Implementation of an information assurance framework for the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is composed of communicating devices and systems. For critical systems information assurance (IA) concerns need to be addressed. An IA framework provides a structured approach aligned to the characteristics and information states of a chosen IA model to assist designers and developers. The purpose of this paper is to present a prototype software implementation of the IA framework in our previous work. Related work is reviewed, and the components of that framework are modeled and implemented using open-source software tools. Traditional approaches to information assurance are challenged by the complexity of IoT systems and the need for a shared information assurance practice. The proposed implementation addresses the complexity of IoT systems, by utilizing their modularity, and supports a common IA practice for IoT systems. Finally, the models of the IA framework components are validated, by illustrating their application for transportation, healthcare, and sports medicine use cases. The components of the IA framework for IoT include the chosen IA model, IoT information flow, report generation and overall progress metric. The research question: how can the IA framework process be supported in an IA software tool? The implementation prototype presented here uses Python 3.11 for the codebase, Visual Python for the graphic user interface (GUI), and JSON schema for the storage and retrieval of the IA analyses. The main novelty of this work is the integration of the designer’s choice of IA model into a tool that guides the designer throughout its application to an IoT system.