SCCAF: A Secure and Compliant Continuous Assessment Framework in Cloud-Based IoT Context

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) offers a wide variety of benefits to our daily lives in many ways, ranging from smart wearable devices to industrial systems. However, it also brings well-known security and compliance concerns, especially in the physical layer. In addition, due to numerous IoT architectures which have been developed and deployed based on the cloud, the security and compliance of IoT depend on the cloud thoroughly. In this paper, a secure and compliant continuous assessment framework (SCCAF) is proposed to evaluate the security and compliance levels of cloud services in life-cycle. The SCCAF facilitates cloud service to customers to select an optimal cloud service provider (CSP) which satisfies their desired security requirements. Moreover, it also enables cloud service customers to evaluate the compliance of the selected CSP in the process of using cloud services. To evaluate the performance and availability of SCCAF, we carry out a series of experiments with case study and real-world scenario datasets. Experimental results show that SCCAF can assess the security and compliance of CSPs efficiently and effectively.