Towards a Trustworthy and Decentralised Future Internet of Things

In recent years the Internet of Things (IoT) continues to grow in both scale and importance, from approximately 16 billion devices in 2023 to a predicted 44 billion devices by 2027 [1]. This growth of the IoT o ers great opportunities to improve our understanding of and interaction with the physical world. However, in the existing IoT devices are siloed and isolated within networks and vendor infrastructure, failing to realise the opportunities of pervasive computing and resulting in a fragmented IoT environment where device vendors are forced to become cloud service providers and users are left with limited control over their devices and data. In this thesis, we present an alternative future for the IoT, identifying key challenges in the creation and operation of IoT devices and systematically addressing these to create a holistic decentralised architecture for the IoT. Beginning with a novel shared platform to support trustworthy and end-to-end secure decentralised applications (DSF), then building on this to address the need for e cient and unambiguous speci cations for describing, (locally) discovering, and interacting with IoT services to create a decentralised platform for IoT devices (DSF-IoT). We then extend this work to support constrained networks and devices while retaining the trust and privacy properties of the DSF-IoT, enabling transparent interactions with and between constrained and unconstrained devices to create the rst truly heterogeneous decentralised and zero-trust IoT. Following this we introduce decentralised registries (DSRs), expanding on prior works to enable the trustworthy global sharing and discovery of IoT services. Finally, we evaluate our decentralised approach against existing centralised architectures, highlighting the novelty and utility of our holistic and zero-trust architecture to support future IoT devices. Together our work provides an end-to-end alternative to the way we currently design and deploy IoT devices, decoupling devices from supporting infrastructure in order to free device vendors from the burden of creating and maintaining infrastructure while allowing users to control the operation of their devices and the use of their data. This work paves the way for a more trustworthy, interoperable, and human-centric IoT, aligning with the vision of pervasive computing where technology empowers people to better achieve their goals.

Name thesis:degree_name

PhD

Level thesis:degree_level

Doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Computer Systems Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

ResearchSpace@Auckland

Year dc:date.issued

2025

Author dc:creator

• Kurte, Ryan

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Salcic, Zoran
• Wang, Kevin I-Kai

• Internet of Things
• Decentralisation
• Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks
• Pervasive Computing

Statement dc:rights

• Items in ResearchSpace are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• https://researchspace.auckland.ac.nz/docs/uoa-docs/rights.htm

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/2292/73717

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:researchspace.auckland.ac.nz:2292/73717