Enabling Secure RESTful Web Services in IoT using OpenStack

Thanks to the impact of the advancement in the hardware field, the network size and usage scope of the Internet are continuously growing. Indeed, new smart devices, e.g., sensors, actuators, home appliances are becoming strong enough to communicate and exchange data over the Internet. Accordingly, this distributed ecosystem with sensing/actuation capabilities is introducing new market opportunities with innovative services including, e.g., environmental monitoring, traffic monitoring, homes/buildings control. To conceive new IoT services, enabling the smart devices to join the Internet and expose their capabilities/data through the Web is fundamental. For this purpose, Web Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) or what we refer to also as RESTful Web Services is a paradigm that can enhance the IoT application scope by making smart things part of the Web. In this paper, based on our Stack4Things (S4T) Cloud middleware, we introduce a new approach for exposing services running on IoT devices to the Web so that they become reachable using globally resolvable Uniform Resource Locators (URLs). We emphasized security issues as well by implementing, on the devices, an automated mechanism capable of managing X.509 certificates issuance to enable secure communications using Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS).