Software Defined Ambit of Data Integrity for the Internet of Things

On the Internet of Things (IoT), devices do not have the required computational power and storage capacity; and as a result, a variety of IoT devices may be required to outsource sensed or generated data to multiple heterogeneous cloud servers. We posit that it is the Data Owner’s responsibility to verify whether the stored data remain unchanged when the owner or some trusted third party further requires accessing this data. However, the "level" of this verification may be different under different contexts based on the application need. We propose four methods of integrity verification (which we call the ambit of data integrity – ADI) that considers the "toll" in terms of time, storage and communication by enlisting typically disparate integrity approaches under a single orbit. We adapt the notion of contextual integrity, previously used for assessing privacy grants, to extract important parameters required to decide on a suitable data integrity verification process. We propose a secure architecture using an integration of software defined perimeter (SDP) and software defined network (SDN) to perform authentication and gather each partition’s context information for an SDN application to decide the proper integrity verification method that addresses the context requirements. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that the scope of integrity (or the data context) is used to determine the required layer of integrity verification in IoT.