In recent decades, the industrial applications of the internet of things (IoT) have been attracting massive motivation for research and improvement of industrial operations. The IoT technology integrates various smart objects (or things) to form a network, share data among the connected objects, store data, and process data to support business applications. It is challenging to find a univocal architecture as a reference for different business applications, which can relate to many sensors, intelligence devices, networks, and protocols for operations. Moreover, some of the IoT infrastructural components are a shortage of computational processing power, locally saving ability, and data communication capacity, and these components are very vulnerable to privacy and security attacks. This chapter presents an overview of different IoT-based architectures and security-related issues. Finally, the chapter discusses the challenges of cryptography and blockchain-based solutions after reviewing the threats of IoT-based industry-specific business cases.
TopIntroduction
The innovation of digital communication technology is ushering in a new dawn with the evolution of intelligent electronic devices and high-speed data transportation infrastructures (Pal, 2021a). At the same time, IoT technologies add an extra layer of added advantages to industrial applications. For example, the basic idea of IoT was conceived at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA, in the late 1990s. The IoT idea consists of self-controlled smarter objects (“things”) and their intercommunicability, creating a unique environment and interaction capabilities. For example, intelligent IoT devices can be wearable wristwatches, automobile cars, intelligent factories, radio frequency identification (RFID) tags (Pal, 2019) (Pal, 2021b), and communication technologies are part of this envisioned new world. In addition, there are some prominent IoT-based applications are as follows: (i) smart home applications that include control of domestic electronic objects (e.g., television, refrigerator, security alarm, lighting, heating) and monitoring remotely, (ii) intelligent transport system, which relies heavily on real-time data gathering, and analysis to make judicious decisions for daily transport management and provide appropriate services to the customers, and (iii) digital healthcare services to improve patient-caring capabilities for medical caring agencies.
This innovative progress depends heavily on radio frequency spectrum allocation, other infrastructural issues, and global policymakers' support and wiliness to the technology ratification process. In addition, IoT-based industrial information systems are gaining massive popularity, and these systems use low-power lossy networks, with some devices having constrained resources. Besides, the telecommunication industry is preparing to evolve wireless networks to the next generation of technology, known as sixth-generation network connectivity (6G). The 6G wireless networks represent the most meaningful change in the commercial world has seen in wireless networks since cellular data communication came into industrial use.
The large scale IoT-based information systems deployment results in significant security and privacy-related issues (e.g., authorization, access control, information security management) (Pal, 2021a) (Pal, 2021b). For example, IoT-based smartphone appliances and other intelligent embedded equipment need to create a digital world for distinct end-user categories for required services. However, privacy and security are not assured in this new physical to the digital world mapping environment. In this way, user privacy maybe not be secured, and often data might be leaked when the data communication channel is interrupted, or data is stolen by the hackers (Pal, 2021a). Consequently, developing IoT-based applications requires carefully addressing various security management solutions (Pal, 2021b).
In recent decades, there has been massive attention to finding appropriate security solutions in IoT industrial applications. Many of these methods aim to mitigate security-related issues at a specific layer of the data communication stack, whereas others aim to enhance IoT infrastructure security at all levels. For example, Fadele Ayotunde Alaba and fellow researchers presented some of these approaches to secure IoT systems (Alaba et al., 2017). In addition, it includes application architecture, communication, and data related issues. Besides, it includes IoT security taxonomy for hardware, network, and application layers.
In the same way, another IoT application review by Granjal and others (Granjal et al., 2015) presented safeguarding problems for the protocols deployed in IoT systems. The security-related issues reviews described in (Roman et al., 2011) (Granjal et al., 2008) (Cirani & Ferrari, 2013) present various necessary operation related management systems and modern cryptography applications. Moreover, other groups of academic authors (Butun et al., 2014) (Abduvaliyev & Pathan, 2013) (Mitchell & Chen, 2014) aim for a comparative analysis of different invasion tracking systems; and in recent years, a particular category of computing (known as fog computing) based IoT applications security issues (Yi et al., 2015) (Wang et al., 2015) are also domaining.