Fabio Federici

Securing resource-constrained Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) devices requires guarantees of integrity and confidentiality. This paper presents a security framework developed under the CERTIFY project to document and justify trustworthy execution of sensitive software running on resource-constrained devices. Our architecture model assumes the presence of a separation kernel, that employs hardware Memory Protection Units to enforce Memory isolation and mediate communications during boot, provisioning, and run-time. On the other side, the paper does not cover implementation aspects, but leaves them to the choice of the user intending to adopt the proposed solution architecture. To systematically show the trustworthiness of this proposed architecture, we develop an assurance case using Goal Structuring Notation: we map system requirements to architecture-specific security objectives and introduce a novel “attacker action” graphical element to explicitly integrate threat modeling into our arguments. The resulting assurance case provides a structured, auditable, and reusable foundation architecture for the secure implementation of the CERTIFY IIoT framework.

Compliance data consists of manufacturing quality measures collected in the production process. Quality checks are most of the times computationally expensive to perform, mainly due to the amount of collected data. Having trusted solutions for outsourcing analyses to the Cloud is an opportunity for reducing costs of operation. However, the adoption of the Cloud computation paradigm is delayed for the many security risks associated with it. In the use case we consider in this paper, compliance data is very sensitive, because it may contain IP-critical information, or it may be related to safety-critical operations or products. While the technological solutions that protect data in-transit or at rest have reached a satisfying level of maturity, there is a huge demand for securing data in-use. Homomorphic Encryption (HE) is one of the main technological enablers for secure computation outsourcing. In the last decade, HE has reached maturity with remarkable pace. However, using HE is still far from being an automated process and each use case introduces different challenges. In this paper, we investigate application of HE to the described scenario. In particular, we redesign the compliance check algorithm to a HE-friendly equivalent. We propose efficient data input encoding that takes advantage of SIMD type of computations supported by the CKKS HE scheme. Moreover, we introduce security/performance trade-offs by proposing limited but acceptable information leakage. We have implemented our solution using SEAL HE library and evaluated our results in terms of time complexity and accuracy. Finally, we analyze the benefits and limitations of integration of a Trusted Execution Environment for secure execution of some computations that are overly expensive for the chosen HE scheme.

Modern real-time systems started leveraging runtime reconfigurable architectures to reduce size, weight, and power, while ensuring predictability. However, the time to reconfigure a platform (referred to as reconfiguration delay) is non-negligible and subject to fluctuations caused by conflicts in accessing shared components during the reconfiguration process. Differently from existing solutions that impact either system resources or system performance, in this letter, we propose an approach, together with its supporting tools, allowing to characterize the reconfiguration delay and to be able to capture and produce evidence of the actual impact of the resource contention. In addition, we report the experiments of the proposed approach in a representative configuration on a Xilinx Zynq Ultrascale+ MPSoC; results show that conflicts can impact the reconfiguration delay at most by 230%.

This paper considers the domain of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) infrastructures and the recurring need for collaboration across teams and stakeholders by means of remote access. The paper describes a secure solution beyond the traditional perimeter-based security approach, which consists of an architecture that supports multi-level authorization to achieve fine-grained access control, better scalability, and maintainability. An implementation of the proposed solution, using open-source technologies, is also discussed and covers the protection of both the network and edge domains of a complex IIoT infrastructure. Finally, the paper presents a risk-driven and model-based process that is designed to support the migration of existing infrastructures to the solution architecture. The approach is validated, taking as a reference two relevant scenarios for the aerospace industry.