A secure and quality-aware prototypical architecture for the Internet of Things

• A flexible IoT middleware platform, named NOS, is designed.
• The cross-domain prototype guarantees customized security and data quality levels.
• New well-defined algorithm for the assessment of security is defined.
• The cross-domain prototype guarantees customized security and data quality levels.
• New well-defined algorithm for the assessment of security is defined.
• Uniform representation for the data provided by heterogeneous sources is defined.
• Capability to handle with registered and no registered sources is addressed.

The increasing diffusion of services enabled by Internet of Things (IoT) technologies raises several risks associated to security and data quality. Together with the high number of heterogeneous interconnected devices, this creates scalability issues, thereby calling for a flexible middleware platform able to deal with both security threats and data quality issues in a dynamic IoT environment. In this paper a lightweight and cross-domain prototype of a distributed architecture for IoT is presented, providing minimum data caching functionality and in-memory data processing. A number of supporting algorithms for the assessment of data quality and security are presented and discussed. In the presented system, users can request services on the basis of a publish/subscribe mechanism, data from IoT devices being filtered according to users requirements in terms of security and quality. The prototype is validated in an experimental setting characterized by the usage of real-time open data feeds presenting different levels of reliability, quality and security.