Information security of monitoring systems for construction objects using the internet of things, wireless sensors and cloud analytics

Abstract

Monitoring systems for construction objects based on distributed wireless sensors, edge gateways and cloud analytics form a cyber-physical loop in which the substitution of telemetry directly affects the assessment of the technical condition of load-bearing structures. The contradiction is that design requirements for such systems are formulated in terms of metrological accuracy and fault tolerance, whereas information security threats shift the task from the plane of measurement reliability to the plane of data protection, and both loops are designed separately. The aim of the work is a quantitative assessment of information security risks of a three-tier monitoring system and the determination of the contribution of typical protective measures to the reduction of residual risk. Using an author's computational model of a network of 480 sensors, eight LoRaWAN gateways and a redundant cloud cluster, the assessment of threats according to the methodology of the FSTEC of Russia, the calculation of the end-to-end availability of the loop and the assessment of the resource costs of node cryptographic protection were carried out. It is established that the greatest integral risk is created by the injection of false readings with a violation of telemetry integrity, rather than by data interception with a violation of confidentiality; end-to-end encryption with integrity control and mutual authentication reduces the integral risk index by approximately two-thirds, with an increase in node power consumption of less than one percent and an increase in end-to-end latency within single-digit percentages. The obtained relationships show that the priority in the threat model shifts from confidentiality to the integrity of measurement data, and security is achieved by reconfiguring the transmission protocols already in use rather than by building a separate protection loop.