Future IoT and CPS ecosystems require secure multi-domain operation (MDO) support as a foundational capability. Modern IoT and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) increasingly consist of heterogeneous, resource-constrained devices that interact across organizational, administrative, and technical boundaries. Research in this area address this evolution by systematically analyzing existing IoT platforms and their stakeholder ecosystems to identify requirements for secure communication, privacy preservation, and trust management in constrained environments - particularly in very constrained networks like Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). These investigations revealed that stakeholders are not limited to device owners or operators, but include private end-users (e.g., individuals, residents, employees, caretakers) as well as public actors (e.g., identity providers, eService providers, governmental authorities), each posing distinct technical, legal, and ethical requirements such as anonymity, transparency, Privacy-by-Design, compliant data storage, and accountable service provisioning.
The existing SecureWSN framework provides a comprehensive, trustworthy security and privacy architecture tailored to constrained devices in Smart Home and Smart Building scenarios, supporting both active and passive components. However, SecureWSN currently represents a specialized case within a broader and more pressing research challenge: enabling secure and trustworthy MDOs. Future IoT and Industry 4.0 ecosystems demand federated solutions where multiple administrative domains - potentially spanning companies, public authorities, and private households - interoperate seamlessly while maintaining autonomy, regulatory compliance, and enforceable trust relationships. Addressing this requires scalable identity and access management, interoperable trust models, lightweight yet robust cryptographic mechanisms, and cross-domain policy enforcement suitable for constrained nodes. Consequently, current research extends SecureWSN toward a generalized MDO architecture, positioning constrained networks as a secure, privacy-aware, and regulation-compliant foundation for federated IoT and CPS deployments.
Over the last years a multifaceted system illustrated in the following figure was coninously developed inspired by student's research ideas, input from project partners and rising technologies, which is constantly being further developed. More details are available here.
Photos: © SeCoSys/Schmitt