The security of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) systems is a challenge that needs to be addressed immediately, as the increasing use of new communication paradigms and the abundant use of sensors opens up new opportunities to compromise these types of systems. In this sense, technologies such as Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) and Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) become crucial for adding new layers of security to IIoT systems, especially to edge nodes that incorporate sensors and perform continuous measurements. These technologies, coupled with new communication paradigms such as Blockchain, offer a high reliability, robustness and good interoperability between them. This paper proposes the design of a secure sensor incorporating the above mentioned technologies—HSMs and a TEE—in a hardware device based on a dual-core architecture. Through this combination of technologies, one of the cores collects the data extracted by the sensors and implements the security mechanisms to guarantee the integrity of these data, while the remaining core is responsible for sending these data through the appropriate communication protocol. This proposed approach fits into the Blockchain networks, which act as an Oracle. Finally, to illustrate the application of this concept, a use case applied to wine logistics is described, where this secure sensor is integrated into a Blockchain that collects data from the storage and transport of barrels, and a performance evaluation of the implemented prototype is provided.
Microservice architectures exploit container-based virtualized services, which rarely use hardware-based cryptography. A trusted platform module (TPM) offers a hardware root for trust in services that makes use of cryptographic operations. The virtualization of this hardware module offers high usability for other types of service that require TPM functionalities. This paper proposes the design of TPM virtualization in a container. To ensure integrity, different mechanisms, such as attestation and sealing, have been developed for the binaries and libraries stored in the container volumes. Through a REST API, the container offers the functionalities of a TPM, such as key generation and signing. To prevent unauthorized access to the container, this article proposes an authentication mechanism based on tokens issued by the Cognito Amazon Web Service. As a proof of concept and applicability in industry, a use case for electric vehicle charging stations using a microservice-based architecture is proposed. Using the EOS.IO blockchain to maintain a copy of the data, the virtualized TPM microservice provides the cryptographic operations necessary for blockchain transactions. Through a two-factor authentication mechanism, users can access the data. This scenario shows the potential of using blockchain technologies in microservice-based architectures, where microservices such as the virtualized TPM fill a security gap in these architectures.
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