Challenges generated by the Integration of Cloud computing and IoT
The Internet of Things (IoT) digitizes physical assets, sensor devices, machines gateways, and the network it connects people to things and things to things in real-time a typical internet of things network can explode resulting in an exponential increase in the variety, velocity, and the overall volume of data. Cloud computing supplies suitable and scalable network access, which helps in the easy integration of data from various heterogeneous computing devices. Although there are various challenges in the cloud’s integration platform with IoT devices. This paper puts forward some major security challenges faced by integrating cloud with IoT.
INTRODUCTION
IoT and Cloud computing both technologies have emerged side by side as part of the fourth industrial revolution, which makes it important to explore them as both have a lot of features in common. The common features of these two emerging technologies are the reason for many researchers to integrate these two technologies for improvement and enhancement. Although many consider Cloud computing to be new technology, it has been involved in and encompassed various technologies such as grid, utility computing, virtualization, networking, and software services. It is not surprising that the origins of Cloud technologies lie in the grid, utility computing virtualization, networking and software services, and distributed computing and parallel computing. The IoT can be considered both a dynamic and global networked infrastructure that manages self-configuring objects highly intelligently. The IoT is moving towards a phase where all items around us will be connected to the Internet and will have the ability to interact with minimum human effort. The IoT normally includes several objects with limited storage and computing capacity. Cloud computing and IoT are no doubt the future of the Internet and next-generation technologies. However, Cloud services depend on service providers, which are interoperable, while IoT technologies are based on diversity rather than interoperability.
BASIC CONCEPTS
This section reviews the basic concepts of Cloud computing, the IoT, and Cloud-based IoT:-
Internet of Things
The Internet of Things or IoT is influencing our lifestyle from the way we react to the way we behave. From air conditioners that you can control with your smartphone to Smart Cars providing the shortest route or your Smartwatch which is tracking your daily activities. All things in the IoT (smart devices, sensors, etc.) have their own identity. They are combined to form the communication network and will become actively participating objects. IoT is a giant network with connected devices. These devices gather and share data about how they are used and the environment in which they are operated. It’s all done using sensors; sensors are embedded in every physical device. It can be your mobile phone, electrical appliances, barcode sensors, traffic lights, and almost everything that you come across in day-to-day life. These sensors continuously emit data about the working state of the devices, but the important question is how do they share this huge amount of data, And how do we put this data to our benefit IoT provides a common platform for all these devices to dump their data. Also, these objects can create requests and alter their states. Thus, all IoT devices can be monitored, tracked, and counted, which significantly decreases waste, loss, and cost. And a common language for all the devices to communicate with each other. Data is emitted from various sensors and sent to IoT platform security. IoT platform integrates the collected data from various sources further analytics is performed on the data and valuable information is extracted as per requirement. The result is shared with other devices for better user experience Automation and improving efficiencies. We have Smart appliances, Smart Cars, Smart Homes, Smart Cities where IoT is redefining our lifestyle and transforming the way we interact with Technologies. The future of the IoT industry is huge. Business Insider Intelligence estimates that 24 billion IoT devices will be installed by 2020 and ITC predicts that IoT Revenue will reach around three hundred and fifty-seven billion in 2019 resulting in a lot of job opportunities. A great many definitions of the IoT have been put forth by numerous organizations and researchers. According to the ITU (2012), the IoT is “a global infrastructure for the Information Society, enabling advanced services by interconnecting (physical and virtual) things based on, existing and evolving, interoperable information and communication technologies”. The IoT introduces a variety of opportunities and applications. However, it faces many challenges that could potentially hinder its successful implementation, such as data storage, heterogeneous resource-constrained, scalability, Things, variable geospatial deployment, and energy efficiency.
Cloud Computing
There exist several proposed definitions for Cloud computing, although the most widely agreed upon seems to be put forth by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Indeed, the NIST has defined Cloud computing as “a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction”. Cloud deployment models are of three types: public, private and hybrid. Public cloud is basically when you are sharing your server with a host of different people. Cloud computing deployment models are most commonly classified as belonging to the public Cloud, where resources are made available to consumers over the Internet. Public Clouds are generally owned by a profitable organization (e.g. Amazon EC2). Private cloud gives you the server privately that this is your server and has deployed only your operating system own to it and you can use it you can be stressed short you can be safe with your data. The private cloud offers a secure environment and a higher level of control (Microsoft Private Cloud). Hybrid cloud is a mixture of both public cloud and private cloud so if you have an application wherein you’re using public cloud and private cloud both you term it as a hybrid cloud. Hybrid Clouds are a mixture of private and public Clouds. This choice is provided for consumers as it makes it possible to overcome some of the limitations of each model’s resources.
Cloud-Based Internet of Things
The Internet of things means anything rather than anything and everything is now becoming internet enable so that may in other sense that there are sensors cloud also and there can be another type of a different variety of sensors which are enabling it to be a connection to the internet so anything and everything is connecting to the internet and there is a huge volume of data different variety of services which are being possible with this sort of mechanisms so we like to see that this IoT cloud that is an amalgamation of this cloud technology or cloud philosophy with this IoT how it is likely to help the overall performance of these services of the internet of things or cloud services. Cloud computing has partially resolved most of the IoT issues. Indeed, the IoT and Cloud are two comparatively challenging technologies and are being combined to change the current and future environment of internetworking services.
