InDeKX: A High Efficiency Intrusion Detection and Knowledge Exchange Architecture for Secure Edge Computing Services

The recent proliferation of Internet-of-Things (IoT) enabled devices in all forms of service deployments. Additionally, the edge computing paradigm brings short-term data and computation closer to end devices, allowing services to have lower latency and faster computations. However, such IoTenabled edge services suffer from lack of security control, due to the highly distributed nature of such architectures. Moreover, incorporating centralized security controls limits the scalability of the intended decentralized nature of IoT-enabled services. In this paper, we present InDeKX, a novel hierarchical architecture for secure IoT-based edge services. The architecture incorporates a built-in Intrusion Detection System (IDS) along with knowledge propagation for security alerts within the system. We also present a comprehensive prototype implementation for InDeKX, built on top of EdgeX Foundry, an open-source platform for IoT device management, enhanced with microservices to run rule-based intrusion detection using Snort IDS. Henceforth, the prototype is utilized to perform exhaustive empirical evaluation using open-source dataset for IoT device service requests and a large array of varying network and intrusion conditions. The results illustrate high efficiency of functionality and security enforcement, depicting the feasibility of the proposed system in the real-world.