A lightweight cyber security framework with context-awareness for pervasive computing environments

Abstract Internet of things (IoT) plays a key role in enabling smart sustainable cities. Pervasive computing over the IoT platform makes life more convenient by embedding sensors based on context-aware computing devices in the physical environment for the ubiquitous availability of computing resources. The sensors gather contextual information from the physical world and transmit it to receivers as per requirements or in case of environmental changes, such as temperature and humidity. However, the combination of dynamic operation and the need to handle sensitive and private data make the pervasive computing environment and IoT devices vulnerable to numerous attacks. Smart environments require a maximum level of safety assurance, such as trusted context producers and customers, which should protect sensitive information from exposure or monitoring. This paper discusses the major cyber threats in smart environments and proposes a novel lightweight security framework that authenticates and maintains the context providers and receivers. The cloud environment is adopted for user authentication at the user layer to implement access control and role assignment. Finally, the proposed security framework is implemented in the IBM cloud platform with six devices to evaluate its efficiency, sustainability, and secure communication.