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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - ENACT (Development, Operation, and Quality Assurance of Trustworthy Smart IoT Systems)

Teaser

Summary

The overall research question behind the ENACT project is how to develop and operate software for the next generation IoT systems, which realize distributed and coordinated intelligence among large scale resources with closed loop from sensing to actuation. The functioning and correctness of such systems is critical, and aspects related to trustworthiness are of paramount importance. The vision of such next generation trustworthy smart IoT systems (SIS) relies on advanced software services running across the IoT, Edge and Cloud spaces, bringing the required intelligence to the devices and assuring the trustworthiness of the whole system. To enable the agile and continuous delivery of SIS is the key factor for the success of SIS application providers in order to keep competitive in the rapidly changing market. It is also fundamental to ensure the trustworthiness of SIS: In the world of IoT, new vulnerabilities keep emerging, and fast and continuous patching is a key approach to reducing the time that SIS are exposed to the risk of such vulnerabilities being exploited.

Achieving trustworthy SIS is important not only to the IoT industry, but also to the society in general. By 2020, Gartner envisions that 21 billion IoT endpoints will be in use, representing great business opportunities for the entire ecosystem. In the meantime, IoT has infiltrated almost every aspect of modern living, significantly increasing the quality of our everyday lives, and any risk of trustworthiness in IoT systems may have a huge societal impact.

The overall goal of the ENACT project is to provide a novel way of developing and operating software for IoT, by enabling DevOps in the realm of trustworthy smart IoT systems. DevOps is a recent software development practice that encourages developers to frequently commit changes, and continuously place them in production. Despite its wide adoption in cloud computing, DevOps for IoT is still is still in its infancy. The state of the art on DevOps methods and tools relies heavily on the centralized, predictable and homogeneous resources to achieve fully automated deployment and operation, however, IoT breaks these assumptions.

ENACT will investigate and experiment with the new concept, around: (i) New practices: Three IoT solution providers will transform their daily development practice gradually into DevOps ; (ii) New techniques and tools: Researchers will collaborate to attack the key challenges that hinder the implementation of this practice (iii) New usages: All partner together will promote the acceptance of the new concept in the industry, and facilitate the adoption of the practices and tools by external IoT solution providers.

Work performed

In the first period, the ENACT consortium focused on (i) refining the challenges and requirements to achieve DevOps for trustworthy SIS based on three use cases, and then addressing them by the design and experiment of novel technologies; (ii) implementing these technologies into prototype tools and the ENACT framework; and (iii) promoting the awareness and adoption of both the concept and the tools.

The project started with the definition of three use cases from the Intelligent Transportation, Smart Buildings and eHealth including their motivation as well as their business and technical requirements. Based on the use cases, the technical research and development activities of ENACT focused on addressing the key challenges that hinder the adoption of DevOps for trustworthy SIS: (i) the continuous delivery of trustworthy SIS, (ii) the agile operation of trustworthy SIS, (iii) and the trustworthiness mechanisms. The technical activities yield 10 ENACT tools. By the end of the Period 1, every tool has gone through the analysis of the relevant state of the art and the early design of its major features. In addition, first demonstrable prototype of each tool has been delivered. Altogether, the tools compose the loosely coupled ENACT framework meaning they can be seamlessly integrated with each other or independently picked in the framework and integrated with off-the-shelf IoT and DevOps solutions.

The ENACT consortium is active in disseminating the project and the latest results. The consortium follows the open source model. The tools are hosted in open source repositories, and SINTEF, on behalf of the consortium, is working together with OW2, an open source organization, to promote the external usage of the project results. The partners also follow up with their own exploitation plans. In particular, Evidian is planning to integrate part of the result from ENACT to into their product portfolio, and people from CA Technologies, a terminated ENACT partner, created a startup company with part of the ENACT result.

Final results

ENACT as a whole goes beyond the state of the art. DevOps for trustworthy SIS is still a new concept and the adoption of the DevOps principles by IoT providers is still in its infancy. The ENACT use case providers are among the pioneers to actually transfer their daily development and operation practices according to the DevOps principles. ENACT provides a core reference DevOps toolchain to support the DevOps life-cycle for trustworthy SIS. The research behind these tools also advances the state of the art of their relevant domains, in different ways. In particular, for the continuous delivery of trustworthy SIS, we provide the first complete solution of automatic software deployment across Cloud, Edge and IoT devices, according to our systematic literature review; We introduce the continuous risk management into the DevOps loops of IoT systems, considering privacy and security issues. For the agile operation of trustworthy SIS, our initial experiment aims at raising the automation of IoT operation into the next level, by introducing online learning into the decision loop. For the trustworthy mechanisms, we are a pioneer in supporting device-to-device authentication, with a context-aware control of the access rights. The research has led to 17 scientific publications in the first period and more will appear in the coming months.

In the second period, we will finalize the ENACT tools. Meanwhile, they will be exploited and validated in our use cases as planned at the beginning of the project. Our targets towards the end of the project are two-fold: On the technology side, we will provide the final ENACT tools that achieve both the objectives as defined in the Description of Action and the overall designs and requirements as defined in the first technical deliverables. We will also finalize a ready-to-use open source ENACT DevOps framework, together with a comprehensive user guide for external IoT teams to pick the proper tools and build their own DevOps toolchain. On the use case side, the use case providers will finish the transformation and start the full speed DevOps practice in their daily development. In addition, the use cases will yield a final evaluation report to assess the effect of applying ENACT tools on these use cases. The evaluation report also serves as a complementary document to the user guide.