Trust Modelling and Management for Collaborative and Composite Applications in the Internet of Things

A future Internet of Things (IoT) will feature a service-oriented architecture consisting of lightweight computing platforms offering individual, loosely coupled microservices. Often, an end-user will request a bespoke service that will require a composition of two or more microservices offered by different service providers. This architecture offers several advantages that are key to the realisation of the IoT vision, such as modularity, increased reliability and technology heterogeneity and interoperability. As a result, the adoption of this architecture in the IoT is being extensively researched. However, the underlying complexities of service compositions and the increased security risks inherent in such a massively decentralised and distributed architecture remain key problems. The use of trust management to secure the IoT remains a current and interesting topic; its potential as a basis for service compositions has not been thoroughly researched, however. Security through trust presents a viable solution for threat management in the IoT. Currently, a well-defined trust management framework for collaborative and composite applications on an IoT platform does not exist. In this thesis, a collaborative application refers to the one that enables collaboration among its users to jointly complete certain tasks, whereas a composite application is the one composed of multiple existing services to deliver integrated functionalities. To estimate reliably the trust values of nodes within a system, the trust should be measured by suitable parameters that are based on the nodes’ functional properties in the application context. Existing models do not clearly outline the parametrisation of trust. Also, trust decay is inadequately modelled in many current models. In addition, trust recommendations are usually inaccurately weighted with respect to previous trust, thereby increasing the effect of bad recommendations. This thesis focuses on providing solutions to the twin issues of trust-based security and trust-based compositions for the IoT. First, a new model, CTRUST, is proposed to resolve the above stated shortcomings of previous trust models. In CTRUST, trust is accurately parametrised while recommendations are evaluated through belief functions. The effects of trust decay and maturity on the trust evaluation process were studied. Each trust component is neatly modelled by appropriate mathematical functions. CTRUST was implemented in a collaborative download application and its performance was evaluated based on the utility derived and its trust accuracy, convergence, and resiliency. The results indicate that IoT collaborative applications based on CTRUST gain a significant improvement in performance, in terms of efficiency and security. In a second study, the trust properties of service compositions in the IoT, along with the effect of the service architecture on the security and performance of the composed service, are investigated. Novel approaches are considered in relation to trust decomposition and composition, respectively. Relevant trust evaluation functions are derived to guide the compositions, which are used to extend CTRUST into a new trust model, SC-TRUST. SC-TRUST is implemented in a suitable simulation and the results are evaluated. The model reliably guides service compositions while ensuring utility to the end-user. Overall, the analyses and evaluations support the conclusion that the trust models are effective in terms of performance gain and security. The models are scalable and lightweight such that they could be deployed to secure applications and drive meaningful services and collaborations in the envisaged IoT and Web 3.0 sphere

Middleware Technologies for Cloud of Things - a survey

The next wave of communication and applications rely on the new services provided by Internet of Things which is becoming an important aspect in human and machines future. The IoT services are a key solution for providing smart environments in homes, buildings and cities. In the era of a massive number of connected things and objects with a high grow rate, several challenges have been raised such as management, aggregation and storage for big produced data. In order to tackle some of these issues, cloud computing emerged to IoT as Cloud of Things (CoT) which provides virtually unlimited cloud services to enhance the large scale IoT platforms. There are several factors to be considered in design and implementation of a CoT platform. One of the most important and challenging problems is the heterogeneity of different objects. This problem can be addressed by deploying suitable "Middleware". Middleware sits between things and applications that make a reliable platform for communication among things with different interfaces, operating systems, and architectures. The main aim of this paper is to study the middleware technologies for CoT. Toward this end, we first present the main features and characteristics of middlewares. Next we study different architecture styles and service domains. Then we presents several middlewares that are suitable for CoT based platforms and lastly a list of current challenges and issues in design of CoT based middlewares is discussed.Comment: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352864817301268, Digital Communications and Networks, Elsevier (2017

Middleware Technologies for Cloud of Things - a survey

The next wave of communication and applications rely on the new services provided by Internet of Things which is becoming an important aspect in human and machines future. The IoT services are a key solution for providing smart environments in homes, buildings and cities. In the era of a massive number of connected things and objects with a high grow rate, several challenges have been raised such as management, aggregation and storage for big produced data. In order to tackle some of these issues, cloud computing emerged to IoT as Cloud of Things (CoT) which provides virtually unlimited cloud services to enhance the large scale IoT platforms. There are several factors to be considered in design and implementation of a CoT platform. One of the most important and challenging problems is the heterogeneity of different objects. This problem can be addressed by deploying suitable "Middleware". Middleware sits between things and applications that make a reliable platform for communication among things with different interfaces, operating systems, and architectures. The main aim of this paper is to study the middleware technologies for CoT. Toward this end, we first present the main features and characteristics of middlewares. Next we study different architecture styles and service domains. Then we presents several middlewares that are suitable for CoT based platforms and lastly a list of current challenges and issues in design of CoT based middlewares is discussed.Comment: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352864817301268, Digital Communications and Networks, Elsevier (2017

Just-in-Time Memoryless Trust for Crowdsourced IoT Services

We propose just-in-time memoryless trust for crowdsourced IoT services. We leverage the characteristics of the IoT service environment to evaluate their trustworthiness. A novel framework is devised to assess a service's trust without relying on previous knowledge, i.e., memoryless trust. The framework exploits service-session-related data to offer a trust value valid only during the current session, i.e., just-in-time trust. Several experiments are conducted to assess the efficiency of the proposed framework.Comment: 8 pages, Accepted and to appear in 2020 IEEE International Conference on Web Services (ICWS). Content may change prior to final publicatio

Management and Service-aware Networking Architectures (MANA) for Future Internet Position Paper: System Functions, Capabilities and Requirements

Future Internet (FI) research and development threads have recently been gaining momentum all over the world and as such the international race to create a new generation Internet is in full swing: GENI, Asia Future Internet, Future Internet Forum Korea, European Union Future Internet Assembly (FIA). This is a position paper identifying the research orientation with a time horizon of 10 years, together with the key challenges for the capabilities in the Management and Service-aware Networking Architectures (MANA) part of the Future Internet (FI) allowing for parallel and federated Internet(s)

Federated Embedded Systems – a review of the literature in related fields

This report is concerned with the vision of smart interconnected objects, a vision that has attracted much attention lately. In this paper, embedded, interconnected, open, and heterogeneous control systems are in focus, formally referred to as Federated Embedded Systems. To place FES into a context, a review of some related research directions is presented. This review includes such concepts as systems of systems, cyber-physical systems, ubiquitous computing, internet of things, and multi-agent systems. Interestingly, the reviewed fields seem to overlap with each other in an increasing number of ways