A secure, out-of-band, mechanism to manage internet of things devices

Abstract

Adoption of the pervasive and ubiquitous computing paradigm is increasing. One application of this paradigm is Ambient Assistive Living where ICT-based assistive services are deployed in an environment. In this study, a Smart Home in a Box (SHIB) has been devised as an AAL solution. This SHIB relies upon Internet of Things (IoT) devices, such as thermal vision sensors, within an environment to function. Each SHIB deployment consists of IoT devices taken from a common pool of devices. The exact device manifest of each SHIB deployment will change as dictated by end-user requirements. Additionally, this pool will grow and expand when devices are removed or added from previous SHIB deployments. To efficiently manage this pool of devices, and SHIB deployments, a remote management solution is required. Current remote management solutions have a range of deficiencies that render them unsuitable for use with the current SHIB platform. To address these deficiencies, a secure mechanism to manage the IoT devices has been devised. This paper presents this mechanism and evaluates its applicability to SHIB deployments. The evaluation focused on assessing the security of the mechanism and the viability of its Low-Power Wireless Wide-Area Network-based communications. This evaluation showed that the proposed solution was reliable and suitable for the intended deployment scenario. An extended evaluation and system improvements have been identified and proposed within future work.