This domain has been selected given the relevance of IoT in Industrial Control Systems for public infrastructures and factories. ARCADIAN-IoT will innovate the rapid deployment, secured & efficient solution for early monitoring for grid main circuits of industrial and public (e.g. smart cities) infrastructures.
Over the past five years, the industrial IoT sector has converged to solutions based on two fundamentally distinct device architectures that rely either on a microcontroller or a microprocessor at its core. From a technology standpoint, each one has inherent advantages and disadvantages; however, they frequently compete on the same narrow set of key market sectors.
When the price or grid independence are fixed customer constraints, the best option available is to envision a new kind of device based on a powerful microcontroller. This keeps the price low and complements the feature flexibility and the strong security patterns previously available only to prohibitively expensive solutions. It all comes down to innovating around the limitations of the original microcontroller architecture while taking advantage of all the strong assets of the original solution. An unencrypted communication channel between the device and the IoT platform is not acceptable due to data exposure to trivial ‘man-in-the-middle’ attacks. Also, TLS encryption comes with a significant CPU power demand and likely requires running an operating system on the device which may add additional security pitfalls in the process.
ARCADIAN-IoT partners working on this domain – BOX2M Engineering (leader), ATOS, Instituto Pedro Nunes, Research Institutes of Sweden, Truphone, University of the West of Scotland, XLAB – are committed to finding a way that addresses this category by building a comprehensive solution that spans all the way from the prototyping phase to production environments, including the option to retrofit existing systems. This approach guarantees that the proposal is attractive for equipment vendors, system integrators and IoT infrastructure providers alike.
Narrowing the focus among the various scenarios, the key sectors gravitate around the energy & utilities use-cases. Usually, within these industries, the customers already have smart-meters in place that contain either embedded or stand-alone communication modules. Therefore, there is an inherent demand for high-security controls that must be applied to these critical data streams across all communication technologies. Ultimately, the aim is to achieve a significant return of investment over time and target consistently large volumes of equipment deployed in the field.
This domain of implementation covers trust, security, and privacy challenges, meeting the Arcadian-IoT objectives, such as:
- Protect the identity of objects. IoT devices must have their entity protected.
- Protect data and identity of objects during communications. Encryption mechanisms are required to secure the information of IoT devices during communications and for local buffering (storage).
- Authentication/Authorization of telemetry devices and cloud services. Services in telemetry platforms must be able to authenticate/authorize IoT devices
- Intelligence in application to not disclose private information. Information of corporate clients and users in the telemetry platform must be protected and able to preserve privacy.
- Trust chain between IoT devices and services of the telemetry platform. Mechanisms to assure that all the components are trustworthy, that each component can assess trust of another component.
- Self-encryption mechanisms to protect data in local storage of drones and industrial IoT devices. Encryption must be performed through Root of Trust encryption chipsets.
- Autonomous security mechanisms. Mechanisms to implement cybersecurity like intrusion detection and prevention in IoT devices and associated services.
- Autonomous Cyber Threat incident sharing. Upon cyber incidents, the platform must be provided with means to share this information, given its criticality.
The ARCADIAN-IoT project will design and develop a significantly improved hybrid encryption security technology. This advances the overall safety benchmark across the entire IoT and cloud markets. Its application is limitless and the monetization is always predictable and surprisingly flexible.