Author Archives: Rohit Bohara

aCtive sEcurity foR connecTed devIces liFecYcles (CERTIFY)

We are delighted to announce that CERTIFY project has been selected for funding under European Union’s Horizon CL3 Increased Cybersecurity 2021 and Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI). It is a multi-partner project which aims to provide Internet of Things (IoT) security lifecycle management. CERTIFY will detect and respond to a wide spectrum of attacks, in a collaborative/decentralized fashion. It is 36 months long project. We had the project kickoff meeting on 20 to 21 October 2022 in University of Murcia, Spain.

Partners

It is a consortium project which includes 6 SMEs, 4 industrial partners, 2 universities, and 1 research institute from 8 various countries in Europe.

SNPartner NameCountry
1Universidad De MurciaSpain
2Trust UpItaly
3STMicroelectronics SRLItaly
4Engineering – Ingegneria Informatica SPAItaly
5Digital Worx GmbHGermany
6United Technologies Research Centreireland LimitedIreland
7Advanced Laboratory on Embedded Systems SRLItaly
8Red Alert LabsFrance
9The Ubiquitous Technologies CompanyGreece
10AIR Institute – Deep tech labSpain
11European Cyber Security OrganisationBelgium
12Universität ZürichSwitzerland
13modum.io AGSwitzerland

Objectives

The CERTIFY project has following objectives

  • Cybersecurity awareness for IoT-enabled environments through a multi-stakeholder sharing of threats and mitigations
  • Secure reconfiguration and maintenance of customizable embedded devices by means of open hardware primitives and services
  • Perform security operational management based on bootstrapping and monitoring of attacks and malicious behaviours
  • Runtime security compliance and continuous certification methodology via objective metrics
  • Foster knowledge delivery via wide dissemination, capacity building and supporting standardization activities. Build a robust exploitation plan to boost ROI by optimizing current and future EU cybersecurity capabilities
  • Industrial validation of the CERTIFY framework in IoT ecosystems

Our Contribution

The project has been structured in 7 work packages (WP) and 3 pilots. Each work package clearly defined objective, tasks, and deliverables. Each project partner will contribute in various tasks. Digital Worx is involved in all work packages. We are the leader of WP6 which focuses on community engagement and sustainability. Additionally, we are leader of task T2.3 Testing, Refinement and Validation and Pilot 2 Smart Micro-Factories. In the pilot, we will install and configure retrofitting sensors in an industrial setting, perform risk assessment, and secure them through their life cycle. In the task 2.3, we will identify validation scenarios and acceptance criteria based on pilot assessment. It will be utilized to validate the technical components and their integration to deliver high quality software. Moreover, digital worx will contribute in developing and deploying secure IoT environments, IoT device inventory, lifecycle support, secure bootstrapping and intrusion detection solution.

ERATOSTHENES Project Kickoff

The sEcuRe manAgemenT of iOt devices Lifecycle THrough idENtities, trust and distributed ledgerS (ERATOSTHENES) project had kickoff meeting on 6th and 7th October 2021. It is funded under EU H2020 program. Eratosthenes of Cyrene (c. 276—194 bc) was a Greek scholar, geographer, and astronomer. The project takes inspiration from him related to the critical challenges in IoT lifecycle management.

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The project will be carried out by a consortium which includes industrial and academia players.

  • INLECOM Innovation Astiki Mi Kerdoskopiki Etaireia
  • Universidad de Murcia
  • ATOS IT Solutions and Services Iberia SL
  • SINTEF AS
  • AIRBUS CyberSecurity SAS
  • ENGINEERING – Ingegneria Informatica SPA
  • Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
  • Technische Universität Graz
  • University of Piraeus Research Center
  • IDIADA Automotive Technology SA
  • Digital Worx GmbH
  • TELLU IoT AS
  • Eulambia Advanced Technologies Monoprosopi Etairia Periorismenis
  • DBC Europe

The project will devise, implement and evaluate a novel distributed, automated, auditable, yet privacy-respectful, Trust and Identity Management Framework intended to dynamically and holistically manage the lifecycle of IoT devices, strengthening trust, identities, privacy and resilience in the entire IoT ecosystem, supporting the enforcement of the NIS directive, GDPR and Cybersecurity Act.

Follow the project on Twitter and LinkedIn.
https://twitter.com/eratosthenesprj
https://www.linkedin.com/in/eratosthenes-project/

IoTrust Architecture

The IoTrust framework is designed by keeping security and innovation at the core. It consists of 7 main components as shown in the figure above. Each components is developed to handle specific set of tasks in the framework. The fundamental features of IoTrust project are secure bootstrapping, over the air firmware update and trust monitoring. All other services are built around these features. The IoTrust components are following.

