Biblio

Although 6LoWPAN has brought about a revolutionary leap in networking for Low-power Lossy Networks, challenges still exist, including security concerns that are yet to answer. The most common type of attack on 6LoWPANs is the network layer, especially routing attacks, since the very members of a 6LoWPAN network have to carry out packet forwarding for the whole network. According to the initial purpose of IoT, these nodes are expected to be resource-deficient electronic devices with an utterly stochastic time pattern of attachment or detachment from a network. This issue makes preserving their authenticity or identifying their malignity hard, if not impossible. Since 6LoWPAN is a successor and a hybrid of previously developed wireless technologies, it is inherently prone to cyber-attacks shared with its predecessors, especially Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) and WPANs. On the other hand, multiple attacks have been uniquely developed for 6LoWPANs due to the unique design of the network layer protocol of 6LoWPANs known as RPL. While there exist publications about attacks on 6LoWPANs, a comprehensive survey exclusively on RPL-specific attacks is felt missing to bold the discrimination between the RPL-specific and non-specific attacks. Hence, the urge behind this paper is to gather all known attacks unique to RPL in a single volume.

Routing protocol for low power and lossy networks (RPL) is the underlying routing protocol of 6LoWPAN, a core communication standard for the Internet of Things. In terms of quality of service (QoS), device management, and energy efficiency, RPL beats competing wireless sensor and ad hoc routing protocols. However, several attacks could threaten the network due to the problem of unauthenticated or unencrypted control frames, centralized root controllers, compromised or unauthenticated devices. Thus, in this paper, we aim to investigate the effect of topology and Resources attacks on RPL.s efficiency. The Hello Flooding attack, Increase Number attack and Decrease Rank attack are the three forms of Resources attacks and Topology attacks respectively chosen to work on. The simulations were done to understand the impact of the three different attacks on RPL performances metrics including End-to-End Delay (E2ED), throughput, Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) and average power consumption. The findings show that the three attacks increased the E2ED, decreased the PDR and the network throughput, and degrades the network’, which further raises the power consumption of the network nodes.

The most widely used protocol for routing across the 6LoWPAN stack is the Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy (RPL) Network. However, the RPL lacks adequate security solutions, resulting in numerous internal and external security vulnerabilities. There is still much research work left to uncover RPL's shortcomings. As a result, we first implement the worst parent selection (WPS) attack in this paper. Second, we offer an intrusion detection system (IDS) to identify the WPS attack. The WPS attack modifies the victim node's objective function, causing it to choose the worst node as its preferred parent. Consequently, the network does not achieve optimal convergence, and nodes form the loop; a lower rank node selects a higher rank node as a parent, effectively isolating many nodes from the network. In addition, we propose DWA-IDS as an IDS for detecting WPS attacks. We use the Contiki-cooja simulator for simulation purposes. According to the simulation results, the WPS attack reduces system performance by increasing packet transmission time. The DWA-IDS simulation results show that our IDS detects all malicious nodes that launch the WPS attack. The true positive rate of the proposed DWA-IDS is more than 95%, and the detection rate is 100%. We also deliberate the theoretical proof for the false-positive case as our DWA-IDS do not have any false-positive case. The overhead of DWA-IDS is modest enough to be set up with low-power and memory-constrained devices.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a novel paradigm that enables the development of a slew of Services for the future of technology advancements. When it comes to IoT applications, the cyber and physical worlds can be seamlessly integrated, but they are essentially limitless. However, despite the great efforts of standardization bodies, coalitions, companies, researchers, and others, there are still a slew of issues to overcome in order to fully realize the IoT's promise. These concerns should be examined from a variety of perspectives, including enabling technology, applications, business models, and social and environmental consequences. The focus of this paper is on open concerns and challenges from a technological standpoint. We will study the differences in technical such Sigfox, NB-IoT, LoRa, and 6LowPAN, and discuss their advantages and disadvantage for each technology compared with other technologies. Demonstrate that each technology has a position in the internet of things market. Each technology has different advantages and disadvantages it depends on the quality of services, latency, and battery life as a mention. The first will be analysis IoT technologies. SigFox technology offers a long-range, low-power, low-throughput communications network that is remarkably resistant to environmental interference, enabling information to be used efficiently in a wide variety of applications. We analyze how NB-IoT technology will benefit higher-value-added services markets for IoT devices that are willing to pay for exceptionally low latency and high service quality. The LoRa technology will be used as a low-cost device, as it has a very long-range (high coverage).

