Research project Intelligent and Decentralized Security Solution for the Internet of Things (IoT)
Internet of Things (IoT) allows machines to communicate directly with other machines, without involving humans. This technology provides excellent opportunities to do things faster and smarter. But it also raises questions concerning security and privacy.
The current technology driven world is moving forward with massive implementation of smart objects. These smart objects, or Internet of Things (IoT) nodes, are involved in sensing of real time critical data from surroundings.
The increasing number of IoT devices require trusted relationships. All these IoT devices need to be identified within the network. Identity management of this massive number of IoT devices is becoming challenging with traditional identity management solutions. Besides, the IoT devices produce a vast amount of data that needs to be securely transferred via the network.
As many IoT devices collect data from human society, user data privacy is also involved here. Traditional centralized solutions with manual device maintenance are becoming backdated for the IoT paradigm. This PhD thesis project explores how intelligent and trustworthy identity management solutions can increase security and privacy in IoT networks.
This is Kazi Masum Sadique’s PhD thesis project.
Rahim Rahmani is the supervisor, and Paul Johannesson is the co-supervisor.
Project description
The world is evolving with new technologies and connected devices. The users of connected devices are not only humans but also machines. In the future, machine-to-machine interaction will be more common than user-to-device communication. The Internet of Things (IoT) is a common term for defining anything with an internet connection.
IoT devices are heterogeneous as they need to cover vast use cases. Heterogeneous IoT devices communicate with the IoT gateways to transfer data to centralized cloud servers. But due to the extensive use cases of IoT, new loosely coupled devices are integrated into the networks daily. These networks are primarily uncontrolled.
IoT devices are resource-constrained with limited memory, computation, and battery life. Trustworthiness between these resource-constrained devices is necessary. Identity management of these vast numbers of devices in loosely uncontrolled networks is another area to explore. Also, IoT data security without user intervention is a big challenge, as connected devices produce massive amounts of data daily. Moreover, IoT devices are deployed within human society, collecting private data where user data privacy is worthy.
Distributed decentralized, and intelligent solutions for identity, and trust management with local security at the edge controllers for local devices, and global security in the cloud layer could solve the abovementioned problems. By increasing local security, we can also reduce the leakage of private data from unauthorized access.
This PhD project focuses on a distributed, decentralized, and intelligent solution for IoT security, trust, privacy, and identity management, which should be generic and easily adaptable to any IoT solution.
Project members
Project managers
Rahim Rahmani
Professor
Paul Johannesson
Professor
Members
Kazi Masum Sadique
Guest reseracher
