RERUM: Building a reliable IoT upon privacy- and security- enabled smart objects

The Internet of Things (IoT) provides a platform for the interconnection of a plethora of smart objects. It has been widely accepted for providing Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) applications in many “smart” environments, such as cities, buildings, metering, and even agriculture. For several reasons though such applications have yet to achieve wide adoption; a major hurdle is the lack of user trust in the IoT and its role in everyday activities. RERUM, a recently started FP7 European Union project. aims to develop a framework which will allow IoT applications to consider security and privacy mechanisms early in their design phase, ensuring a configurable balance between reliability (requiring secure, trustworthy and precise data) and privacy (requiring data minimization for private information, like location). The RERUM framework will comprise an architecture, built upon novel network protocols and interfaces as well as the design of smart objects hardware. To highlight the challenges and evaluate the framework, RERUM will employ several Smart City application scenarios, which will be deployed and evaluated in real-world testbeds in two Smart Cities participating in the project. Here we detail the key technologies RERUM will investigate over the coming three years to reach its vision for IoT security, privacy and trust.