Secure edge services for future smart environments

The recent developments in communications technologies, such as Internet of Things (IoT) and 5G together with various enabling technologies, will lead us to the next major transition in terms of accessing digital services. For example, one of such transition is the availability of gadget-free services for the users from nearby smart environment and can be termed as ‘gadget-free hyperconnected world’. Similarly, Industry 4.0 is another major digital transformation that ensures the intelligence, digitization and automation in the various industrial applications. Such smart environment applications set strict requirements in terms of low-latency along with scalability, security and privacy. The edge computing is required if low-latency requirements exist, in order to avoid latency overhead from routing to a centralized (cloud) server. For the success of this vision, it is highly important to place suitable and strong security solutions in the edge-based smart environment to ensure the overall security.

This thesis contributes to two different use cases from the context of smart environment, i) smart healthcare environment, ii) smart home construction and proposes novel contributions to improvement of security for edge based smart IoT applications. Firstly, biometrics-based anonymous and lightweight authentication schemes were developed for the single and multiple gadget-free users in smart IoT healthcare environment. The compliance of the security schemes is proven through performance evaluations and by analysing the security properties. Second, a conceptual security mechanism was formulated for three-tier IoT edge architectures to ensure secure smart node bootstrapping and user’s service accessibility mechanisms. The performance evaluation of the proposed IoT edge architecture is evaluated to assess the feasibility of the system. Finally, edge computing and blockchain integrated IIoT framework ‘BlockEdge’ is proposed for the smart home construction use case. The feasibility of the approach is verified by evaluating the performance and resource-efficiency of BlockEdge in terms of latency, power consumption and network load. Furthermore, this thesis also investigates the potential security requirements, challenges and their solutions for the BlockEdge based IIoT framework.