José Cecílio, André Souto, Alan Oliveira de Sá, António Casimiro, LASIGE Integrated Researchers, and João Garcia, Maria G. Silva, LASIGE Researchers, published the paper “Decentralized architecture for ensuring trust and secure handoffs in dynamic IoT networks” in the top 10% journal Computers & Security (Elsevier). Georg Jäger, from the Institute of Computer Science at TU Bergakademie Freiberg, Freiberg, Germany, co-authored the paper. This research addresses the growing need for secure and trustworthy data processing in Internet of Things (IoT) environments, particularly in scenarios involving mobile devices that need to continuously connect to different Edge Servers.

The proposed work introduces a decentralised architecture that enables secure data delivery to applications while minimising communication overhead and ensuring trustworthy handovers between Edge Servers. A key aspect of the architecture is the continuous verification of Edge Server integrity through an external verifier service, protecting IoT applications from compromised or malicious servers. To demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed architecture, the researchers implemented two prototypes using different consensus technologies and evaluated them under realistic conditions. The first prototype, based on BFT-SMaRt, achieved lower latency and higher throughput, but relies on dedicated infrastructure and does not provide global auditability. The second prototype, based on an existing blockchain network, provides decentralization and complete auditability without requiring proprietary infrastructure, although with higher latency. The experimental results demonstrate that both approaches provide strong security guarantees while exposing different trade-offs between performance and transparency. Overall, the results validate the suitability of the proposed architecture for secure and dynamic IoT-Edge environments.

The paper is available here.