Security Management of Horizontal IoT Platforms: A Survey and Comparison
Anastassia Gharib, Jason Jaskolka, Mohamed A. Ibnkahla, Ashraf Matrawy · ACM Computing Surveys · 2025
With the rise of Industry 4.0, horizontal Internet of Things (IoT) platforms are becoming a standardized approach for managing interoperability within complex and heterogeneous IoT systems. Horizontal IoT platforms are software solutions that provide overall IoT system orchestration and management. They work to facilitate IoT services and resources, where security management remains one of the main challenges. This article provides a survey and comparison of security management in IoT systems using horizontal IoT platforms. For this purpose, we first define and compare vertical and horizontal IoT platforms. Although vertical IoT platforms provide solutions to many industries, horizontal IoT platforms improve system connectivity by interconnecting multiple vertical domains. We then describe the security management functionalities of horizontal IoT platforms. With these in mind, we perform a comparative study on the current state of security management approaches of existing horizontal IoT platforms. Particularly, we survey and compare the security management features of the selected standard-based reference implementations. Through discussions, we cover concerns that researchers and developers should be aware of when selecting specific reference implementations for their works. Finally, we identify open issues in the existing security management principles of these reference implementations to be addressed in future studies and practical implementations.