Security Assurance in Modern IoT Systems

Modern distributed systems consist of a multilayer architecture of IoT, edge, and cloud nodes. Together, they are revolutionizing our lives, bringing intelligence to existing processes (e.g., smart grids) and enabling novel, efficient and effective processes (e.g., remote surgery). This transition however does not come without drawbacks, due to the ever-increasing reliance on devices whose security and safety are, at least, questionable. In this context, research is in its infancy, struggling to adapt successful practices applied, for instance, in cloud systems. Security of modern IoT systems still relies on old-fashioned approaches, mostly static assessments considering only very specific parts of the target system, rather than assessing the system as a whole. In this paper, we put forward the idea of security assurance for IoT, as a higher-level assurance process evaluating the target system at different layers and different moments of its lifecycle, then implemented by a flexible assurance framework. The quality of our approach is evaluated in a real-world smart lighting system.