Virtual Sensors

Introduction
• A virtual sensor can be considered as a product of spatial, temporal
and/or thematic transformation of raw or other virtual sensor producing
data with necessary source information attached to this transformation.
• Virtual sensors and actuators are a programming abstraction simplifying
the development of decentralized WSN applications.
• Models for interacting with wireless sensors such as Internet of Things and
sensor cloud aim to overcome restricted resources and efficiency.
• New sensor clouds need to enable different networks, cover a large
geographical area, connect together and be used simultaneously by
multiple users on demand.
• Virtual sensors, as the core of the sensor cloud architecture, assist in
creating a multiuser environment on top of resource constrained physical
wireless sensors and can help in supporting multiple applications.
Contd.
 Contd.
• The data acquired by a set of sensors can be collected,
processed according to an application-provided aggregation
function, and then perceived as the reading of a single virtual
sensor.
• A virtual sensor behaves just like a real sensor, emitting time-
series data from a specified geographic region with newly
defined thematic concepts or observations which the real
sensors may not have.
• A virtual sensor may not have any real sensor’s physical
properties such as manufacturer or battery power information,
but does have other properties, such as: who created it; what
methods are used, and what original sensors it is based on.
Security, Privacy &Trust
 Introduction
• There are a number of specific security, privacy and
trust challenges in the IoT,
– Lightweight and symmetric solutions, Support for
resource constrained devices.
– Scalable to billions of devices/transactions.
• Solutions will need to address
federation/administrative co-operation
– Heterogeneity and multiplicity of devices and platforms.
– Intuitively usable solutions, seamlessly integrated into
the real world.
 Trust for IoT
• As IoT-scale applications and services will scale over
multiple administrative domains and involve multiple
ownership regimes, there is a need for a trust
framework to enable the users of the system to have
confidence that the information and services being
exchanged can indeed be relied upon.
• The trust framework needs to be able to deal with
humans and machines as users, i.e. it needs to convey
trust to humans and needs to be robust enough to be
used by machines without denial of service.
 Contd.
• The development of trust frameworks that address this
requirement will require advances in areas such as:
– Light weight Public Key Infrastructures (PKI) as a basis for trust
management. Advances are expected in hierarchical and cross
certification concepts to enable solutions to address the scalability
requirements.
– Lightweight key management systems to enable trust relationships to
be established and the distribution of encryption materials using
minimum communications and processing resources, as is consistent
with the resource constrained nature of many IoT devices.
– Quality of Information is a requirement for many IoT-based systems
where metadata can be used to provide an assessment of the
reliability of IoT data.
 Contd.
– Decentralised and self-configuring systems as alternatives to PKI for
establishing trust e.g. identity federation, peer to peer.
– Novel methods for assessing trust in people, devices and data, beyond
reputation systems. One example is Trust Negotiation. Trust Negotiation
is a mechanism that allows two parties to automatically negotiate, on
the basis of a chain of trust policies, the minimum level of trust required
to grant access to a service or to a piece of information.
– Assurance methods for trusted platforms including hardware, software,
protocols, etc.
– Access Control to prevent data breaches. One example is Usage Control,
which is the process of ensuring the correct usage of certain information
according to a predefined policy after the access to information is
granted.
 Security for IoT
• As the IoT becomes a key element of the
Future Internet and a critical
national/international infrastructure, the need
to provide adequate security for the IoT
infrastructure becomes ever more important.
• Large-scale applications and services based
on the IoT are increasingly unsafe to
disruption from attack or information theft.
 Contd.
• Advances are required in several areas to make the IoT secure from those with
malicious intent, including
– IoT is always susceptible to the well-known DoS/DDOS attacks and will require
specific techniques and mechanisms to ensure that transport, energy, city
infrastructures cannot be disabled or destabilized.
– General attack detection and recovery to cope with IoT-specific threats, such
as compromised nodes, malicious code hacking attacks.
– Cyber situation awareness tools/techniques will need to be developed to
enable IoT-based infrastructures to be monitored.
– The IoT requires a variety of access control and associated accounting
schemes to support the various authorisation and usage models that are
required by users.
– The IoT needs to handle virtually all modes of operation by itself without
relying on human control. New techniques and approaches e.g. from machine
learning, are required to lead to a self-managed IoT.
 Privacy for IoT
• As much of the information in an IoT system
may be personal data, there is a requirement
to support anonymity and restrictive handling
of personal information.
 Contd.
• There are a number of areas where advances are required:
– Cryptographic techniques that enable protected data to be
stored processed and shared, without the information content
being accessible to other parties.
– Technologies such as homomorphic and searchable encryption
are potential candidates for developing such approaches.
– Techniques to support Privacy by Design concepts, including
data minimisation, identification, authentication and anonymity.
– Fine-grain and self-configuring access control mechanism
emulating the real world
 Contd.
• There are a number of privacy implications arising from the
ubiquity and pervasiveness of IoT devices where further research
is required, including
– Preserving location privacy, where location can be inferred from things
associated with people.
– Prevention of personal information inference, that individuals would
wish to keep private, through the observation of IoT-related exchanges.
– Keeping information as local as possible using decentralised computing
and key management.
– Use of soft Identities, where the real identity of the user can be used to
generate various soft identities for specific applications. Each soft
identity can be designed for a specific context or application without
revealing unnecessary information, which can lead to privacy breaches.
THE END