Biblio

With ubiquitous connectivity no longer a dream, the need for efficient communications between smart objects in Internet of Things has become more demanding than ever before. In this context, efficient yet low cost modeling tools, capable of considering the impactful parameters are essential in provisioning such systems. ETX (Expected Transmission count), used in RPL (Routing Protocol for Low power lossy networks), turns to be one of the most widely used routing metrics, so it is considered by IETF for IPv6 routing in low-power wireless sensor networks and to infer many network layer characteristics like packet loss rate. As more and more wireless sensor networks being deployed with 6LoWPAN, having a model to easily obtain network parameters gains importance. This work aims to provide such a tool in the form of a modular analytic model for linear topology of 6LoWPANs which are mostly seen in monitoring systems of linear structures like pipeline, bridges and highways. The proposed model is evaluated in obtaining the ETX metric and packet loss rate in a typical IoT network.

Traditionally, a Certification Authority (CA) is required to sign, manage, verify and revoke public key certificates. Multiple CAs together form the CA-based Public Key Infrastructure (PKI). The use of a PKI forces one to place trust in the CAs, which have proven to be a single point-of-failure on multiple occasions. Blockchain has emerged as a transformational technology that replaces centralized trusted third parties with a decentralized, publicly verifiable, peer-to-peer data store which maintains data integrity among nodes through various consensus protocols. In this paper, we deploy three blockchain-based alternatives to the CA-based PKI for supporting IoT devices, based on Emercoin Name Value Service (NVS), smart contracts by Ethereum blockchain, and Ethereum Light Sync client. We compare these approaches with CA-based PKI and show that they are much more efficient in terms of computational and storage requirements in addition to providing a more robust and scalable PKI.

Security is a vital aspect of industrial control systems since they are used in critical infrastructures and manufacturing processes. As demonstrated by the increasing number of emerging exploits, securing such systems is still a challenge as the employed fieldbus technologies do not offer intrinsic support for basic security objectives. In this work we discuss some security aspects of DeviceNet, a communication protocol widely used for control applications especially in the North American industrial sector. Having the Controller Area Network (CAN) protocol at its base, DeviceNet inherits all the vulnerabilities that were already illustrated on CAN in-vehicle communication. We discuss how the lack of security in DeviceNet can be exploited and point on the fact that these vulnerabilities can be modelled by existing formal verification tools and countermeasures can be put in place.

In order to cater the growing spectrum demands of large scale future 5G Internet of Things (IoT) applications, Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA) based networks are being proposed as a high-throughput and cost-effective solution. However the lack of understanding of DSA paradigm's inherent security vulnerabilities on IoT networks might become a roadblock towards realizing such spectrum aware 5G vision. In this paper, we make an attempt to understand how such inherent DSA vulnerabilities in particular Spectrum Sensing Data Falsification (SSDF) attacks can be exploited by collaborative group of selfish adversaries and how that can impact the performance of spectrum aware IoT applications. We design a utility based selfish adversarial model mimicking collaborative SSDF attack in a cooperative spectrum sensing scenario where IoT networks use dedicated environmental sensing capability (ESC) for spectrum availability estimation. We model the interactions between the IoT system and collaborative selfish adversaries using a leader-follower game and investigate the existence of equilibrium. Using simulation results, we show the nature of adversarial and system utility components against system variables. We also explore Pareto-optimal adversarial strategy design that maximizes the attacker utility for varied system strategy spaces.

As the Internet of Things (IoT) era raise, billions of additional connected devices in new locations and applications will create new challenges. Security and privacy are among the major challenges in IoT as any breaches and misuse in those aspects will have the adverse impact on users. Among many factors that determine the security of any system, human factor is the most important aspect to be considered; as it is renowned that human is the weakest link in the information security cycle. Experts express the need to increase cyber resilience culture and a focus on the human factors involved in cybersecurity to counter cyber risks. The aim of this study is to propose a conceptual model to improve cyber resilience in IoT users that is adapted from a model in public health sector. Cyber resilience is improved through promoting security behavior by gathering the existing knowledge and gain understanding about every contributing aspects. The proposed approach is expected to be used as foundation for government, especially in Indonesia, to derive strategies in improving cyber resilience of IoT users.

