SensorCloud: Trustworthy management and analysis of sensor data in a cloud infrastructure

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Sensor network technology is increasingly making its way to our everyday life. For example, sensors appear as smart objects in home automation systems, intelligent environmental and industrial systems, as well as a fundamental building block in smart grids, intelligent traffic systems and smart cities. However, while smart objects are highly capable of sensing and actuating, their computation and storage resources are scarce. In SensorCloud, we combined the advantages of smart objects with the strength of Cloud Computing – elastic computation and storage. Storing and computing sensed data in the cloud allows to efficiently utilize past data items in current situations.

A second aspect of SensorCloud was the availability of sensed data. Today’s applications of sensor networks mostly implement isolated networks. It is oftentimes neither possible to reuse information for different application scenarios nor to combine information from different networks in order to gain higher-value information. In stark contrast to such restricted data availability, the central and highly scalable platform of SensorCloud makes information accessible across application and network boundaries. Hence, SensorCloud allows to reuse sensed information for different kinds of applications and to correlate sensor data independent from the sensor location.

Sensed data may contain highly personal or otherwise critical information (especially in company settings). Hence, users currently refrain from storing critical information in cloud platforms such as Amazon EC2. When interconnecting smart objects with the cloud we observe that these scenarios typically involve a gateway in the trusted domain of the sensor data provider. While these gateways commonly provide connectivity with the Internet, we elevate them to trust points of the SensorCloud architecture. Specifically, trust points encrypt sensed data before storing it in the cloud and perform access control for the stored data. This ensures that the data provider remains in control over her data. Besides the actual design of the trust point-based architecture, SensorCloud research topics include efficient multi-party encryption and integrity protection, federated user management, and mechanisms to convey privacy implications to users and cloud providers.

SensorCloud, funded by the Germand Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi) as part of the Trusted Cloud initiative, was a joined project with several partners from academia and industry that ran from 2012 to 2014. It was a research effort that aimed to provide synergies for two recent trends in networking: the Internet of Things and Cloud Computing. More information on this past project and our project partners can be found on www.sensorcloud.de.



Publications

Martin Henze, Jens Hiller, René Hummen, Roman Matzutt, Klaus Wehrle, Jan Henrik Ziegeldorf. Network Security and Privacy for Cyber-Physical Systems. Security and Privacy in Cyber-Physical Systems: Foundations, Principles and Applications. November 2017.
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Martin Henze, René Hummen, Roman Matzutt, Klaus Wehrle. The SensorCloud Protocol: Securely Outsourcing Sensor Data to the Cloud. Department of Computer Science, RWTH Aachen University. July 2016.
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Martin Henze, René Hummen, Roman Matzutt, Klaus Wehrle. A Trust Point-based Security Architecture for Sensor Data in the Cloud. Trusted Cloud Computing. December 2014.
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Michael Eggert, Roger Häußling, Martin Henze, Lars Hermerschmidt, René Hummen, Daniel Kerpen, Antonio Navarro Pérez, Bernhard Rumpe, Dirk Thißen, Klaus Wehrle. SensorCloud: Towards the Interdisciplinary Development of a Trustworthy Platform for Globally Interconnected Sensors and Actuators. Trusted Cloud Computing. December 2014.
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Martin Henze, Sebastian Bereda, René Hummen, Klaus Wehrle. SCSlib: Transparently Accessing Protected Sensor Data in the Cloud. The 6th International Symposium on Applications of Ad hoc and Sensor Networks (AASNET'14), vol. 37, Halifax, NS, Canada. September 2014.
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René Hummen, Hossein Shafagh, Shahid Raza, Thiemo Voigt, Klaus Wehrle. Delegation-based Authentication and Authorization for the IP-based Internet of Things. 11th IEEE International Conference on Sensing, Communication, and Networking (SECON 2014), Jun 30 - Jul 3, 2014, Singapore. June 2014.
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Martin Henze, René Hummen, Roman Matzutt, Daniel Catrein, Klaus Wehrle. Maintaining User Control While Storing and Processing Sensor Data in the Cloud. International Journal of Grid and High Performance Computing (IJGHPC), vol. 5, no. 4. December 2013.
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Martin Henze, René Hummen, Klaus Wehrle. The Cloud Needs Cross-Layer Data Handling Annotations (Position Paper). Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Data Usage Management (DUMA 2013), May 23 - May 24, 2013, San Francisco, CA. May 2013.
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René Hummen, Jens Hiller, Hanno Wirtz, Martin Henze, Hossein Shafagh, Klaus Wehrle. 6LoWPAN Fragmentation Attacks and Mitigation Mechanisms. Proceedings of the 6th ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks (WiSec ‘13), Budapest, Hungary. April 2013.
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René Hummen, Martin Henze, Daniel Catrein, Klaus Wehrle. A Cloud Design for User-controlled Storage and Processing of Sensor Data. Proceedings of the 2012 IEEE 4th International Conference on Cloud Computing Technology and Science (CloudCom), Dec 3 - Dec 6, 2012, Taipei, Taiwan. December 2012.
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