Consensus is a basic building block in distributed systems for a myriad of related problems that involve agreement. For asynchronous networks, consensus has been proven impossible, and is well known as Augean task. Failure Detectors (FDs) have since emerged as a possible remedy, able to solve consensus in asynchronous systems under certain assumptions. With the increasing use of asynchronous, wireless Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, such as IEEE 802.15.4/6LoWPAN, the demand of applications that require some form of reliability and agreement is on the rise. What was missing so far is an FD that can operate under the tight constraints offered by Low Power and Lossy Networks (LLNs) without compromising the efficiency of the network. We present 6LoFD, an FD specifically aimed at energy and memory efficient operation in small scale, unreliable networks, and evaluate its working principles by using an ns-3 implementation of 6LoFD.

The aim of this paper is to describe the battery lifetime estimation and energy consumption model of the sensor nodes in TDMA wireless mesh sensor using merged data collecting (MDC) methods based on lithium thionyl chloride batteries. Defining the energy consumption of the nodes in wireless mesh networks is crucial for battery lifetime estimation. In this paper, we describe the timing, energy consumption, and battery lifetime estimation of the MDC method in the TDMA mesh sensor networks using flooding routing. For the battery life estimation, we made a semiempirical model that describes the energy consumption of the nodes with a real battery model. In this model, the low-level constraints are based on the measured energy consumption of the sensor nodes in different operation phases.

This paper proposes a RSSI-based routing protocol for smart pole mesh networks equipped with multiple IEEE 802.11p/WAVE radios. In the IEEE 802.11p based multi-radio multi-channel environments, the performance of traditional mesh routing protocols is severely degraded because of metric measurement overhead. The periodic probe messages for measuring the quality of each channel incurs a large overhead due to the channel switching delay. To solve such an overhead problem, we introduce a routing metric that estimates expected transmission time and proposes a light-weight channel allocation algorithm based on RSSI value only. We evaluate the performance of the proposed solution through simulation experiments with NS-3. Simulation results show that it can improve the network performance in terms of latency and throughput, compared to the legacy WCETT routing scheme.

This paper presents an energy consumption model of the sensor nodes in TDMA wireless mesh sensor network using merged data collecting (MDC) methods. Defining the energy consumption of the nodes in wireless mesh networks is crucial for battery lifetime estimation. In this paper, we describe the semiempirical model of the energy consumption of MDC method in the TDMA mesh sensor networks using flooding routing. In the model the low-level constraints are based on the measured energy consumption of the sensor nodes in the different operation phases.

Internet of Things (IoT) evolution calls for stringent communication demands, including low delay and reliability. At the same time, wireless mesh technology is used to extend the communication range of IoT deployments, in a multi-hop manner. However, Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are facing link failures due to unstable topologies, resulting in unsatisfied IoT requirements. Named-Data Networking (NDN) can enhance WMNs to meet such IoT requirements, thanks to the content naming scheme and in-network caching, but necessitates adaptability to the challenging conditions of WMNs.In this work, we argue that Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is an ideal solution to fill this gap and introduce an integrated SDN-NDN deployment over WMNs involving: (i) global view of the network in real-time; (ii) centralized decision making; and (iii) dynamic NDN adaptation to network changes. The proposed system is deployed and evaluated over the wiLab.1 Fed4FIRE+ test-bed. The proof-of-concept results validate that the centralized control of SDN effectively supports the NDN operation in unstable topologies with frequent dynamic changes, such as the WMNs.

This work proposed a unified approach to increase the explainability of the predictions made by Convolution Neural Networks (CNNs) on medical images using currently available Explainable Artificial Intelligent (XAI) techniques. This method in-cooperates multiple techniques such as LISA aka Local Interpretable Model Agnostic Explanations (LIME), integrated gradients, Anchors and Shapley Additive Explanations (SHAP) which is Shapley values-based approach to provide explanations for the predictions provided by Blackbox models. This unified method increases the confidence in the black-box model’s decision to be employed in crucial applications under the supervision of human specialists. In this work, a Chest X-ray (CXR) classification model for identifying Covid-19 patients is trained using transfer learning to illustrate the applicability of XAI techniques and the unified method (LISA) to explain model predictions. To derive predictions, an image-net based Inception V2 model is utilized as the transfer learning model.