Cryptosystems are essential for computer and communication security, e.g., RSA or ECDSA in PGP Email clients and AES in full disk encryption. In practice, the cryptographic keys are loaded and stored in RAM as plain-text, and therefore vulnerable to cold-boot attacks exploiting the remanence effect of RAM chips to directly read memory data. To tackle this problem, we propose Copker, a cryptographic engine that implements asymmetric cryptosystems entirely within the CPU, without storing any plain-text sensitive data in RAM. Copker supports the popular asymmetric cryptosystems (i.e., RSA and ECDSA), and deterministic random bit generators (DRBGs) used in ECDSA signing. In its active mode, Copker stores kilobytes of sensitive data, including the private key, the DRBG seed and intermediate states, only in on-chip CPU caches (and registers). Decryption/signing operations are performed without storing any sensitive information in RAM. In the suspend mode, Copker stores symmetrically-encrypted private keys and DRBG seeds in memory, while employs existing solutions to keep the key-encryption key securely in CPU registers. Hence, Copker releases the system resources in the suspend mode. We implement Copker with the support of multiple private keys. With security analyses and intensive experiments, we demonstrate that Copker provides cryptographic services that are secure against cold-boot attacks and introduce reasonable overhead.

With the development of the interconnection of all things(IoT), a large number of mobile terminal devices with multiple users access the distribution network, and gradually form an open and interconnected network environment, which brings new challenges to the security and protection of the distribution network. In this paper, a method of analyzing the sensing data of the digital substation is proposed, which can prevent the abnormal data from causing the malfunction of the protective relays by calculating the creditability of the sensing data. Creditability calculation algorithm as well as the implementation of the intrusion tolerance strategy are studied throughout the paper. The simulation results show that the proposed creditability-based intrusion-tolerant(CIT) algorithm can ensure that the protective equipment have no protective malfunction from the false instructions or false data attacks, and the proposed intrusion tolerant algorithm has little affect on the real-time performance of the original protection algorithm, hence it has some practical value.

With the prevalence of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and systems, touching almost every single aspect of our modern life, one core factor that will determine whether this technology will succeed, and gain people trust, or fail is security. This technology aimed to facilitate and improve the quality of our life; however, it is hysterical and fast growth makes it an attractive and prime target for a whole variety of hackers posing a significant risk to our technology and IT infrastructures at both enterprise and individual levels. This paper discusses and identifies some critical aspects from software security perspective that need to be addressed and considered when designing IoT applications. This paper mainly concerned with potential security issues of the applications running on IoT devices including insecure interfaces, insecure software, constrained application protocol and middleware security. This effort is part of a funded research project that investigates internet of things (IoT) security and privacy issues related to architecture, connectivity and data collection.

User authentication in wireless sensor networks is more complex than normal networks due to sensor network characteristics such as unmanned operation, limited resources, and unreliable communication. For this reason, various authentication protocols have been presented to provide secure and efficient communication. In 2017, Wu et al. presented a provable and privacy-preserving user authentication protocol for wireless sensor networks. Unfortunately, we found that Wu et al.'s protocol was still vulnerable against user impersonation attack, and had a problem in the password change phase. We show how an attacker can impersonate an other user and why the password change phase is ineffective.

We are living in a society where technology is present everywhere we go. We are striving towards smart homes, smart cities, Internet of Things, Internet of Everything. Not so long ago, a password was all you needed for secure authentication. Nowadays, even the most complicated passwords are not considered enough. Multi-factor authentication is gaining more and more terrain. Complex system may also require more than one solution for real, strong security. The present paper proposes a framework based with MFA as a basis for access control and data analytics. Events within a cyber-physical system are processed and analyzed in an attempt to detect, prevent and mitigate possible attacks.

Examining implementations of the 6LoWPAN Internet Standard in major embedded operating systems, we observe that they do not fully interoperate. We find this is due to some inherent design flaws in 6LoWPAN. We propose and demonstrate four principles that can be used to structure protocols for low power devices that encourage interoperability between diverse implementations.

