A Secure Cloud-based Architecture for monitoring Cyber-Physical Critical Infrastructures

Monitoring systems that capture information from the physical world are becoming increasingly essential nowadays. These systems can integrate diverse technologies such as sensor networks, IoT devices, Big Data analysis, machine learning classifiers and predictors, and other tools that can help protect critical infrastructures, mainly their physical assets. However, limitations regarding hardware and edge computing resources can challenge the suitable implementation of these systems. Furthermore, cybersecurity has become a serious concern since one needs to ensure system availability and the integrity and authenticity of large data amounts. This paper proposes the thoughtful employment of cloud computing resources to address the abovementioned problems, applying microservices and cloud computing for validating blockchain security and monitoring the protection of physical environments. Our contributions focus on two main aspects: a microservices-based architecture to deal with data receiving, analysis, and storage while enhancing availability; and the integration of blockchains as a security mechanism to verify data integrity and authenticity using smart contracts. Moreover, our proposal also discusses the challenges involving blockchains in a Big Data scenario and appropriate mechanisms to deal with scalability and performance constraints. Finally, we present a complete implementation of our architecture using the AWS cloud environment and Hyperledger Fabric platform. Our tests demonstrate how microservices can help increase blockchain throughput. We argue that our architecture proposal and its implementation constitute a suitable solution for modern monitoring systems and serve as a reference model for future works.