Design of a secure IoT gateway configuration and data visualisation web application

Abstract

Nowadays, information technology is everywhere. Smartnodes, an innovative spin-off of the University of Liège, is currently developing the concept of smart cities. Its developers have designed a light controller which is able to follow the movements of the road users and create a bubble of light around them. To do so, they place, on the street lamps, several systems called nodes that embed sensors in order to collect data from a street area. A central system, composed of a Raspberry Pi, serves as a gateway to manage the operations and the synchronizations between the nodes.

However, the only existing solution to configure a gateway or to visualize some data about the nodes is to connect to it with a terminal and the SSH protocol. Therefore, the goal of this master thesis is to make this process more intuitive by developing an ergonomic responsive web application and to deploy it in each gateway.

After comparing the different web technologies, the ones that fit the best for this project was Python with the Django framework for the server side, HTML/CSS/JavaScript with Bootstrap and jQuery libraries for the client side and Nginx for the web server.

Moreover, the solution proposed is secured against principle types of attacks and all communications between the client's browser and the server are encrypted by using the HTTPS protocol.

Finally, as the number of gateways may be very big and will increase with the time, the testing and the deployment processes must be the easiest as possible. Thus, some unit tests have been written and a script that automates the installation of the Django web application and all its dependencies has been implemented.