Tracing where IoT data are collected and aggregated

TL;DR

This paper introduces IoT-LySa, a process calculus with static analysis to trace data origins and flows in IoT systems, aiding designers in verifying properties like security.

Contribution

It presents IoT-LySa, a novel formal framework for modeling and analyzing data provenance and flow in IoT environments from a foundational perspective.

Findings

The analysis can verify non-functional properties such as security.

IoT-LySa effectively tracks data provenance and manipulation.

The framework supports reasoning about IoT system behaviors.

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) offers the infrastructure of the information society. It hosts smart objects that automatically collect and exchange data of various kinds, directly gathered from sensors or generated by aggregations. Suitable coordination primitives and analysis mechanisms are in order to design and reason about IoT systems, and to intercept the implied technological shifts. We address these issues from a foundational point of view. To study them, we define IoT-LySa, a process calculus endowed with a static analysis that tracks the provenance and the manipulation of IoT data, and how they flow in the system. The results of the analysis can be used by a designer to check the behaviour of smart objects, in particular to verify non-functional properties, among which security.