Biblio

The growing pervasiveness of Internet of Things (IoT) expands the attack surface by connecting more and more attractive attack targets, i.e. embedded devices, to the Internet. One key component in securing these devices is software integrity checking, which typically attained with Remote Attestation (RA). RA is realized as an interactive protocol, whereby a trusted party, verifier, verifies the software integrity of a potentially compromised remote device, prover. In the vast majority of IoT applications, smart devices operate in swarms, thus triggering the need for efficient swarm attestation schemes.In this paper, we present WISE, the first intelligent swarm attestation protocol that aims to minimize the communication overhead while preserving an adequate level of security. WISE depends on a resource-efficient smart broadcast authentication scheme where devices are organized in fine-grained multi-clusters, and whenever needed, the most likely compromised devices are attested. The candidate devices are selected intelligently taking into account the attestation history and the diverse characteristics (and constraints) of each device in the swarm. We show that WISE is very suitable for resource-constrained embedded devices, highly efficient and scalable in heterogenous IoT networks, and offers an adjustable level of security.

Smartphones have become the pervasive personal computing platform. Recent years thus have witnessed exponential growth in research and development for secure and usable authentication schemes for smartphones. Several explicit (e.g., PIN-based) and/or implicit (e.g., biometrics-based) authentication methods have been designed and published in the literature. In fact, some of them have been embedded in commercial mobile products as well. However, the published studies report only the brighter side of the proposed scheme(s), e.g., higher accuracy attained by the proposed mechanism. While other associated operational issues, such as computational overhead, robustness to different environmental conditions/attacks, usability, are intentionally or unintentionally ignored. More specifically, most publicly available frameworks did not discuss or explore any other evaluation criterion, usability and environment-related measures except the accuracy under zero-effort. Thus, their baseline operations usually give a false sense of progress. This paper, therefore, presents some guidelines to researchers for designing, implementation, and evaluating smartphone user authentication methods for a positive impact on future technological developments.