An IoT middleware for enhanced security and privacy: the RERUM approach

The Internet of Things (IoT) presents itself as a promising set of key technologies to provide advanced smart applications. IoT has become a major trend lately and smart solutions can be found in a large variety of products. Since it provides a flexible and easy way to gather data from huge numbers of devices and exploit them to provide new applications, it has become a central research area lately. However, due to the fact that IoT aims to interconnect millions of constrained devices that are monitoring the everyday life of people, acting upon physical objects around them, the security and privacy challenges are huge. Nevertheless, only lately the research focus has been on security and privacy solutions. Many solutions and IoT frameworks have only a minimum set of security, which is a basic access control. The EU FP7 project RERUM has a main focus on designing an IoT architecture based on the concepts of Security and Privacy by design. A central part of RERUM is the implementation of a middleware layer that provides extra functionalities for improved security and privacy. This work, presents the main elements of the RERUM middleware, which is based on the widely accepted OpenIoT middleware.