Trust, security and privacy management for IoT systems

Internet of Things technologies offer the capability to better address key challenges in society. The ability to gather data over wide geographic areas, environments and applications to gain insights to drive actions, is a powerful means by which to bring about change. This ranges from improving productivity in our companies; enhancing healthcare provision; and monitoring lone workers in hazardous environments to more accurately assessing the condition of the natural environment; and ensuring compliance to legislation. Security, trust and privacy are often cited as areas of concern by both individuals and organisations globally and as such as seen as barriers in the adoption of IoT. Managing these concerns in an inter-related holistic manner is essential in order to realise the full potential positive impact IoT can provide.

Challenges faced in achieving better collective management of trust, security, and privacy in IoT are several-fold. These are the diverse nature of IoT products and services, range of applications, technical standards and legislation in different market sectors, and the rapid pace that IoT systems are developing. The IoT systems market is evolving rapidly with an increasingly diverse range of end users.  This presents a challenge to create one all-encompassing framework to address all aspects of trust, security and privacy without a concerted effort from a large consortium of organisations. At this point in time, priority applications for IoT should be addressed first. These include the areas of healthcare, critical infrastructure, financial systems and other more specialised IoT applications which involve data capture from mobile platforms.

The ARCADIAN-IoT project will help to address the issues of trust, security and privacy in IoT by bringing together experts and organisations from across Europe to investigate, implement and integrate the required components to create a framework to address priority IoT applications. ARCADIAN-IoT’s strategy to build on and advance technologies such as Blockchain, hardened encryption and decentralised identification, will enable cohesive solutions to be created to effectively enable distributed trust and digital identity management. The outcome of the work will be a set of useful tools that will benefit both individuals, companies and government in the development, deployment and use of IoT.  The project partners’ wider activities in business development, technology transfer, economic development and outreach will ensure the outcomes of the project have impact as widely as possible, particularly in the small and medium-sized company community.