Policy-Based Secure and Trustworthy Sensing for Internet of Things in Smart Cities

The Internet of Things (IoT), which is known as one of the key enabling technologies of smart cities, generally refers to the network of smart objects, which are embedded with sensing, computing, networking, and actuating capabilities that all together enable them to collect and exchange data. The IoT devices are usually wirelessly networked, and they serve as a key enabling technology for many critical smart city applications, such as intelligent transportation, smart grid, smart building, and mobile healthcare. However, security has become a key challenge for the wide deployment of IoT: because of the environmental influences, the IoT data are inherently noisy. Moreover, the IoT devices may be compromised by attackers to intentionally generate fake data. Finally, the underlying wireless network can also be subverted. To address the security issue in IoT, we propose a policy-based secure and trustworthy sensing scheme for IoT named RealAlert, in which the trustworthiness of both data and the IoT devices are evaluated based on both the reporting history and the context in which the data are collected using policy rules. Experimental results have shown that the RealAlert scheme can accurately assess the trust of the sensor nodes as well as data in IoT.