Dynamic security management of smart WoT infrastructures using SDN
Résumé
The next generation of infrastructures (hospitals, factories, buildings, etc.) will be deeply impacted by the introduction of a huge number of IoT devices which will contribute to a significant improvement of their operations. This follows the trend of the Web of Things (WoT) which projects to seamlessly connect an incredible diversity of IoT devices and IoT frameworks in a novel way, enabling exciting new services and opportunities due to its flexible nature. However, it also means that more and more data need to be protected from external threats and unauthorized accesses. Additional security, privacy and monitoring mechanisms need to be deployed, together with an efficient management of those IoT devices for the new vision of smart infrastructure. This issue becomes more convoluted and hardly tractable when dealing with several smart objects of the infrastructure dispatched over different network locations that we call Smart Spaces (SS), along with evolving management rules which may be specific to each SS. This paper proposes to solve this issue by introducing an architecture based on an Software Defined Networking (SDN) controller for managing the secure access to the different SSs of a smart infrastructure. We argue that a centralized view can greatly simplify and improve the security management of such infrastructures. We illustrate our approach with a use case from the e-Health domain involving the management of the security of different rooms of an hospital where each room is considered as an SS. A Proof of Concept is also provided, with a concrete implementation of all the components together with an analysis of the performance and the security of the new architecture.