Industrial Internet of Things applications are distributed Cyber-Physical systems with long life-cycles, with strict security requirements, that are being pervasively adopted with the proliferation of Industry 4.0. A fundamental aspect of security, in such applications, is a trustworthy identity to avoid impersonation attacks. Classical approaches for identity management usually rely on some variation of a centralized system, either based in a Public Key Infrastructure or in a central identity database. These solutions have some well-known drawbacks, notably the single point of failure in the central node and the limited scalability. Self-Sovereign Identity is a novel paradigm for digital identity allowing individuals and devices to fully own and manage their digital identities. According to this paradigm, identity artifacts can be stored by their owners and freely presented whenever a transaction requires some proof of identity, without relying on a central entity. This paper provides a review and discussion of the use-cases, technologies, and challenges that Self-Sovereign Identity faces in the context of Industrial Internet of Things’ applications. The potential advantages of using this new paradigm are discussed in detail, together with the key challenges that still need to be addressed.

The popularity of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Industrial IoT (IIoT) has caused a rapid increase in connected entities and exposed its lack of adequate Identity Management (IdM). Traditional IdM systems are highly dependent on central authorities; any failure can potentially compromise the entire system. To eliminate the drawback of central authorities and evolve IdM systems to meet increasingly stringent security requirements, the Decentralized Identification approach has been proposed. This approach often relies on blockchain technology to provide a secure and tamper-proof method of managing and verifying identities. Therefore, this article investigates the capabilities of blockchain-based decentralized identification for the IoT domain, with an emphasis on the heterogeneity of online devices. It describes a number of features and specifications of decentralized identification with a specific focus on Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI), a model in which entities own their identities. The article concludes with a discussion of technical aspects as well as potential obstacles and constraints to the implementation of decentralized identification in the context of the Internet of Things.

The extensive use of smartphones combined with the rise in the Internet of Things adoption has fostered the emergence of several use-cases to provide added comfort and peace of mind in our everyday life. Public transportation payment in large cities, where frequent commuters and generic users often spend a significant amount of time buying and validating tickets, can become a cumbersome process. This paper presents the design and implementation of a seamless payment system named IOTApass, which handles payments through the usage of a smartphone and a distributed ledger technology to avoid the limitations of centralized payment solutions. The IOTApass enables a user to seamlessly pay for public transports using a smartphone App without explicit (user) interface interactions, thus reducing payment complexity. Besides describing the architecture, operation, and implementation of IOTApass, the paper documents its experimental validation and confirms its feasibility.

5-th generation of mobile networks (5G) speeds up the data rate, serves more users, and improves the support for machine-to-machine communication. This paper investigates the impact of different communication technologies on the performance of UGVs (Unmanned Ground Vehicle). Specifically, we study the UGV energy consumption and decision time when it replaces the previous generation of cellular networks with 5G. Then, we propose a new test bed to extensively evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art communication technologies as well as 5G using several lab tests. Our extensive experiments, employing the proposed setting, show while using 3G takes more than 6 seconds to make a decision, using 5G, instead, decreases the decision time to less than 0.5 seconds.