Hello
Google has asked for proposals regarding the "Open Web of Things", and they are
interested in funding interesting projects (500.000-800.000 USD is it is a group of
researchers at a university, or 50.000-150.000 USD if it is a private investigator). If
you have not seen it:
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B3B49KOvpS8TbnRlcDVDOTdlYmc/edit
They have five categories:
1) Human-Computer Interaction
2) Privacy & Security
3) Systems & Protocols
Since we are strong within these areas, we can offer help to mount such projects. (The
grants go only to the university involved.) What we can do:
* Help with project ideas.
* Assist in the technical description of the project.
* Provide technology and a platform for rapid application development for IoT.
* Act as mentors.
* Help with evaluating the project.
What we cannot do is help with the actual development, nor in the description of the
results, or hardware for the project. (Such things need to be covered by the grant.)
The proposals (which can be various) have to be sent before the 21st of January 2015. Here
comes a few proposals of projects that can be done, and that fall within what they are
looking for:
Securing the Life Cycle for things and provisioning for Internet of Things using XMPP
The majority of solutions for the IoT are manually configured. Very few solutions exist
where the end user can buy a product designed for massive use in a retail store, connect
it, and then use it on the Internet in a secure manner.
We have made a proposal of a distributed architecture that takes the entire life cycle of
an IoT product into account, designed for massive scale, from production, sales,
installation, creation of identities, configuration, authorization, change of ownership
and decommissioning, in a secure and scalable way, without losing real-time communication
capabilities. The architecture also supports distributed transactions, protects
information (the owners of the things are also owners of all its data and control who can
access it and do what with it.)
You can find more information about the control of a things life cycle here:
https://www.thingk.me/Provisioning/Papers/Securing%20the%20Life%20Cycle%20o…
More information about provisioning of things (who can access what things, and
read/control what data):
https://www.thingk.me/Provisioning/Papers/Security%20in%20IoT%20using%20Del…
More details:
https://www.thingk.me/Provisioning/Api.xml
The project could include:
* Implementation of the indicated protocols for use in things. (Open source code
exist on GitHub, for reference:
https://github.com/Clayster/Learning-IoT-XMPP)
* Implementation of the indicated protocols for servers, or use of existing
servers. (The thingk.me platform already supports them)
* Define "normal use"
* Measure efficiency of different use cases.
* Simulate large volumes of things, and different distributions of servers.
* Security analysis.
* Proposal of extensions.
Extension of the Semantic Web to Peer-to-Peer-like Sensor Networks based on XMPP
One of the problems with the Semantic Web, or the Web of Things, is the problem of
security and distributed transactions using the HTTP protocol. In the traditional web, the
web servers are centralized, and security is managed on the same web servers. For the Web
of Things, each sensor has the possibility to become a small web server. How do you manage
security in a similar distributed environment? HTTP does not have any good solutions by
itself, except it supports the use of directory services (which are designed for use
within intranets and not on the global Internet). The same happens for the Semantic Web or
with SPARQL. Another problem is how to bypass firewalls. Normally, sensors are installed
in protected environments, behind firewalls. This This prohibits access to the sensor
directly from outside of the firewall, unless holes are punched in the firewall.
To resolve this, most solutions store all information centrally. This later permits the
management of security to that centralized location. But, by doing this, you lose the
local control and the real-time communication with the devices, something that prohibits
many different types of applications, and limits the scalability of the implemented
solutions. Furthermore, one has to store much more data than what would otherwise be
necessary, simply to solve the problem of latency (since there is no connection that
permits communication in real-time).
Another manner to solve this problem, is to use another transport for HTTP than TCP, for
example XMPP. This protocol (standardized by the IETF, like HTTP) gives all participants a
global identity, permits authorization of messages and, because of this, also distributed
transactions, real-time communication, it bypasses firewalls in a secure manner, and is
scalable to many billions of devices (today, already billions of devices are using it).
More information can be found here:
https://www.thingk.me/Provisioning/Papers/Extending%20the%20Semantic%20Web%…
The project could include:
* Implementation of the HTTP over XMPP protocol, and the HTTPX URI scheme, as
plug-ins to browsers (Mozilla, Chromium), web servers (Apache), and perhaps media players
(VLC)
* Implementation of the same into a public SPARQL endpoint (or SPARQL database),
or use an existing one. (Clayster platform already supports it)
* Implementation of an ontology for the Internet of Things.
* Measurement of efficiency.
* Simulation of huge networks.
* Security analysis.
* Proposal of extensions.
BIOTIC
The BIOTIC protocol (Binary Internet Of Things Interoperable Communication) proposes to
solve many of the problems that exist today for the internet of things, and it also
proposes several new innovative solutions. To learn more, look at the documents published
here:
http://biotic-community.tumblr.com/
This document describes the reason for creating and using the protocol:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3064761/Biotic%20-%20Executive%20Summar…
<https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3064761/Biotic%20-%20Executive%20Summary.pdf%20>
This document describes the protocol, including new innovative communication patterns:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3064761/Biotic%20-%20Protocol%20v1.0.pd…
The project could include:
* Implementation of BIOTIC-servers, which can be installed in home gateways, on
routers or publicly on the Internet.
* Tiny implementations for microcontrollers
* Measurement of efficiency.
* Simulation of huge networks.
* Security analysis.
* Proposal of extensions.
If there are any interested parties, I propose that we schedule a meeting to talk about
this, and how we can advance to be able to send one or more proposals before the indicated
end date.
If you know any other researchers that could be interested, please resend this email to
them.
Best regards,
Peter Waher