This paper designs three distribution devices for the smart grid, which are, respectively, novel transformer with dc bias restraining ability, energy-saving contactor, and controllable reactor with adjustable intrinsic magnetic state based on the magnetically tunable nanocomposite material core. First, the magnetic performance of this magnetic material was analyzed and the magnetic properties processing method was put forward. One kind of nanocomposite which is close to the semihard magnetic state with low coercivity and high remanence was attained. Nanocomposite with four magnetic properties was processed and prepared using the distribution devices design. Second, in order to adjust the magnetic state better, the magnetization and demagnetization control circuit based on the single-phase supply power of rectification and inverter for the nanocomposite magnetic performance adjustment has been designed, which can mutual transform the material's soft and hard magnetic phases. Finally, based on the nanocomposite and the control circuit, a novel power transformer, an energy-saving contactor, and a magnetically controllable reactor were manufactured for the smart grid. The maintained remanence of the nanocomposite core after the magnetization could neutralize the dc bias magnetic flux in the transformer main core without changing the transformer neutral point connection mode, could pull in the contactor movable core instead of the traditional electromagnetic-type fixed core, and could adjust the reactor core saturation degree instead of the traditional electromagnetic coil. The simulation and experimental results verify the correctness of the design, which provides reliable, intelligent, interactive, and energy-saving power equipment for the smart power grids safe operation.

This paper targets the efficient implementation of digital signatures and signcryption schemes on typical internet-of-things (IoT) devices, i.e. embedded processors with constrained computation power and storage. Both signcryption schemes (providing digital signatures and encryption simultaneously) and digital signatures rely on computation-intensive public-key cryptography. When the number of signatures or encrypted messages the device needs to generate after deployment is limited, a trade-off can be made between performing the entire computation on the embedded device or moving part of the computation to a precomputation phase. The latter results in the storage of the precomputed values in the memory of the processor. We examine this trade-off on a health sensor platform and we additionally apply storage encryption, resulting in five implementation variants of the considered schemes.

This paper proposes a novel kind of direct-current and alternate-decay-current hybrid integrative magnetization and demagnetization power supplies applied to transformer dc bias treatment based on a nanocomposite magnetic material. First, according to the single-phase transformer structure, one dc bias magnetic compensation mechanism was provided. The dc bias flux in the transformer main core could be eliminated directionally by utilizing the material remanence. Second, for the rapid response characteristic of the magnetic material to an external magnetic field, one positive and negative dc magnetization superimposed decaying ac demagnetization hybrid integrative power supplies based on single-phase rectifier circuit and inverter circuit was designed. In order to accurately control the magnetic field strength by which a good de/-magnetization effect could be achieved, this paper adopts the double-loop control technology of the magnetic field strength and magnetizing current for the nanocomposite magnetic state adjustment. Finally, two 10 kVA transformers and the experiment module of the hybrid integrative power supplies were manufactured and built. Experimental results showed that the integrated power supplies have good de/-magnetization effect and practicability, proving the validity and feasibility of the proposed scheme.

Challenges associated with developing analytics solutions at the edge of large scale Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) networks close to where data is being generated in most cases involves developing analytics solutions from ground up. However, this approach increases IoT development costs and system complexities, delay time to market, and ultimately lowers competitive advantages associated with delivering next-generation IoT designs. To overcome these challenges, existing, widely available, hardware can be utilized to successfully participate in distributed edge computing for IIoT systems. In this paper, an osmotic computing approach is used to illustrate how distributed osmotic computing and existing low-cost hardware may be utilized to solve complex, compute-intensive Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) deep learning problem from the edge, through the fog, to the network cloud layer of IIoT systems. At the edge layer, the C28x digital signal processor (DSP), an existing low-cost, embedded, real-time DSP that has very wide deployment and integration in several IoT industries is used as a case study for constructing real-time graph-based Coiflet wavelets that could be used for several analytic applications including deep learning pre-processing applications at the edge and fog layers of IIoT networks. Our implementation is the first known application of the fixed-point C28x DSP to construct Coiflet wavelets. Coiflet Wavelets are constructed in the form of an osmotic microservice, using embedded low-level machine language to program the C28x at the network edge. With the graph-based approach, it is shown that an entire Coiflet wavelet distribution could be generated from only one wavelet stored in the C28x based edge device, and this could lead to significant savings in memory at the edge of IoT networks. Pearson correlation coefficient is used to select an edge generated Coiflet wavelet and the selected wavelet is used at the fog layer for pre-processing and denoising IIoT data to improve data quality for fog layer based deep learning application. Parameters for implementing deep learning at the fog layer using LSTM networks have been determined in the cloud. For XAI, communication network noise is shown to have significant impact on results of predictive deep learning at IIoT network fog layer.

