S×C4IoT: A Security-by-contract Framework for Dynamic Evolving IoT Devices

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) revolutionised the way devices, and human beings, cooperate and interact. The interconnectivity and mobility brought by IoT devices led to extremely variable networks, as well as unpredictable information flows. In turn, security proved to be a serious issue for the IoT, far more serious than it has been in the past for other technologies. We claim that IoT devices need detailed descriptions of their behaviour to achieve secure default configurations, sufficient security configurability, and self-configurability. In this article, we propose S×C4IoT, a framework that addresses these issues by combining two paradigms: Security by Contract (S×C) and Fog computing. First, we summarise the necessary background such as the basic S×C definitions. Then, we describe how devices interact within S×C4IoT and how our framework manages the dynamic evolution that naturally result from IoT devices life-cycles. Furthermore, we show that S×C4IoT can allow legacy S×C-noncompliant devices to participate with an S×C network, we illustrate two different integration approaches, and we show how they fit into S×C4IoT. Last, we implement the framework as a proof-of-concept. We show the feasibility of S×C4IoT and we run different experiments to evaluate its impact in terms of communication and storage space overhead.