Towards a Large Scale IoT through Partnership, Incentive, and Services: A Vision, Architecture, and Future Directions

Internet of Things applications has been deployed and managed in a small to a medium scale deployments in industries and small segments of cities in the last decade. These real-world deployments not only helped the researchers and application developers to create protocols, standards, and frameworks but also helped them understand the challenges associated with the maintenance and management of IoT deployments in all kinds of operational environments. Despite the technological advancements and the deployment experiences, the technology failed to create a notable momentum towards large scale IoT applications involving thousands of IoT devices. We argue the reasons behind the lack of large scale deployments and the limitations of contemporary IoT deployment model. In addition, we present an approach involving multiple stakeholders as a means to scale IoT applications to hundreds of devices. Besides, we argue that the partnership, incentive mechanisms, privacy, and security frameworks are the critical factors for large scale IoT deployments of the future

BlendSM-DDM: BLockchain-ENabled Secure Microservices for Decentralized Data Marketplaces

To promote the benefits of the Internet of Things (IoT) in smart communities and smart cities, a real-time data marketplace middleware platform, called the Intelligent IoT Integrator (I3), has been recently proposed. While facilitating the easy exchanges of real-time IoT data streams between device owners and third-party applications through the marketplace, I3 is presently a monolithic, centralized platform for a single community. Although the service oriented architecture (SOA) has been widely adopted in the IoT and cyber-physical systems (CPS), it is difficult for a monolithic architecture to provide scalable, inter-operable and extensible services for large numbers of distributed IoT devices and different application vendors. Traditional security solutions rely on a centralized authority, which can be a performance bottleneck or susceptible to a single point of failure. Inspired by containerized microservices and blockchain technology, this paper proposed a BLockchain-ENabled Secure Microservices for Decentralized Data Marketplaces (BlendSM-DDM). Within a permissioned blockchain network, a microservices based security mechanism is introduced to secure data exchange and payment among participants in the marketplace. BlendSM-DDM is able to offer a decentralized, scalable and auditable data exchanges for the data marketplace.Comment: Accepted and to be presented at the 2nd International Workshop on CLockchain Enabled Sustainable Smart Cities (BLESS 2019), held in conjunction with the 5th IEEE International Smart Cities Conference (ISC2 2019), Casablanca, Morocco, October 14 - 17, 2019. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1902.1056

slimIoT: Scalable Lightweight Attestation Protocol For the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is increasingly intertwined with critical industrial processes, yet contemporary IoT devices offer limited security features, creating a large new attack surface. Remote attestation is a well-known technique to detect cyber threats by remotely verifying the internal state of a networked embedded device through a trusted entity. Multi-device attestation has received little attention although current single-device approaches show limited scalability in IoT applications. Though recent work has yielded some proposals for scalable attestation, several aspects remain unexplored, and thus more research is required. This paper presents slimIoT, a scalable lightweight attestation protocol that is suitable for all IoT devices. slimIoT depends on an efficient broadcast authentication scheme along with symmetric key cryptography. It is resilient against a strong adversary with physical access to the IoT device. Our protocol is informative in the sense that it identifies the precise status of every device in the network. We implement and evaluate slimIoT considering many factors. On the one hand, our evaluation results show a low overhead in terms of memory footprint and runtime. On the other hand, simulations demonstrate that slimIoT is scalable, robust and highly efficient to be used in static and dynamic networks consisting of thousands of heterogenous IoT devices.Comment: This paper has been accepted at the 2018 IEEE Conference on Dependable and Secure Computing (DSC

ParkingJSON: An Open Standard Format for Parking Data in Smart Cities

Data marketplaces and data management platforms offer a viable solution to build large city-scale Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Contemporary data marketplaces and data management platforms for smart cities such as Intelligent IoT Integrator (I3), Cisco Kinetic, Terbine, and Streamr present a middleware platform to help the data owners to provide their data to the application developers. However, such platforms suffer from adoption issues because of the interoperability concerns that stem from heterogeneous data formats. On the one hand, the IoT devices and the software used by the device owners follow either a custom data standard or a proprietary industrial standard. On the other hand, the application developers consuming data from multiple device owners expect the data to follow one common standard to process the data without developing custom software for each data feed. Therefore, a common data standard is desired to enable interoperable data exchange through data marketplace and data management platforms while promoting adoption. We present our experiences from developing a city-scale real-time parking application for a smart city. We also introduce ParkingJSON, a new open standard format for parking data in smart cities, which could help the parking data providers to cover all types of parking infrastructures through a single JSON schema. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first parking data standard proposed that a) covers a wide range of parking spaces and structures, b) integrates spatial information, and c) provides support for data integrity and authenticity

Hitch Hiker 2.0: a binding model with flexible data aggregation for the Internet-of-Things

Wireless communication plays a critical role in determining the lifetime of Internet-of-Things (IoT) systems. Data aggregation approaches have been widely used to enhance the performance of IoT applications. Such approaches reduce the number of packets that are transmitted by combining multiple packets into one transmission unit, thereby minimising energy consumption, collisions and congestion. However, current data aggregation schemes restrict developers to a specific network structure or cannot handle multi-hop data aggregation. In this paper, we propose Hitch Hiker 2.0, a component binding model that provides support for multi-hop data aggregation. Hitch Hiker uses component meta-data to discover remote component bindings and to construct a multi-hop overlay network within the free payload space of existing traffic flows. Hitch Hiker 2.0 provides end-to-end routing of low-priority traffic while using only a small fraction of the energy of standard communication. This paper extends upon our previous work by incorporating new mechanisms for decentralised route discovery and providing additional application case studies and evaluation. We have developed a prototype implementation of Hitch Hiker for the LooCI component model. Our evaluation shows that Hitch Hiker consumes minimal resources and that using Hitch Hiker to deliver low-priority traffic reduces energy consumption by up to 32 %