Secure and Private Internet of Things for Industry, Training, and Homes: A Communications Solution for Connected Devices

We are currently living in the era of the Internet of Things (IoT)
[1]
, which has been fostered by the electronic and communications revolution that happened in recent decades. The already great number of devices connected is continuously increasing, while their size and energy consumption keep decreasing. These IoT devices offer network interfaces that allow the interaction between a user/manager and the device through the network. These interfaces are usually developed by the manufacturers, and so, they constitute a private software interface (PSI). Within the IoT, a great variety of devices, such as, for example, appliances and other electric equipment, are publicly accessed. The essence of the IoT’s structure is presented in
Figure 1
, where appliances are accessible through a smartphone and their local area network (LAN). This basic architecture has been used in older IoT works such as
[2]
. To get this accessibility, the user must first register in a cloud, which is usually run by the manufacturer of the appliance, meaning that the management of the data is completely unknown for the end user in most cases. This lack of privacy does not dissuade people from using those devices (in many cases, because the only alternative is to not use such a device at all), but also, nowadays, people manage a large part of their professional, personal, and leisure information through the Internet
[3]
, within a cloud (cloud computing)
[4]
.