A process calculus SMrCaIT for IoT

Abstract

With the rapid popularization of smart devices, the applications and technologies of the Internet of Things (IoT) are in high demand worldwide, especially in improving development efficiency and ensuring system quality, reliability, and security. Formal methods have been successfully used to specify, verify, and analyze software and hardware systems, effectively alleviating the above problems in these systems. However, most of the existing works mainly focus on the practical applications of IoT, and there is a lack of research on modeling and analyzing IoT systems from the perspective of formal methods. In this paper, we first propose a secure mobile real‐time process calculus for specifying and reasoning about IoT systems, called SMrCaIT, which supports not only value‐passing communication but also name‐passing communication. In addition, this calculus can strictly separate process actions and mobility modeling by providing parametric mobility models. Subsequently, we present the operational semantics of this calculus, in particular, the rules on how to secure channel communication by closing the scope of a channel and handling scope extrusion. Taking vehicle ad hoc network (VANET) as a case, the application details of SMrCaIT and its operational semantics are fully demonstrated. By using the rewrite engine Real‐Time Maude, we further implement SMrCaIT and its operational semantics and verify some properties of the VANET case to indicate the effectiveness of our calculus in real‐world scenes.