Secure group-oriented communication is crucial to a wide range of applications in Internet of Things (IoT). Security problems related to group-oriented communications in IoT-based applications placed in a privacy-sensitive environment have become a major concern along with the development of the technology. Unfortunately, many IoT devices are designed to be portable and light-weight; thus, their functionalities, including security modules, are heavily constrained by the limited energy resources (e.g., battery capacity). To address these problems, we propose a group key management scheme based on a novel physically unclonable function (PUF) design: multistage interconnected PUF (MIPUF) to secure group communications in an energy-constrained environment. Our design is capable of performing key management tasks such as key distribution, key storage and rekeying securely and efficiently. We show that our design is secure against multiple attack methods and our experimental results show that our design saves 47.33% of energy globally comparing to state-of-the-art Elliptic-curve cryptography (ECC)-based key management scheme on average.

This paper presents a novel research model of identity and the use of this model to answer some interesting research questions. Information travels in the cyber world, not only bringing us convenience and prosperity but also jeopardy. Protecting this information has been a commonly discussed issue in recent years. One type of this information is Personally Identifiable Information (PII), often used to perform personal authentication. People often give PIIs to organizations, e.g., when applying for a new job or filling out a new application on a website. While the use of such PII might be necessary for authentication, giving PII increases the risk of its exposure to criminals. We introduce two innovative approaches based on our model of identity to help evaluate and find an optimal set of PIIs that satisfy authentication purposes but minimize risk of exposure. Our model paves the way for more informed selection of PIIs by organizations that collect them as well as by users who offer PIIs to these organizations.

Because major smartphone platforms are equipped with Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) capabilities, more and more smart devices have adopted BLE technologies to communicate with smartphones. In order to support the mesh topology in BLE networks, several proposals have been designed. Among them, the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) recently released a specification for Bluetooth mesh networks based upon BLE technology. This paper focuses on this standard solution and analyses its security protocol with hardware security in mind. As it is expected that internet of things (IoT) devices will be deployed everywhere, the risk of physical attacks must be assessed. First, we provide a comprehensive survey of the security features involved in Bluetooth mesh. Then, we introduce some physical attacks identified as serious threats for the IoT and discuss their relevance in the case of Bluetooth mesh networks. Finally, we briefly discuss possible countermeasures to reach a secure implementation.

With all the exciting benefits of IoT in healthcare - from mobile applications to wearable and implantable health gadgets-it becomes prominent to ensure that patients, their medical data and the interactions to and from their medical devices are safe and secure. The security and privacy is being breached when the mobile applications are mishandled or tampered by the hackers by performing reverse engineering on the application leading to catastrophic consequences. To combat against these vulnerabilities, there is need to create an awareness of the potential risks of these devices and effective strategies are needed to be implemented to achieve a level of security defense. In this paper, the benefits of healthcare IoT system and the possible vulnerabilities that may result are presented. Also, we propose to develop solutions against these vulnerabilities by protecting mobile applications using obfuscation and return oriented programming techniques. These techniques convert an application into a form which makes difficult for an adversary to interpret or alter the code for illegitimate purpose. The mobile applications use keys to control communication with the implantable medical devices, which need to be protected as they are the critical component for securing communications. Therefore, we also propose access control schemes using white box encryption to make the keys undiscoverable to hackers.

Voice interfaces are increasingly becoming integrated into a variety of Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Such systems can dramatically simplify interactions between users and devices with limited displays. Unfortunately voice interfaces also create new opportunities for exploitation. Specifically any sound-emitting device within range of the system implementing the voice interface (e.g., a smart television, an Internet-connected appliance, etc) can potentially cause these systems to perform operations against the desires of their owners (e.g., unlock doors, make unauthorized purchases, etc). We address this problem by developing a technique to recognize fundamental differences in audio created by humans and electronic speakers. We identify sub-bass over-excitation, or the presence of significant low frequency signals that are outside of the range of human voices but inherent to the design of modern speakers, as a strong differentiator between these two sources. After identifying this phenomenon, we demonstrate its use in preventing adversarial requests, replayed audio, and hidden commands with a 100%/1.72% TPR/FPR in quiet environments. In so doing, we demonstrate that commands injected via nearby audio devices can be effectively removed by voice interfaces.

