SecIoTComm: An Actor-Based Model and Framework for Secure IoT Communication

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystems are becoming increasingly ubiquitous and heterogeneous, adding extra layers of complexity to secure communication and resource allocation. IoT computing resources are often located at the network edge and distributed across many heterogeneous sensors, actuators, and controller devices. This makes it challenging to provide the proper security mechanisms to IoT ecosystems in terms of manageability and maintainability. In an IoT ecosystem, computational resources are naturally distributed and shareable among their constituency, which creates an opportunity to distribute heavy tasks to them. However, resource allocation in IoT requires secure and complex communication and coordination mechanisms, which existing ones do not adequately support. In this paper, we present Secure Actor-based Model for IoT Communication (SecIoTComm), a model for representing secure IoT communication. SecIoTComm aims to represent secure IoT communication properties and design and implement novel mechanisms to improve their programmability and performance. SecIoTComm separates the communication and computation concerns, achieving design modularity in building IoT ecosystems. First, this paper presents the syntax and operational semantics of SecIoTComm. Then, we present an IoT framework implementing the key concepts of the model. Finally, we evaluate the developed framework using various performance and scalability metrics.