Electrical load forecasting is an essential part of the smart grid to maintain a stable and reliable grid along with helping decisions for economic planning. With the integration of more renewable energy resources, especially solar photovoltaic (PV), and transitioning into a prosumer-based grid, electrical load forecasting is deemed to play a crucial role on both regional and household levels. However, most of the existing forecasting methods can be considered black-box models due to deep digitalization enablers, such as Deep Neural Networks (DNN), where human interpretation remains limited. Additionally, the black box character of many models limits insights and applicability. In order to mitigate this shortcoming, eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) is introduced as a measure to get transparency into the model’s behavior and human interpretation. By utilizing XAI, experienced power market and system professionals can be integrated into developing the data-driven approach, even without knowing the data science domain. In this study, an electrical load forecasting model utilizing an XAI tool for a Norwegian residential building was developed and presented.

Federated Learning (FL) is a multiparty learning computing approach that can aid privacy-preservation machine learning. However, FL has several potential security and privacy threats. First, the existing FL requires a central coordinator for the learning process which brings a single point of failure and trust issues for the shared trained model. Second, during the learning process, intentionally unreliable model updates performed by Byzantine colluding parties can lower the quality and convergence of the shared ML models. Therefore, discovering verifiable local model updates (i.e., integrity or correctness) and trusted parties in FL becomes crucial. In this paper, we propose a resilient and verifiable FL algorithm based on a reputation scheme to cope with unreliable parties. We develop a selection algorithm for task publisher and blockchain-based multiparty learning architecture approach where local model updates are securely exchanged and verified without the central party. We also proposed a novel auditing scheme to ensure our proposed approach is resilient up to 50% Byzantine colluding attack in a malicious scenario.

MPLS has been in the forefront of high-speed Wide Area Networks (WANs), for almost two decades [1], [12]. The performance advantages in implementing Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) are mainly its superior speed based on fast label switching and its capability to perform Fast Reroute rapidly when failure(s) occur - in theory under 50 ms [16], [17], which makes MPLS also interesting for real-time applications. We investigate the aforementioned advantages of MPLS by creating two real testbeds using actual routers that commercial Internet Service Providers (ISPs) use, one with a ring and one with a partial mesh architecture. In those two testbeds we compare the performance of MPLS channels versus normal routing, both using the Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) routing protocol. The speed of the Fast Reroute mechanism for MPLS when failures are occurring is investigated. Firstly, baseline experiments are performed consisting of MPLS versus normal routing. Results are evaluated and compared using both single and dual failure scenarios within the two architectures. Our results confirm recovery times within 50 ms.

This paper aims to identify Wi-SUN devices using physical layer fingerprint. We first extract physical layer features based on the received Wi-SUN signals, especially focusing on device-specific clock skew and frequency deviation in FSK modulation. Then, these physical layer fingerprints are used to train a machine learning-based classifier and the resulting classifier finally identifies the authorized Wi-SUN devices. Preliminary experiments on Wi-SUN certified chips show that the authenticator with the proposed physical layer fingerprints can distinguish Wi-SUN devices with 100 % accuracy. Since no additional computational complexity for authentication is involved on the device side, our approach can be applied to any Wi-SUN based IoT devices with security requirements.

In this work, a digitally tunable Frequency Selec-tive Surface (FSS) for use in Physical Layer Security (PLS) systems is presented. The design of a unit cell is described, which is optimized by simulations for the frequency range of 5 GHz indoor Wi-Fi. Based on the developed unit cell, a prototype with 64 binary switchable elements is set up. The performance of the surface is demonstrated by measurements.

