DRMF: A Distributed Resource Management Framework for Industry 4.0 Environments

Abstract

While smart factories are becoming widely recognized as a fundamental concept of Industry 4.0, their implementation has posed several challenges insofar that they generate, process, and exchange vast amounts of security critical and privacy sensitive data, which makes them attractive targets of attacks and unauthorized access. Security requirements in such scenario include integrity, confidentiality, traceability and notarization of exchanged data in the one hand plus access control, privacy and trust in the other one. In this context, we design a distributed resource management framework using the emerging smart contracts technology for Industry 4.0 applications and more specifically for smart factories environments. This last, named DRMF, utilizes three Ethereum smart contracts specifically a Governance Contract (GC), an Access Contract (AC) and a Lookup Contract (LC) that are respectively responsible for the registration of new joining entities as well as those requesting consensus partaking permissions, second the dynamic access authorization and third the mapping between the required services and contracts ensuring their management. Using the blockchain technology, this framework is expected to achieve distributed, flexible, verifiable and trustworthy access control in addition to a transparent, traceable and notarized resource usage and sharing. Results from a real implementation plus performance evaluation prove the proposed concept and demonstrate its feasibility.

An Event-B Based Approach for Formal Modelling and Verification of Smart Contracts

“…We remind here that sharing such resources among several parties collaborating and working all together and especially that could not always have a strong confidence established in advance could raise several problems mainly related to the management and the access made over common resources that should be in most time fully distributed, secure, traceable and notarized. In an attempt to resolve such challenges, we have used in our previous proposal [3], blockchain based smart contracts technology in order to keep a living document trace about the flow of resources being shared among collaborating parties while integrating the OrBAC access control model to implement distributed, dynamic and secure resource access authorization. To do so, a smart contract named Access Contract (AC) was developed where the OrBAC access control model was integrated within a distributed ledger to express access control policies and to manage access authorization made over shared resources.…”

“…V-C and then (ii) checking that both the presented implementation and design of the smart contract verifies well some required typing and safety properties. More details about the proposed framework are provided in our previous work [3]. As a first attempt to validate the Event-B models, we have applied these last to a simplified real example derived from the use case study illustrated in Section.…”

“…Therefore a verification of the formal model is conducted using a model checking tool along which expected safety properties are formalized, validated and judged to be satisfied or unsatisfied. The described approach of this proposal is applied to a use case application that has been the subject of a previous work, called Distributed Resource Management Framework for Industry 4.0 environments (DRMF) [3]. The rest of this paper is organized as follows.…”

A Systematic Survey of Industrial Internet of Things Security: Requirements and Fog Computing Opportunities

“…[104] also propose a blockchain system, identifying the need for dynamic access control and distributed governance. They utilize smart contracts and leverage the non-repudiation and integrity inherent to blockchain systems to propose a resource management framework, with fine-grained AC built in.…”