An approach for the secure management of hybrid cloud–edge environments

Abstract

The Cloud-of-Things (CoT) paradigm is a challenging approach to manage IoT applications exploiting Cloud resources and services. In order to avoid latency in Cloud–IoT communications, the management of time-sensitive services has to be moved to the edge of the CoT. To this aim, a secure Cloud-to-Edge environment for seamless management of IoT applications is necessary. The realization of a performing and secure Cloud-to-Edge middleware solution is a very strategic goal for future business CoT services. Thus, it needs to be deeply investigated, as highlighted by the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA). A valuable approach to develop an efficient Cloud-to-Edge system is based on an instant-message communication solution. In current Cloud environments, a Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) based on an Instant Message Protocol (IMP) provides good performance, but overlook security requirements. In this paper, we aim at overcoming such a gap following the CSA guidelines. In particular, we discuss the involved issues for improving such a kind of Cloud-to-Edge system in order to achieve data confidentiality, integrity, authenticity and non-repudiation. Moreover, we analyze a real case of study considering a MOM architectural model. Experimental results performed on a real testbed show how the introduced secure capabilities do not affect the overall performances of the whole middleware.