With technology at our fingertips waiting to be exploited, the past decade saw the revolutionizing Human Computer Interactions. The ease with which a user could interact was the Unique Selling Proposition (USP) of a sales team. Human Computer Interactions have many underlying parameters like Data Visualization and Presentation as some to deal with. With the race, on for better and faster presentations, evolved many frameworks to be widely used by all software developers. As the need grew for user friendly applications, more and more software professionals were lured into the front-end sophistication domain. Application frameworks have evolved to such an extent that with just a few clicks and feeding values as per requirements we are able to produce a commercially usable application in a few minutes. These frameworks generate quantum lines of codes in minutes which leaves a contrail of bugs to be discovered in the future. We have also succumbed to the benchmarking in Software Quality Metrics and have made ourselves comfortable with buggy software's to be rectified in future. The exponential evolution in the cyber domain has also attracted attackers equally. Average human awareness and knowledge has also improved in the cyber domain due to the prolonged exposure to technology for over three decades. As the attack sophistication grows and zero day attacks become more popular than ever, the suffering end users only receive remedial measures in spite of the latest Antivirus, Intrusion Detection and Protection Systems installed. We designed a software to display the complete services and applications running in users Operating System in the easiest perceivable manner aided by Computer Graphics and Data Visualization techniques. We further designed a study by empowering the fence sitter users with tools to actively participate in protecting themselves from threats. The designed threats had impressions from the complete threat canvas in some form or other restricted to systems functioning. Network threats and any sort of packet transfer to and from the system in form of threat was kept out of the scope of this experiment. We discovered that end users had a good idea of their working environment which can be used exponentially enhances machine learning for zero day threats and segment the unmarked the vast threat landscape faster for a more reliable output.

The past decade has shown us the power of cyber space and we getting dependent on the same. The exponential evolution in the domain has attracted attackers and defenders of technology equally. This inevitable domain has led to the increase in average human awareness and knowledge too. As we see the attack sophistication grow the protectors have always been a step ahead mitigating the attacks. A study of the various Threat Detection, Protection and Mitigation Systems revealed to us a common similarity wherein users have been totally ignored or the systems rely heavily on the user inputs for its correct functioning. Compiling the above we designed a study wherein user inputs were taken in addition to independent Detection and Prevention systems to identify and mitigate the risks. This approach led us to a conclusion that involvement of users exponentially enhances machine learning and segments the data sets faster for a more reliable output.

Zero-day attack is a critical network attack. The zero-day attack period (ZDAP) is the period from the release of malware/exploit until a patch becomes available. IDS/IPS cannot effectively block zero-day attacks because they use pattern-based signatures in general. This paper proposes a Prophetic Defender (PD) by which ZDAP can be minimized. Prior to actual attack, hackers scan networks to identify hosts with vulnerable ports. If this port scanning can be detected early, zero-day attacks will become detectable. PD architecture makes use of a honeypot-based pseudo server deployed to detect malicious port scans. A port-scanning honeypot was operated by us in 6 years from 2009 to 2015. By analyzing the 6-year port-scanning log data, we understand that PD is effective for detecting and blocking zero-day attacks. The block rate of the proposed architecture is 98.5%.

With the increasing number of catastrophic weather events and resulting disruption in the energy supply to essential loads, the distribution grid operators’ focus has shifted from reliability to resiliency against high impact, low-frequency events. Given the enhanced automation to enable the smarter grid, there are several assets/resources at the disposal of electric utilities to enhances resiliency. However, with a lack of comprehensive resilience tools for informed operational decisions and planning, utilities face a challenge in investing and prioritizing operational control actions for resiliency. The distribution system resilience is also highly dependent on system attributes, including network, control, generating resources, location of loads and resources, as well as the progression of an extreme event. In this work, we present a novel multi-stage resilience measure called the Anticipate-Withstand-Recover (AWR) metrics. The AWR metrics are based on integrating relevant ‘system characteristics based factors’, before, during, and after the extreme event. The developed methodology utilizes a pragmatic and flexible approach by adopting concepts from the national emergency preparedness paradigm, proactive and reactive controls of grid assets, graph theory with system and component constraints, and multi-criteria decision-making process. The proposed metrics are applied to provide decision support for a) the operational resilience and b) planning investments, and validated for a real system in Alaska during the entirety of the event progression.

Bus factor is a metric that identifies how resilient is the project to the sudden engineer turnover. It states the minimal number of engineers that have to be hit by a bus for a project to be stalled. Even though the metric is often discussed in the community, few studies consider its general relevance. Moreover, the existing tools for bus factor estimation focus solely on the data from version control systems, even though there exists other channels for knowledge generation and distribution. With a survey of 269 engineers, we find that the bus factor is perceived as an important problem in collective development, and determine the highest impact channels of knowledge generation and distribution in software development teams. We also propose a multimodal bus factor estimation algorithm that uses data on code reviews and meetings together with the VCS data. We test the algorithm on 13 projects developed at JetBrains and compared its results to the results of the state-of-the-art tool by Avelino et al. against the ground truth collected in a survey of the engineers working on these projects. Our algorithm is slightly better in terms of both predicting the bus factor as well as key developers compared to the results of Avelino et al. Finally, we use the interviews and the surveys to derive a set of best practices to address the bus factor issue and proposals for the possible bus factor assessment tool.

