The Internet is an open global network, which is fantastic, but being a global open network opens up problems with security, as open also means that an attack on an Internet service can come from anywhere.
The basis of Internet services is a client-server architecture, and servers are inherently automated in that monitoring is abstracted from the hardware and software through interfaces. A minimum of one server hosts the service, and access is provided openly or through password protection.
An Online Private Garden (OP Garden) technology such as the IoE Eden disrupts this concept by using Device Inclusiveness. What used to be a client in a client/server setup now becomes included in the interconnected device pool, where service information is available system-wide. All devices have access to the service information.
An OP Garden service consists of a secure pool of devices that communicates over public, private key protected connections and autonomously nominates workflow paths.
Each device in an OP Garden service knows of each other and shares a blockchain; the blockchain keeps track of all data movements and verifies that data received comes from another trusted node on the blockchain. The data movement checksums saved in the blockchain also create the possibility of calculating if a device node deviates from its assigned task. This is important as any node that deviates should be isolated and examined as it could be infected by malware, or the hardware can be erroneous.
An OP Garden backbone device only communicates over one TCP/IP port. All other access to the device has been removed at an OS level; this provides extreme security, as not only does it remove attack vectors. It creates a second layer of malware detection, as the malware will try to contact its Command and Control center on ports that are not opened but are still monitored.
Tasks can scale OP Garden services; for example, you have three layers, the intersection layer, the knowledge layer, and the decision layer, for city traffic routing.
The intersection layer is where all the cameras and sensors reside; let’s say that in our example, there are 16 HD cameras per intersection producing 1080p quality video streams at 1 Mb/s, so each intersection is 16 megabits of data per second.
The information refined from the raw data is event-based, in the sense that if there is no traffic, there are no events. So not moving all this data to a server makes sense in the world; refining the data into information on a local OP Garden cluster where it can be requested for use does make sense. Sustainable through Local Computing. So instead of moving data from an IoT installation to the cloud for computing, for Private Edge Gardens, local IoT devices work as a cluster to perform Data to Information refinement.
Decentralized, Autonomous, scalable, and self-healing, built-in malware detection and isolation are unique features of Online Private Gardens.
