Identifying and mitigating security risks for secure and robust NGI networks

Abstract

Smart city development is important to achieve sustainable cities and societies which help enhance urban services, reduce resource consumption and decrease overall cost. The incorporation of smart cities with the Internet has given us the Next Generation of Internet (NGI) where every smart device exploits the interconnected services and infrastructure of the Internet. The underlying structure of NGI is composed of large scale heterogeneous multilevel systems-of-systems (SoSs) where each system represents a sensor, mobile phone, computer or smart device.Security and privacy is a fundamental requirement of NGI which is heavily dependent on the composition of services and connectivity of the underlying systems. Meaning any unsecure system can affect the security of the entire networked infrastructure/SoSs. Therefore, it is important to analyse and understand the composition of different systems at different levels in NGI in order to identify and mitigate vulnerabilities. This paper proposes a solution to identify and mitigate vulnerabilities within multilevel SoSs, to enhance security without deploying additional security at endpoints, and quantify security levels of individual systems and the entire composed system. The solution was tested and evaluated using simulation and a network testbed. Results show that NGI security can be enhanced with better composition of systems.