Multi Layered IoT System Design Towards End to End Secure Communication
An increasing amount of sensory data, often of confidential nature, is exchanged day by day: from the sensor and actuator layers over smart gateways to the business logic and analytics level. Robust yet efficient security measures play an essential role in this interaction. However, the complexity of securely connecting different building blocks of a distributed, multi layered systems is considerable. Security methodologies are often applied at a late stage of system development, posing problems such as inappropriate security levels, performance issues, and longer time to market cycles. Addressing possible security properties already in the design phase of a security critical system helps to mitigate these problems. In this paper, we discuss a distributed, multi layered IoT data collection system that enables data aggregation and exchange from the embedded level up to different cloud instances while supporting end to end secured communication. The system was designed in the course of a case study where we used a design space exploration tool for identifying secure processes in regard to key management and distribution. Based on our analysis results, a distributed proof of concept was developed. Subsequently, the most critical processes of the individual layers were evaluated regarding security and execution speed.
IECON 2020 The 46th Annual Conference of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society