Section: New Results

Secure design of WoT services for Smart Cities

Participant : Jean-Marie Bonnin [contact] .

The richness and the versatility of WebRTC, a new peer-to-peer, real-time and browser- based communication technology, allowed the imagination of new and innovative services. We analyzed the capabilities required to allow a participant in a WebRTC session to access the smart things belonging to his own environment as well as those of any other participant in the same session. The access to such environment (a Smart Space (SS)) can be either passive, for example by monitoring the contextual information provided by the sensors, or active by requesting the execution of commands by the actuators, or a mixture of both. This approach deserves attention because it allows to solve in an original way various issues such as allowing experts to remotely exercise and provide their expertises. From a technical point of view the issue is not trivial because it requires a smooth and mastered articulation between two different technologies: WebRTC and the Internet of Things (IoT) / Web of Things (WoT) [6].

We defined from scratch, of an architecture allowing a junction between WebRTC and the WoT. This architecture is illustrated through a set of innovative use cases. The latter relies essentially on a gateway connecting the two technologies. Since WebRTC is natively secure, its analysis allowed us to propose a set of mechanisms to secure the link between the gateway and the WebRTC client together with the access control to the SS. The implementation of an experimental prototype validates the feasibility of this approach. We also proposed a new smart home architecture encompassing several services, among them the healthcare and the energy management. The overall work targets the introduction of a real smart home, based in Aalborg University labs. Finally, we introduced an SDN controller in order to manage the various SSs that can be involved in a WebRTC session. The main idea consists in allowing an end-user to own more than one SS while keeping their management simple and effective. The principle of our approach consists in centralizing the decisions concerning the management of the various SSs. Due to the fact that routing concerns are intimately intertwined with those of security, the SDN clearly appears as a promising tool to solve these issues.

This work has been done in collaboration with IRISA-OCIF team.