Secure, Trustworthy, and Interoperable API Gateways for Renewable Energy Assets
Files
DeNeyer_74842100_Khoury_02272100_2026.pdf
Open access - Adobe PDF
- 4.3 MB
Details
- Supervisors
- Faculty
- Degree label
- Abstract
- Renewable energy plays a crucial role in fighting against climate change by providing viable, low-carbon alternatives that are essential for an environmentally responsible future. The integration of information technology (IT) into renewable energy systems has enabled remote monitoring and management of renewable energy devices. However, it has also made these systems vulnerable to many threats and potential attacks, making the communication insecure. In addition, the communication with these different devices may also require various protocols and methods of interaction, making it challenging and complex to manage simultaneous communication with all these devices. In this work, we propose an API Gateway architecture and implementation based on Apache APISIX, an open-source API Gateway, to enable secure communication between cloud backends and renewable energy devices. The proposed architecture addresses four key security aspects: (1) Trustworthy and secure access control, (2) Security of API request/call, (3) Traffic overload protection and (4) Rate limitation. Additionally, it abstracts protocol-specific requirements through an integrated protocol translation mechanism, simplifying device interaction and management. The architecture is implemented and finally evaluated in a representative deployment environment simulating renewable energy devices. Performance testing shows that the security and translation layers add limited overhead to the communication, and that the gateway scales predictably with CPU allocation, capable of handling thousands of requests per second while maintaining low latency. The contribution is publicly available under an Apache 2.0 license at https://github.com/GaecKo/MasterThesis.