Biblio
The Internet of Things is stepping out of its infancy into full maturity, requiring massive data processing and storage. Unfortunately, because of the unique characteristics of resource constraints, short-range communication, and self-organization in IoT, it always resorts to the cloud or fog nodes for outsourced computation and storage, which has brought about a series of novel challenging security and privacy threats. For this reason, one of the critical challenges of having numerous IoT devices is the capacity to manage them and their data. A specific concern is from which devices or Edge clouds to accept join requests or interaction requests. This paper discusses a design concept for developing the IoT data management platform, along with a data management and lineage traceability implementation of the platform based on blockchain and smart contracts, which approaches the two major challenges: how to implement effective data management and enrich rational interoperability for trusted groups of linked Things; And how to settle conflicts between untrusted IoT devices and its requests taking into account security and privacy preserving. Experimental results show that the system scales well with the loss of computing and communication performance maintaining within the acceptable range, works well to effectively defend against unauthorized access and empower data provenance and transparency, which verifies the feasibility and efficiency of the design concept to provide privacy, fine-grained, and integrity data management over the IoT devices by introducing the blockchain-based data management platform.
Private Set Intersection (PSI) is a cryptographic technique that allows two parties to compute the intersection of their sets without revealing anything except the intersection. We use fully homomorphic encryption to construct a fast PSI protocol with a small communication overhead that works particularly well when one of the two sets is much smaller than the other, and is secure against semi-honest adversaries. The most computationally efficient PSI protocols have been constructed using tools such as hash functions and oblivious transfer, but a potential limitation with these approaches is the communication complexity, which scales linearly with the size of the larger set. This is of particular concern when performing PSI between a constrained device (cellphone) holding a small set, and a large service provider (e.g. WhatsApp), such as in the Private Contact Discovery application. Our protocol has communication complexity linear in the size of the smaller set, and logarithmic in the larger set. More precisely, if the set sizes are Ny textless Nx, we achieve a communication overhead of O(Ny log Nx). Our running-time-optimized benchmarks show that it takes 36 seconds of online-computation, 71 seconds of non-interactive (receiver-independent) pre-processing, and only 12.5MB of round trip communication to intersect five thousand 32-bit strings with 16 million 32-bit strings. Compared to prior works, this is roughly a 38–115x reduction in communication with minimal difference in computational overhead.
Many mobile services consist of two components: a server providing an API, and an application running on smartphones and communicating with the API. An unresolved problem in this design is that it is difficult for the server to authenticate which app is accessing the API. This causes many security problems. For example, the provider of a private network API has to embed secrets in its official app to ensure that only this app can access the API; however, attackers can uncover the secret by reverse-engineering. As another example, malicious apps may send automatic requests to ad servers to commit ad fraud. In this work, we propose a system that allows network API to authenticate the mobile app that sends each request so that the API can make an informed access control decision. Our system, the Mobile Trusted-Origin Policy, consists of two parts: 1) an app provenance mechanism that annotates outgoing HTTP(S) requests with information about which app generated the network traffic, and 2) a code isolation mechanism that separates code within an app that should have different app provenance signatures into mobile origin. As motivation for our work, we present two previously-unknown families of apps that perform click fraud, and examine how the lack of mobile origin information enables the attacks. Based on our observations, we propose Trusted Cross-Origin Requests to handle point (1), which automatically includes mobile origin information in outgoing HTTP requests. Servers may then decide, based on the mobile origin data, whether to process the request or not. We implement a prototype of our system for Android and evaluate its performance, security, and deployability. We find that our system can achieve our security and utility goals with negligible overhead.