VOSySIoT, IoT Mixed-critical Secure Edge

Virtual Open Systems at IoT Solutions World Congress 2018, Barcelona

This video demo showcases the smart home VOSySIoT software stack presented by Virtual Open Systems at the IoT Solutions World Congress 2018, Barcelona, Spain. VOSySIoT is a security and IoT software stack product that runs on IoT gateways and allows to execute real-time, security and safety workloads together with standard applications. Thanks to its certified virtualization software VOSySmonitor, it enables IoT Edge consolidation, lowers infrastructure costs in a flexible and modular way. In fact, it's possible to combine VOSySIoT with open source IoT Gateway software stacks (e.g., Eclipse Kura, but any other as well), to provide an end-to-end IoT solution for mixed-critical IoT environments such as smart metering, smart building, smart cities, industry 4.0 (IIoT), low to high voltage power breakers, automotive , etc.

VOSySIoT Smart Home Use Case

VOSySIoT is designed for scenarios where both critical and non critical sensors/actuators are part of the same IoT network, such as for instance a smart home equipped with a smart alarm controlled by a presence sensor. This demonstration is about a prototype of a VOSySIoT powered smart home that includes a critical proximity sensor directly connected to the smart alarm. In particular, thanks to VOSySIoT, this proximity sensor can be accessed by standard dashboards or cloud platforms as expected. However, even in the case the Linux IoT Gateway software stack crashes, the proximity sensor and the related alarm will continue detecting intruders in the house and activating the alarm in real-time. Similarly, if the IoT Gateway software stack gets attacked, VOSySIoT is able to detect an attack and restore the system to a previous safe working condition.

More in detail, the IoT gateway running VOSySIoT is an ARMv8-based M3 board. In order to provide the right level of security and isolation for the proximity sensor, the IoT gateway system is partitioned in this way:

• A real-time OS (FreeRTOS) runs the critical tasks, gets the data from the proximity sensor and triggers a buzzer if needed. It constantly monitors the activity of Linux, and creates virtual sensors that are able to detect failures in Linux or in the IoT stack.
• A Linux partition (non-critical) executes an IoT stack which gets data from the sensors and forwards it to a cloud-based backend system. The cloud infrastructure is used to show a dashboard monitoring the different metrics of the IoT gateway.