End-Device

It is a small form-factor hardware which sits on the edge of an IoT network. It consists of microcontroller, memory, input/output peripherals, communication modules etc. In the IoTrust architecture, an End-Device will be used to collect, format, and send sensor data to a server. The End-Device shall incorporate at least a LoRaWAN capable module to guarantee a set networking of features.

Gateway

A Gateway provides last-mile LoRaWAN radio access to the end-devices. It is an edge component at the end of the LoRaWAN network infrastructure. A gateway is a multi-channel high performance LoRa transceiver module that can receive, process, and send several LoRa packets simultaneously using different spreading factors on various channels. Communications’ security is provided through the LoRaWAN message encryption, as defined by the protocol specification. This scheme is employed in communications to and from the End-Device and the Network Server.

Network Server

The Network Server is part of the LoRaWAN back-end infrastructure. It represents the central hub of all communications from and to LoRaWAN end-devices. It aims to hide the Physical (PHY) and Medium Access Control (MAC) layer details of the LoRaWAN protocol to the components that need to communicate with end-devices. The Network Server will manage all the low-level details to guarantee secure and reliable delivery of messages to and from the LoRaWAN infrastructure.

IoT Controller

The IoT Controller plays the role of authenticator in the Authentication, Authorisation, and Accounting (AAA) architecture. The End-devices perform the bootstrapping process. This process includes an authentication and key agreement stage. Once the device successfully authenticates itself, session keys are shared with the device in order to securely perform the regular operation tasks.

Authentication Server

The AAA architecture has been proposed by standardisation organisation, such as IETF, to provide a scalable solution to security management tasks in heterogeneous IoT ecosystems, especially those employing long-range wide-area networks. The authentication server employs EAP, a flexible solution that supports several methods, with various degrees of performance
requirements for each End-Device.

IoT Agent

The IoT Agent is a MQTT client which subscribes to the topics exposed by the MQTT broker running in the Network Server. At the heart of MQTT are the MQTT broker and clients. The data sent by the end-devices is received by the Network Server over LoRaWAN, which is in turn dispatched using MQTT messages. Each message is posted in a device-specific application reception topic. IoT Agent forwards the device metadata and sensor data to the asvin platform. It does it over HTTPs using REST API end-points. The IoT Agent acts as a bridge between the Network Server and the asvin Platform

asvin Platform

It is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) to facilitate over the air security patches for IoT devices using novel decentralized and distributed technologies. The asvin Platform provides a complete solution for device, security patches and rollout management. It is comprised of 4 components.

  1. IPFS
  2. Blockchain
  3. Customer Platform
  4. Version Controller

Innovations of the IoTrust

The IoTrust project will achieve its objectives by designing, developing and integrating a novel bootstrapping protocol, peer to peer distributed storage protocol, distributed ledger technology and inventive trust monitoring algorithm. The main innovations of the IoTrust are following.

  1. Secure Bootstrapping of LO-CoAP-EAP built with Internet standards for secure setup of IoT devices.
  2. Trust Monitoring: Human-centric trust report of IoT devices to simplify the maintenance decisions making of inexpert end-users for achieving cost effective and sustainable IoT infrastructure.
  3. Decentralized Peer-to-Peer Reprogramming: High resilience against DDoS attacks by decentralized distribution of encrypted firmware, configurations and patches based on peer-to-peer IPFS networks.
  4. Trusted layer for IoT Networks: DTL-based privacy-enhanced storage and IDs management to identify IoT devices and calculate their trust scores.

The core technologies used in the IoTrust are following.

Low-Overhead CoAP-EAP

It integrates the use of Authentication, Authorization and Accounting (AAA) infrastructure, the Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP) Constrained and Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP).

IPFS

Interplanetary File System (IPFS) is distributed system for storing and accessing files. It will be utilized to store firmware files and security patches of IoT devices.

Hyperledger Besu

Device and firmware metadata information will be stored in a distributed ledger. Hyperledger Besu will be utilized for this task. It is an open-source Ethereum client developed under Linux Foundation.

LoRaWAN

It is Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) networking protocol designed to wirelessly connect battery operated devices. The end devices in the IoTrust framework will communicate using LoRaWAN protocol.

IoTrust Project Kickstart

It is our pleasure to announce that IoTrust project has been selected for funding under the NGI TRUST. The digital worx GmbH and Odin Solutions submitted the IoTrust project proposal in the NGI_TRUST 3rd Open Call. The NGI_TRUST has been cofounded by European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program. It supports the development of human-centric internet in the field of privacy and trust enhancing technologies.

The IoTrust aims to provide simple setup and reliable operation of IoT networks in a trusted and secure manner automated setup of IoT peer-to-peer networks and open source stacks for worldwide applications.