Trusted ecosystem for IoT service provisioning based on brokering

The usage of untrusted, non-certified or non-validated Internet of Things (IoT) devices can affect the entire system functioning, causing service interruption and invalidating information processing. These vulnerabilities are mainly due to the errors in providing services and the whole ecosystem's exposure to different cyber attacks. This paper aims to address these problems by proposing a new method to create a trusted distributed environment for implementing IoT services based on Edge computing. Our solution is based on the key idea that IoT devices are certified by a certification authority (CA) through an authorized broker. IoT devices will connect to the CA only if they have been previously authorized to the same. The CA will also allow single isolated IoT nodes to participate in one or more applications in a specific FIWARE-based domain. The entire certification process of IoT devices and the digital certificate issuance take place using a Mobile Edge Computing system (MEC) located near the IoT node. The MEC is the broker device that allows the interaction of the IoT device with the CA. We implemented the proposed solution and performed some experiments to test its effectiveness.