Building Trustable Remote Monitoring and Management Systems

Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging technology that expands wireless and mobile networks into heterogeneous network of connected devices. Trustable remote monitoring and management systems are required to establish a controlled environment for new services and devices in order to (i) improve the quality of existing services and (ii) enable novel services. However, monitoring and remote management can cause security and privacy concerns and thus affect the trust formation between customer and service provider. This paper introduces a trust model considering institutions as mediators to assess trustability of remote monitoring and management systems. The proposed model considers governance as an approach to audit remote monitoring and management systems and accordingly provides institutional assurance in form of certificate or labels in order to facilitate trust decision making and motivate trustworthy behaviors. The proposed model utilized the multi-metric method to measure governance criteria objectively and represent level of trustworthiness with A-F labels. Representing governance criteria with labels accompanied by color coding facilitates trust decision making based on application context or requirements for everyone regardless of level of expertise. Meanwhile, issuing trustworthiness certificate or A-F labels will encourage service providers to improve trustability of their remote monitoring and management approaches, which improve acceptability and efficiency of managed services.