High-temperature magnetic properties of the anisotropic bulk SmCo7/Fe(Co) nanocomposite magnets prepared by multistep deformation have been investigated and compared with the corresponding isotropic nanocomposites. The anisotropic SmCo7/Fe(Co) nanocomposites with a Fe(Co) fraction of 28% exhibit much higher energy products than the corresponding isotropic nanocomposites at both room and high temperatures. These magnets show a small remanence (α = -0.022%/K) and a coercivity (β = -0.25%/K) temperature coefficient which can be comparable to those of the conventional SmCo5 and Sm2Co17 high-temperature magnets. The magnetic properties of these nanocomposites at high temperatures are sensitive to the weight fractions of the Fe(Co) phase. This paper demonstrates that the anisotropic bulk SmCo7/Fe(Co) nanocomposites have better high-temperature magnetic properties than the corresponding isotropic ones.

Low-power wide area networks (LPWANs), such as LoRa, are fast emerging as the preferred networking technology for large-scale Internet of Things deployments (e.g., smart cities). Due to long communication range and ultra low power consumption, LPWAN-enabled sensors are today being deployed in a variety of application scenarios where sensitive information is wirelessly transmitted. In this work, we study the privacy guarantees of LPWANs, in particular LoRa. We show that, although the event-based duty cycling of radio communication, i.e., transmission of radio signals only when an event occurs, saves power, it inherently leaks information. This information leakage is independent of the implemented crypto primitives. We identify two types of information leakage and show that it is hard to completely prevent leakage without incurring significant additional communication and computation costs.

The intrinsic use of SDN/NFV technologies in 5G infrastructures promise to enable the flexibility and programmability of networks to ensure lower cost of network and service provisioning and operation, however it brings new challenges and requirements due to new architectural changes. In terms of security, authentication and authorization functions need to evolve towards the new and emerging 5G virtualization platforms in order to meet the requirements of service providers and infrastructure operators. Over the years, a lot of authentication techniques have been used. Now, a wide range of options arise allowing to extend existing authentication and authorization mechanisms. This paper focuses on proposing and showcasing a 5G platform oriented solution among different approaches to integrate authentication and authorization functionalities, an adapted secure and stateless mechanism, providing identity and permissions management to handle not only users, but also system micro-services, in a network functions virtualization management and orchestration (NFV MANO) system, oriented to deploy virtualized services. The presented solution uses the NFV-based SONATA Service Platform which offers capabilities for a continuous integration and delivery DevOps methodology that allow high levels of programmability and flexibility to manage the entire life cycle of Virtual Network Functions, and enables the perfect scenario to showcase different approaches for authentication and authorization mechanisms for users and micro-services in a 5G platform.

Internet of Things (IoT) device authentication is weighed as a very important step from security perspective. Privacy and security of the IoT devices and applications is the major issue. From security perspective, important issue that needs to be addressed is the authentication mechanism, it has to be secure from different types of attacks and is easy to implement. The paper gives general idea about how different authentication mechanisms work, and then secure and efficient multi-factor device authentication scheme idea is proposed. The proposed scheme idea uses digital signatures and device capability to authenticate a device. In the proposed scheme device will only be allowed into the network if it is successfully authenticated through multi-factor authentication otherwise the authentication process fails and whole authentication process will restart. By analyzing the proposed scheme idea, it can be seen that the scheme is efficient and has less over head. The scheme not only authenticates the device very efficiently through multi-factor authentication but also authenticates the authentication server with the help of digital signatures. The proposed scheme also mitigates the common attacks like replay and man in the middle because of nonce and timestamp.

Nanotechnology provides new solutions for numerous applications that have a significant effect on almost every aspect of our community including health monitoring, smart cities, military, agriculture, and industry. The interconnection of nanoscale devices with existing communication networks over the Internet defines a novel networking paradigm called the Internet of Nano-Things (IoNT). The IoNT involves a large number of nanosensors that used to provide more precise and detailed information about a particular object to enable a better understanding of object behaviour. In this paper, we investigate the challenges and opportunities of the IoNT system in various applications. An overview of the IoNT is first introduced. This is followed by a discussion of the network architecture of the IoNT and various applications that benefit from integrating IoT with nanotechnology. In the end, since security is considered to be one of the main issues of the IoNT system, we provide an in-depth discussion on security goals, attack vectors and security challenges of the IoNT system.