Biblio

Nowadays Osmotic Computing is emerging as one of the paradigms used to guarantee the Cloud Continuum, and this popularity is strictly related to the capacity to embrace inside it some hot topics like containers, microservices, orchestration and Function as a Service (FaaS). The Osmotic principle is quite simple, it aims to create a federated heterogeneous infrastructure, where an application's components can smoothly move following a concentration rule. In this work, we aim to solve two big constraints of Osmotic Computing related to the incapacity to manage dynamic access rules for accessing the applications inside the Osmotic Infrastructure and the incapacity to keep alive and secure the access to these applications even in presence of network disconnections. For overcoming these limits we designed and implemented a new Osmotic component, that acts as an eventually consistent distributed peer to peer access management system. This new component is used to keep a local Identity and Access Manager (IAM) that permits at any time to access the resource available in an Osmotic node and to update the access rules that allow or deny access to hosted applications. This component has been already integrated inside a Kubernetes based Osmotic Infrastructure and we presented two typical use cases where it can be exploited.

The Extended Triple Diffie-Hellman (X3DH) protocol has been used for years as the basis of secure communication establishment among parties (i.e, humans and devices) over the Internet. However, such a protocol has several limits. It is typically based on a single trust third-party server that represents a single point of failure (SPoF) being consequently exposed to well- known Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks. In order to address such a limit, several solutions have been proposed so far that are often cost expensive and difficult to be maintained. The objective of this paper is to propose a BlockChain-Based X3DH (BCB-X3DH) protocol that allows eliminating such a SPoF, also simplifying its maintenance. Specifically, it combines the well- known X3DH security mechanisms with the intrinsic features of data non-repudiation and immutability that are typical of Smart Contracts. Furthermore, different implementation approaches are discussed to suits both human-to-human and device-to-device scenarios. Experiments compared the performance of both X3DH and BCB-X3DH.