Autonomic Security Management for IoT Smart Spaces

Abstract

Embedded sensors and smart devices have turned the environments around us into smart spaces that could automatically evolve, depending on the needs of users, and adapt to the new conditions. While smart spaces are beneficial and desired in many aspects, they could be compromised and expose privacy, security, or render the whole environment a hostile space in which regular tasks cannot be accomplished anymore. In fact, ensuring the security of smart spaces is a very challenging task due to the heterogeneity of devices, vast attack surface, and device resource limitations. The key objective of this study is to minimize the manual work in enforcing the security of smart spaces by leveraging the autonomic computing paradigm in the management of IoT environments. More specifically, we strive to build an autonomic manager that can monitor the smart space continuously, analyze the context, plan and execute countermeasures to maintain the desired level of security, and reduce liability and risks of security breaches. We follow the microservice architecture pattern and propose a generic ontology named Secure Smart Space Ontology (SSSO) for describing dynamic contextual information in security-enhanced smart spaces. Based on SSSO, we build an autonomic security manager with four layers that continuously monitors the managed spaces, analyzes contextual information and events, and automatically plans and implements adaptive security policies. As the evaluation, focusing on a current BlackBerry customer problem, we deployed the proposed autonomic security manager to maintain the security of a smart conference room with 32 devices and 66 services. The high performance of the proposed solution was also evaluated on a large-scale deployment with over 1.8 million triples.