17 January. 2021
Cloud computing (or computing within distant data centres) has contributed much to the development of the Internet over the past twenty years or so. However, new applications in the area of IoT, but not only, are pushing the limits of cloud computing to the point where computing at far-away data-centres cannot cope with application requirements. Emerging trends in computing, communications and networking move towards fog computing and mobile edge computing (MEC). According to these trends computation moves to the edges of the network (hence from cloud to fog to edge) to serve newly emerging applications with strict response deadlines. The challenges pertaining to this move defy some of the most fundamental operations taking place in the Internet infrastructure today. Being at the intersection between IoT and Cloud, Edge/Fog Computing inherits all the security and privacy issues of both paradigms, but these become more critical due to the safety issues of industrial systems. By extending the Cloud computing model towards the Edge we expand the attack surface, as in principle any Edge/Fog device could be an entry point for attacking the overall system. Secure data storage, secure computation, network security, authentication, are all examples of security challenges that need to be addressed to realise the Edge/Fog computing vision.
This PhD will deal with a combination of the following: analyze the security threats of the Edge/Fog Computing infrastructure for Industry 4.0, develop a security framework that takes advantage of the Edge and Fog Nodes and Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) as security-enabling components of the system, investigate Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) to deal with transactions through trust-less IoT and edge-computing nodes, and encompass all these within a Security-by-Design overarching framework.