IoT-based security service for the documentary chain of custody

Abstract Document and process digitalization is considered an essential factor for sustainable cities as it facilitates socio-economic interaction and contributes to climate-friendly urban environments and societies. Since digital documents are vulnerable to illegitimate modifications and forgery, there is a risk of these documents being rejected as untrustful. Therefore, to really benefit from digitalized documents and processes in sustainable urban environments and society, it is imperative to put in place means to generate trust towards these documents and processes. As computational trust and information security mutually contribute to building each other, this paper is devoted to building trust in digital documents by ensuring the chain of custody (CoC) of the produced and preserved documents. The CoC comprises a set of resources and means to ensure the properties of security required for digitalized documents and is a comprehensive concept allowing to integrate the security measures in the whole producer-to-consumer information flow, being explicitly informed to the user so that she/he can trust that available protections were put in place for their digital documents. As the CoC needs to be operative in diverse document production chains, our design considers the Industry Internet of Things (IIoT) paradigm to conceive an IIoT-Based Security Service for the documentary chain of custody – IoTSec2CoC, with a service model to identify and authorize all of its components by providing microservices for the integration of the fully distributed proactive and reactive security measures, to ensure the confidentiality, availability, and integrity of the flowing document units. This design constitutes a production chain that presents the plasticity adequate for smart sustainable cities. The proposal validation was carried out with an implemented prototype whose resilience tests show that the proposed new model increases security at all stages of the digital document processing CoC.