A Secure Interoperability Framework for Heterogeneous Internet of Things Devices in Intelligent Transportation Systems

Abstract

The rapid deployment of diverse types of IoT devices throughout ITS has led to major obstacles concerning data interoperability and the security of networks that support these devices. Multi-layer models traditionally are subject to a high computational latency and to incompatibility in protocol translation. The Secure Interoperability Framework (SIF) is a novel proposed framework for supporting secure interoperability among multiple communications protocols at the network edge, such as MQTT, CoAP and REST, through the employment of the newly-developed Secure Semantic Translation (SST) algorithm. The proposed experimental design will utilize both simulation-based experimental designs through the network simulator NS-3 and real-world vehicle mobility data from the CRAWDAD database to evaluate the framework's performance with 'real-world' traffic in an urban environment. Results show that the SIF optimizes the Security-Interoperability trade-off substantially, as evidenced by a quantitative analysis that demonstrates a 33% improvement in end-to-end latency when compared to current models, with an average processing delay of 74 ms, well within the safety-critical threshold for vehicular communications. In addition, the framework demonstrated a high Interoperability Success Rate (ISR) of 96.8% and a Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) of 94.2%. Statistical validation through a T-test verified the statistical significance of the performance improvements with a  p-value < 0.001. Further, the inclusion of lightweight encryption techniques ensures strong protection, yielding a 91.5% attack detection rate with only a small security overhead of 8%. The findings of this study suggest that through the use of the SST algorithm, a highly scalable and secure method has been achieved for deploying a heterogeneous ITS environment. Finally, there are plans for using machine learning approaches to automate the protocol mapping process in a future 6G-enabled V2X environment.