing, and so-called fog computing, a concept referring to capabilities of edge devices and users' clients to compute, store, and exchange data among each other and with the cloud. Although the rapid pace of this evolution was not easily foreseeable, today each piece of it facilitates and enables the deployment of what we commonly refer to as a smart scenario, including smart cities, smart transportation, and smart homes. As most current cloud, fog, and network services run simultaneously in each scenario, we observe that we are at the dawn of what may be the next big step in the cloud computing and networking evolution, whereby services might be executed at the network edge, both in parallel and in a coordinated fashion, as well as supported by the unstoppable technology evolution. As edge devices become richer in functionality and smarter, embedding capacities such as storage or processing, as well as new functionalities, such as decision making, data collection, forwarding, and sharing, a real need is emerging for coordinated management of fog-to-cloud (F2C) computing systems. This article introduces a layered F2C architecture, its benefits and strengths, as well as the arising open and research challenges, making the case for the real need for their coordinated management. Our architecture, the illustrative use case presented, and a comparative performance analysis, albeit conceptual, all clearly show the way forward toward a new IoT scenario with a set of existing and unforeseen services provided on highly distributed and dynamic compute, storage, and networking resources, bringing together heterogeneous and commodity edge devices, emerging fogs, as well as conventional clouds.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Fog and Edge Oriented Embedded Enterprise Systems Patterns: Towards Distributed Enterprise Systems That Run on Edge and Fog Nodes

Enterprise software systems enable enterprises to enhance business and management reporting tasks in enterprise settings. Internet of Things (IoT) focuses on making interactions possible between a number of network-connected physical devices. Prominence of IoT sensors and multiple business drivers have created a contemporary need for enterprise software systems to interact with IoT devices. Business process implementations, business logic and microservices have traditionally been centralized in enterprise systems. Constraints like privacy, latency, bandwidth, connectivity and security have posed a new set of architectural challenges that can be resolved by designing enterprise systems differently so that parts of business logic and processes can run on fog and edge devices to improve privacy, minimize communication bandwidth and promote low-latency business process execution. This paper aims to propose a set of patterns for the expansion of previously-centralized enterprise systems to the edge of the network. Patterns are supported by a case study for contextualization and analysis

Trust Evaluation for Embedded Systems Security research challenges identified from an incident network scenario

This paper is about trust establishment and trust evaluations techniques. A short background about trust, trusted computing and security in embedded systems is given. An analysis has been done of an incident network scenario with roaming users and a set of basic security needs has been identified. These needs have been used to derive security requirements for devices and systems, supporting the considered scenario. Using the requirements, a list of major security challenges for future research regarding trust establishment in dynamic networks have been collected and elaboration on some different approaches for future research has been done.This work was supported by the Knowledge foundation and RISE within the ARIES project

IoTSan: Fortifying the Safety of IoT Systems

Today's IoT systems include event-driven smart applications (apps) that interact with sensors and actuators. A problem specific to IoT systems is that buggy apps, unforeseen bad app interactions, or device/communication failures, can cause unsafe and dangerous physical states. Detecting flaws that lead to such states, requires a holistic view of installed apps, component devices, their configurations, and more importantly, how they interact. In this paper, we design IoTSan, a novel practical system that uses model checking as a building block to reveal "interaction-level" flaws by identifying events that can lead the system to unsafe states. In building IoTSan, we design novel techniques tailored to IoT systems, to alleviate the state explosion associated with model checking. IoTSan also automatically translates IoT apps into a format amenable to model checking. Finally, to understand the root cause of a detected vulnerability, we design an attribution mechanism to identify problematic and potentially malicious apps. We evaluate IoTSan on the Samsung SmartThings platform. From 76 manually configured systems, IoTSan detects 147 vulnerabilities. We also evaluate IoTSan with malicious SmartThings apps from a previous effort. IoTSan detects the potential safety violations and also effectively attributes these apps as malicious.Comment: Proc. of the 14th ACM CoNEXT, 201