Data provenance and trust establishment in the Internet of Things

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a network of heterogeneous networks encompassing various forms of communications form the current traditional communication models to ubiquitous and pervasive machine to machine communications. In such an ever expanding, dynamic, and complex environment, it becomes vital to know the origin or the source of data and whether this data can be trusted or no. This requires not only accurate, secure, and correct data collection processes; but also provisioning of data provenance throughout the life‐cycle of an IoT device and the data it produces. To this end, this work introduces a provenance‐based trust management solution, which provides a trust establishment mechanism amongst communicating devices in the IoT. It provides a way to quantitatively assess the trustworthiness of data supplied by a given IoT device. Thus, providing a novel solution to preserve data provenance of IoT devices. This IoT data provenance solution extends the capabilities of our previously proposed IoT platform known as the IoT‐management platform, which aimed at preserving the privacy of users in the IoT.