Cloud Computing (CC) has emerged as an on-demand accessible tool in different practical applications such as digital industry, academics, manufacturing, health sector and others. In this paper different security threats faced by CC are discussed with suitable examples. Moreover, an artificial intelligence based security enabled CC is also discussed based on suitable empirical data. It is found that an artificial neural network (ANN) is an effective system to detect the level of risk factors associated with CC along with mitigating those risk issues with appropriate algorithms. Hence, it provides a desired level of protection against cyber attacks, internal confidential threats and external threat of data theft from a cloud computing system. Levenberg–Marquardt (LMBP) algorithms are also found as a significant tool to estimate the level of security performance around a cloud computing system. ANN is used to improve the performance level of data security across a cloud computing network and make it security enabled to ensure a protected data transmission to clients associated with the system.

The security proposed for Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) systems in the European Union is specified in the ETSI Cooperative Intelligent Transport System (C-ITS) standards, and related documents are based on the trusted PKI/CAs. The C-ITS trust model platform comprises an EU Root CA and additional Root CAs run in Europe by member state authorities or private organizations offering certificates to individual users. A new method is described in this paper where the security in V2X is based on the Distributed Public Keystore (DPK) platform developed for Ethereum blockchain. The V2X security is considered as one application of the DPK platform. The DPK stores and distributes the vehicles, RSUs, or other C-ITS role-players’ public keys. It establishes a generic key exchange/ agreement scheme that provides mutual key, entity authentication, and distributing a session key between two peers. V2X communication based on this scheme can establish an end-to-end (e2e) secure session and enables vehicle authentication without the need for a vehicle certificate signed by a trusted Certificate Authority.

Efficient low-power accelerators for Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) largely benefit from quantization and approximation, which are typically applied layer-wise for efficient hardware implementation. In this work, we present a novel strategy for efficient combination of these concepts at a deeper level, which is at each channel or kernel. We first apply layer-wise, low bit-width, linear quantization and truncation-based approximate multipliers to the CNN computation. Then, based on a state-of-the-art resiliency analysis, we are able to apply a kernel-wise approximation and quantization scheme with negligible accuracy losses, without further retraining. Our proposed strategy is implemented in a specialized framework for fast design space exploration. This optimization leads to a boost in estimated power savings of up to 34% in residual CNN architectures for image classification, compared to the base quantized architecture.

Over past years, the high demand to efficiently process deep learning (DL) models has driven the market of the chip design companies. However, the new Deep Chip architectures, a common term to refer to DL hardware accelerator, have slightly paid attention to the security requirements in quantized neural networks (QNNs), while the black/white -box adversarial attacks can jeopardize the integrity of the inference accelerator. Therefore in this paper, a comprehensive study of the resiliency of QNN topologies to black-box attacks is examined. Herein, different attack scenarios are performed on an FPGA-processor co-design, and the collected results are extensively analyzed to give an estimation of the impact’s degree of different types of attacks on the QNN topology. To be specific, we evaluated the sensitivity of the QNN accelerator to a range number of bit-flip attacks (BFAs) that might occur in the operational lifetime of the device. The BFAs are injected at uniformly distributed times either across the entire QNN or per individual layer during the image classification. The acquired results are utilized to build the entropy-based model that can be leveraged to construct resilient QNN architectures to bit-flip attacks.

Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks in wide-area control loops of electric power systems can cause temporary halting of information flow between the generators, leading to closed-loop instability. One way to counteract this issue would be to recreate the missing state information at the impacted generators by using the model of the entire system. However, that not only violates privacy but is also impractical from a scalability point of view. In this paper, we propose to resolve this issue by using a model-free technique employing neural networks. Specifically, a long short-term memory network (LSTM) is used. Once an attack is detected and localized, the LSTM at the impacted generator(s) predicts the magnitudes of the corresponding missing states in a completely decentralized fashion using offline training and online data updates. These predicted states are thereafter used in conjunction with the healthy states to sustain the wide-area feedback until the attack is cleared. The approach is validated using the IEEE 68-bus, 16-machine power system.