Biblio

The vision of cyber-physical systems (CPSs) considered the Internet as the future communication network for such systems. A challenge with this regard is to provide high communication reliability, especially, for CPSs applications in critical infrastructures. Examples include smart grid applications with reliability requirements between 99-99.9999% [2]. Even though the Internet is a cost effective solution for such applications, the reliability of its end-to-end (e2e) paths is inadequate (often less than 99%). In this paper, we propose Reliable Multipath Communication Approach for Internet-based CPSs (RC4CPS). RC4CPS is an e2e approach that utilizes the inherent redundancy of the Internet and multipath (MP) transport protocols concept to improve reliability measured in terms of availability. It provides online monitoring and MP selection in order to fulfill the application specific reliability requirement. In addition, our MP selection considers e2e paths dependency and unavailability prediction to maximize the reliability gains of MP communication. Our results show that RC4CPS dynamic MP selection satisfied the reliability requirement along with selecting e2e paths with low dependency and unavailability probability.

The threshold secret sharing technique has been used extensively in cryptography. This technique is used for splitting secrets into shares and distributing the shares in a network to provide protection against attacks and to reduce the possibility of loss of information. In this paper, a new approach is introduced to enhance communication security among the nodes in a network based on the threshold secret sharing technique and traditional symmetric key management. The proposed scheme aims to enhance security of symmetric key distribution in a network. In the proposed scheme, key distribution is online which means key management is conducted whenever a message needs to be communicated. The basic idea is encrypting a message with a key (the secret) at the sender, then splitting the key into shares and sending the shares from different paths to the destination. Furthermore, a Pre-Distributed Shared Key scheme is utilized for more secure transmissions of the secret’s shares. The proposed scheme, with the exception of some offline management by the network controller, is distributed, i.e., the symmetric key setups and the determination of the communication paths is performed in the nodes. This approach enhances communication security among the nodes in a network that operates in hostile environments. The cost and security analyses of the proposed scheme are provided.