Resilient security monitoring system for critical edge iot networks
A Resilient Runtime-Verification Fabric for Security Monitoring of Critical Edge-IoT Infrastructure
Cryptography and SecurityDistributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Summary
Monitoring many IoT devices for security problems is hard because data can get lost or mixed up, causing false safety reports. The authors show a new system called RV-Fabric that makes sure security checks run reliably even if parts fail or the network goes silent. It tracks certainty levels in its reports, so users know if results may be incomplete or unreliable. Tests with real datasets show that RV-Fabric catches all problems, unlike older methods that often missed them.
What this means in practice
- •For industrial control operators: Continually check IoT devices in water and manufacturing plants for security faults with guaranteed event delivery and ordering despite network failures.
- •For cloud infrastructure teams: Build reliable monitoring pipelines that avoid silent data loss and provide clear alert statuses during overload or crashes.
Authors
Nikolaos Kekatos, Marinelio Chintri, Panagiotis Katsaros, Alexios Lekidis, Tom Nianios, Ioannis Seitoglou, Anastasios Temperekidis, Stylianos Basagiannis
Abstract
Protecting critical infrastructure increasingly depends on continuously verifying large IoT fleets against formal security specifications at runtime. Yet the runtime-verification (RV) pipelines proposed for this task are typically single-host prototypes whose monitors read a shared log file, with no resilience to the failures such deployments incur: a crash or overload silently drops events, clock skew corrupts the ordering metric monitors require, a time-triggered "node has gone silent" property cannot fire when the network itself falls silent, and one slow consumer stalls the pipeline. Each failure is silent: the monitor keeps emitting verdicts over a corrupted view. We present RV-Fabric, a resilient delivery layer that carries the hierarchy over two brokers (MQTT for device ingest, a durable stream broker for backend delivery) and re-establishes five continuity guarantees: durable delivery under crashes, a trusted event order, progress under total silence, consumer isolation and flow control under bounded overload, each an invariant conditioned on broker durability. Above the transport, RV-Fabric makes evidence completeness part of runtime-verification semantics: every verdict carries a status (sound, degraded, incomplete or unavailable) derived from delivery gaps, retention pressure and liveness, so an incomplete stream cannot yield an unqualified all-clear. Under controlled fault injection on a containerised testbed, measured against a fault-free oracle using the real MonPoly engine, the shared-log baseline misses six of seven injected incidents, reporting each as an unqualified all-clear, whereas RV-Fabric preserves all seven; removing a delivery mechanism reintroduces silent loss, removing isolation costs only timeliness. Two published critical-infrastructure datasets, water-SCADA and IoT/IIoT, replay end-to-end.