Semantically enabling IoT trust to ensure and secure deployment of IoT entities

Abstract

Semantics for the IoT domain have been already introduced for the (semi-)automated deployment of heterogeneous entities. Depending on the level of interoperability and the ability of dynamic expansion of the IoT environment, an application may have to 'decide' (and then select) which devices in that environment are trustworthy for ensuring and securing effective deployment. In the open and distributed IoT, where a large number of heterogeneous entities will be registered, the need to ensure and secure their selection and deployment tasks is highly important. In this paper, an effective modelling approach towards supporting the selection and deployment of IoT entities is presented, based on the notion of trust semantics. Using fuzzy ontologies as an enabler of trust semantics in IoT, this work demonstrates that such semantics, when seamlessly integrated in IoT ontologies, serve as a secure selection key to an IoT application (or service) for selecting, among the available entities, the one(s) that the application should trust for its effective deployment in the specific environment/context.