A Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach for Security-Aware Service Acquisition in IoT

The novel Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm is composed of a growing number of heterogeneous smart objects and services that are transforming architectures and applications, increasing systems' complexity, and the need for reliability and autonomy. In this context, both smart objects and services are often provided by third parties which do not give full transparency regarding the security and privacy of the features offered. Although machine-based Service Level Agreements (SLA) have been recently leveraged to establish and share policies in Cloud-based scenarios, and also in the IoT context, the issue of making end users aware of the overall system security levels and the fulfillment of their privacy requirements through the provision of the requested service remains a challenging task. To tackle this problem, we propose a complete framework that defines suitable levels of privacy and security requirements in the acquisition of services in IoT, according to the user needs. Through the use of a Reinforcement Learning based solution, a user agent, inside the environment, is trained to choose the best smart objects granting access to the target services. Moreover, the solution is designed to guarantee deadline requirements and user security and privacy needs. Finally, to evaluate the correctness and the performance of the proposed approach we illustrate an extensive experimental analysis.