IoT Security & Trust Models for Edge-Cloud Systems: A Reliability Engineering View

Abstract

The proliferation of Internet of Things systems across edge-cloud architectures has created a critical tension between security requirements and operational reliability. Traditional approaches treat these dimensions as competing priorities, implementing authentication, encryption, and trust mechanisms that often degrade system availability through increased latency, computational overhead, and additional failure points. This fragmentation becomes particularly problematic in mission-critical applications where both threat protection and continuous uptime are non-negotiable. This paper presents SecRel-IoT, an integrated framework that reconceptualizes security and reliability as coupled rather than opposing objectives in distributed IoT environments. The proposed architecture incorporates lightweight authentication protocols, hardware-based trust anchors, edge-distributed verification, and reliability-aware redundancy strategies that maintain security properties during failures. Mathematical models quantify security overhead impacts on availability metrics, enabling systematic trade-off analysis through multi-objective optimization and Pareto frontier mapping. Experimental validation across smart manufacturing, healthcare monitoring, traffic management, and energy grid scenarios demonstrates that properly designed security mechanisms can enhance rather than compromise system dependability. Results reveal that edge intelligence significantly reduces cloud dependencies for trust operations, optimal configurations vary substantially by application domain, and integrated approaches achieve superior availability-security balance compared to conventional designs. The framework provides actionable design patterns and implementation guidelines for practitioners building next-generation IoT systems where protection and reliability must coexist.