Security of ONS service for applications of the Internet of Things and their pilot implementation in academic network

Abstract

The aim of the Object name services (ONS) project was to find a robust and stable way of automated communication to utilize name and directory services to support radio-frequency identification (RFID) ecosystem, mainly in the way that can leverage open source and standardized services and capability to be secured. All this work contributed to the new RFID services and Internet of Things (IoT) heterogeneous environments capabilities presentation. There is an increasing demand of transferred data volumes associated with each and every IP or non-IP discoverable objects. For example RFID tagged objects and sensors, as well as the need to bridge remaining communication compatibility issues between these two independent worlds. RFID and IoT ecosystems require sensitive implementation of security approaches and methods. There are still significant risks associated with their operations due to the content nature. One of the reasons of past failures could be lack of security as the integral part of design of each particular product, which is supposed to build ONS systems. Although we focused mainly on the availability and confidentiality concerns in this paper, there are still some remaining areas to be researched. We tried to identify the hardening impact by metrics evaluating operational status, resiliency, responsiveness and performance of managed ONS solution design. Design of redundant and hardened testing environment under tests brought us the visibility into the assurance of the internal communication security and showed behavior under the load of the components in such complex information service, with respect to an overall quality of the delivered ONS service.