The "Internet of Things" is a great thing when everything works smoothly and flawlessly. From the "smart city" to "autonomous driving" and the "factory of the future", nothing works without digital systems whose job it is to make interactive processes more efficient. To make such IoT systems - the abbreviation stands for "Internet of Things" - more robust against attacks and less prone to errors, the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) is funding a project at the universities of Ulm and Passau with a total of 1.5 million euros. The Passau-based software and IT consultancy Innowerk-IT and the Stuttgart-based innovation service provider bwcon are involved as industrial partners. Sorrir, as the project is called, focuses on the development of a self-organizing, resilient execution platform for IoT services.

"The Internet of Things is becoming more and more pervasive in our private lives, and it is also gaining massive importance in business, medicine and the public sphere. With the increasing social relevance of IoT systems, the need for reliability and resilience is also growing," explains project coordinator Dr Jörg Domaschka, Group Leader at the Institute for Organization and Management of Information Systems at Ulm University.

"Nobody wants to live with an automated vehicle that can be hacked or in a smart city with a disrupted energy supply and unreliable traffic management systems. We need robust IoT systems for this," explains Professor Hans Reiser, who holds a junior professorship for security in information systems at the University of Passau. IoT-based control systems for industrial production or supply processes are no less sensitive - keyword Industry 4.0.

Securing IoT infrastructure against disruptions and attacks
Sorrir aims to make the Internet of Things more reliable and also more secure. More specifically, the project is about making the IoT infrastructure more robust against disruptions and attacks. The aim is to achieve greater resilience, as the technical term goes. On the one hand, existing software tools that have proven themselves as resilience mechanisms are bundled in a library. On the other hand, the aim is to develop an independent programming model and a resilient execution environment.

"The special thing about our project is that we want to make it possible for the resilience mechanisms to be linked to the application not only during installation, but even during operation," says Professor Franz Hauck from the Institute of Distributed Systems, who is involved in Sorir with his working group. The Ulm researchers also include scientists from the Institute of Software Engineering and Programming Languages, which is headed by Professor Matthias Tichy.

Front row from left: Stefan Dambeck (Innowerk-IT GmbH), Gerhard Habiger (University of Ulm), Franz Hauck (University of Ulm), David Mödinger (University of Ulm) Middle row from left: Hans Reiser (University of Passau), Jörg Domaschka (University of Ulm), Philipp Eichhammer (University of Passau), Matthias Dangl (Innowerk-IT GmbH).Hans Reiser (University of Passau), Jörg Domaschka (University of Ulm), Philipp Eichhammer (University of Passau), Matthias Dangl (Innowerk-IT GmbH) Back row from left: - Christian Berger (University of Passau), Matthias Tichy (University of Ulm), Jakob Pietron (University of Ulm), Stefan Wesner (University of Ulm) © Gerhard Habiger / University of Ulm

Thanks to the dynamic linking, any protective measures or resilience mechanisms can be activated or deactivated in a targeted manner. The self-organizing execution platform that the research team wants to develop ensures maximum flexibility in the application: components can be added, removed, moved or updated as required. In addition, the execution environment can be adapted at any time and it is possible to reconfigure the software-based protection mechanisms to suit the situation.

Parking space management application example
One of the practical application examples chosen by the scientists is parking space management. This is an area that is one of the central challenges of the smart city in the context of mobility, traffic space utilization and energy supply. The partner for the practical test is the city of Ulm, which is one of four winning cities in Baden-Württemberg in the federal competition "City of the Future 2030". There are later plans to extend the resilience concept to the areas of e-health and Industry 4.0.

The Sorrir research project not only addresses society's growing need for security and reliability, but also responds to technical trends in the Internet of Things. This is because IoT systems are becoming ever larger and more complex, and the tasks are becoming ever more demanding. In addition, such systems are now much more closely integrated into critical infrastructures and cloud-based solutions are being used more frequently due to the growing demand for computing capacity.

Added to this are generally shorter development cycles in the software sector and an increasing diversity of installed hardware such as sensors and actuators. "This means that as society's dependence on the Internet of Things increases, the programmability of the underlying IoT systems becomes more difficult," says project manager Domaschka, explaining the basic problem.

Together with IT experts from the University of Passau and the two partner companies, the computer scientists and engineers from Ulm are now working on making the Sorrir platform as robust as possible against both hardware and software failures. It should also be able to tolerate disrupted transmission networks and cloud service failures and be able to effectively fend off targeted attacks from outside. "With our research project, we want to make the work of software developers easier so that they can concentrate on their core task, the application logic, in future," say the researchers. as