The complementary features of cloud and IoT are shown in TABLE 1. This complementarity is the primary reason why many researchers have proposed their integration.
CHALLENGES FACING CLOUD-BASED IoT INTEGRATION
There are a vast number of challenges faced by the integration of Cloud and IoT. Some of which are listed below:
Devices and their capacity
Device’s security approaches normally depend on the encryption most of the security approaches whenever we talk about it depends upon encryption but when going about IoT the entire environment is all about constrained environments and the devices are also about constrained devices which means they are not having sorts of luxury in terms of resource availability in terms of memory in terms of processor speed in terms of many things they are constrained even including power so when you go with encryption it is not a good fit for this constrained environment are constrained devices and this complex encryption and decryption may take time for this constrained devices it might not work well so these products with constrained resources are most vulnerable to the side-channel attacks and reverse engineering of the algorithms is also possible so it is not a great idea to go with encryption techniques towards the constrained environment this is the first challenge that we normally face. Sensitive information leakage can also occur due to multi-tenancy. Moreover, public-key cryptography cannot be applied to all layers because of the processing power constraints imposed by IoT objects. New challenges also require specific attention; for example, the distributed system is exposed to several possible attacks, such as SQL injection, session riding, cross-site scripting, and side-channel. Moreover, important vulnerabilities, including session hijacking and virtual machine escape are also problematic.
Authorization and the Authentication
Although security and privacy are both critical research issues that have received a great deal of attention, they are still open issues that require more effort. Indeed, adapting to different threats from hackers is still an issue. The device authorization is not a separate work it also goes with authentication the device authorization must go hand-in-hand with authentication and is pretty critical when it comes to IoT products because you are not only authorized but also you need to authenticate so the one who tries to access this must establish their identity before proceeding further with the Gateway access and to other cloud resources so I would each platform with the two-factor authentication and usage of strong passwords are the major ones that we are relying on till so you need to think about this aspect of the security authentication and authorization both are to be very good just the point that you need to remember.
Updates
The third aspect the device updates whenever you have a device it gets updates these states in terms of member update or something security patches firmware or the software will have several challenges means every day every second now and then we see that there are a lot of new security threats are coming in and how do we address it we normally address it through the patches on the security firmware updates so these updates are to be very good and this might not be feasible or possible with every IoT device so how do we handle it do we have a chance to go ahead and update the firmware of every IoT device concerning the newly incoming attacks in that case that is fine but there are some cases where we really may not have an opportunity to go ahead and update the firmware because of constrained environments and all those stuff so many a times the device roller may not also show much interest in applying an update this very important point, forgetting the importance of the security updates we postpone this security updates so that’s the major problem that we are facing and that’s one of the biggest challenges.
Communication Channel
The communication channel needs to be much secured the encrypting messages before the transfer is good but the better one is to use the transport encryption and to adapt the standards like TLS(Transport Layer Security) see this point here in the communication channels when you are about to send before that you encrypt and standard the first point that we said is the encryption that is happening in the devices but now we are talking about the so there is a lot of difference between these two points so understand the difference and when we talk about the vulnerabilities it can cost constraints it can be expertise constraints it can be known operation of the software by the customers it can be the market created the way the mandate for speedy deployment when it has to be fast it cannot go for multiple checking that is that has to happen to make sure the system is secure and operational constraints all these are the major security vulnerabilities that we are facing when one deploys any IoT devices. Besides, when critical IoT applications move into the Cloud, issues arise because of the lack of trust in the service provider, information regarding service level agreements (SLAs), and the physical location of data.
Retain collected data
The sensor data should be stored and processed securely the sensor data may come from different sensors it is attached to different equipment all the different equipment could be at different places so it is a challenge we need to make sure that the data integrity has to be maintained including some checksums or signatures that can be included to make sure that the original raw data is not modified during the transfer what it means is that we have generated the data that should go to the destination and in between the data should not be changed so what do we have checksums we have other methods we can make sure that the data order is not changed and all those are to be practised and most an important point the data that you think is not required anymore should be removed retaining that data will increase the complexity and will cost us more in the maintenance part of it.
Performance
The performance here is concerned with the network bandwidth which depends upon the type of IoT sensors and applications for which they are used. If the application is not at an industrial level then large bandwidth is not required else the transfer of heavy amounts of data from sensors to cloud requires a large amount of bandwidth. This is because timeliness might be affected by unpredictable matters and real-time applications are very sensitive to performance efficiency. Cloud environments; indeed, this is because broadband growth is not keeping pace with storage and computation evolution.
CLOUD-BASED IoT APPLICATIONS
The integration of cloud and IoT has introduced a large number of efficient applications that have simplified the lives of human beings across the world. Some of them are listed below in TABLE 2.
CONCLUSION
The Internet of Things (IoT) is now becoming an evolutionary technology that requires a big data storage platform as well as high-speed processing systems. The limited scope of both the storage and processing powers is one of the major concerns for the while including issues such as security, authentication, and authorization, performance, communication channel, updates, and device’s capacity. Thus the integration of Cloud into IoT is necessary for overcoming these challenges. In this paper, we stated the need for a Cloud-based IoT approach.
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