Biblio

The Fog is an emergent computing architecture that will support the mobility and geographic distribution of Internet of Things (IoT) nodes and deliver context-aware applications with low latency to end-users. It forms an intermediate layer between IoT devices and the Cloud. However, Fog computing brings many requirements that increase the cost of security management. It inherits the security and trust issues of Cloud and acquires some of the vulnerable features of IoT that threaten data and application confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Several existing solutions address some of the security challenges following adequate adaptation, but others require new and innovative mechanisms. These reflect the need for a Fog architecture that provides secure access, efficient authentication, reliable and secure communication, and trust establishment among IoT devices and Fog nodes. The Fog might be more convenient to deploy decentralized authentication solutions for IoT than the Cloud if appropriately designed. In this short survey, we highlight the Fog security challenges related to IoT security requirements and architectural design. We conduct a comparative study of existing Fog architectures then perform a critical analysis of different authentication schemes in Fog computing, which confirms some of the fundamental requirements for effective authentication of IoT devices based on the Fog, such as decentralization, less resource consumption, and low latency.

Internet of Things (IoT) systems are becoming widely used, which makes them to be a high-value target for both hackers and crackers. From gaining access to sensitive information to using them as bots for complex attacks, the variety of advantages after exploiting different security vulnerabilities makes the security of IoT devices to be one of the most challenging desideratum for cyber security experts. In this paper, we will propose a new IoT system, designed to ensure five data principles: confidentiality, integrity, availability, authentication and authorization. The innovative aspects are both the usage of a web-based communication and a custom dynamic data request structure.

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.

The Blockchain is an emerging paradigm that could solve security and trust issues for Internet of Things (IoT) platforms. We recently introduced in an IETF draft (“Blockchain Transaction Protocol for Constraint Nodes”) the BIoT paradigm, whose main idea is to insert sensor data in blockchain transactions. Because objects are not logically connected to blockchain platforms, controller entities forward all information needed for transaction forgery. Never less in order to generate cryptographic signatures, object needs some trusted computing resources. In previous papers we proposed the Four-Quater Architecture integrating general purpose unit (GPU), radio SoC, sensors/actuators and secure elements including TLS/DTLS stacks. These secure microcontrollers also manage crypto libraries required for blockchain operation. The BIoT concept has four main benefits: publication/duplication of sensors data in public and distributed ledgers, time stamping by the blockchain infrastructure, data authentication, and non repudiation.

Virtualization of Internet of Things(IoT) is a concept of dynamically building customized high-level IoT services which rely on the real time data streams from low-level physical IoT sensors. Security in IoT virtualization is challenging, because with the growing number of available (building block) services, the number of personalizable virtual services grows exponentially. This paper proposes Service Object Capability(SOC) ticket system, a decentralized access control mechanism between servers and clients to efficiently authenticate and authorize each other without using public key cryptography. SOC supports decentralized partial delegation of capabilities specified in each server/client ticket. Unlike PKI certificates, SOC's authentication time and handshake packet overhead stays constant regardless of each capability's delegation hop distance from the root delegator. The paper compares SOC's security benefifits with Kerberos and the experimental results show SOC's authentication incurs significantly less time packet overhead compared against those from other mechanisms based on RSA-PKI and ECC-PKI algorithms. SOC is as secure as, and more efficient and suitable for IoT environments, than existing PKIs and Kerberos.

The increase of sensitive data in the current Internet of Things (IoT) raises demands of computation, communication and storage capabilities. Indeed, thanks to RFID tags and wireless sensor networks, anything can be part of IoT. As a result, a large amount of data is generated, which is hard for many IoT devices to handle, as many IoT devices are resource-constrained and cannot use the existing standard security protocols. Cloud computing might seem like a convenient solution, since it offers on-demand access to a shared pool of resources such as processors, storage, applications and services. However this comes as a cost, as unnecessary communications not only burden the core network, but also the data center in the cloud. Therefore, considering suitable approaches such as fog computing and security middleware solutions is crucial. In this paper, we propose a novel middleware architecture to solve the above issues, and discuss the generic concept of using fog computing along with cloud in order to achieve a higher security level. Our security middleware acts as a smart gateway as it is meant to pre-process data at the edge of the network. Depending on the received information, data might either be processed and stored locally on fog or sent to the cloud for further processing. Moreover, in our scheme, IoT constrained devices communicate through the proposed middleware, which provide access to more computing power and enhanced capability to perform secure communications. We discuss these concepts in detail, and explain how our proposal is effective to cope with some of the most relevant IoT security challenges.

Cloud services are widely used to virtualize the management and actuation of the real-world the Internet of Things (IoT). Due to the increasing privacy concerns regarding querying untrusted cloud servers, query anonymity has become a critical issue to all the stakeholders which are related to assessment of the dependability and security of the IoT system. The paper presents our study on the problem of query receiver-anonymity in the cloud-based IoT system, where the trade-off between the offered query-anonymity and the incurred communication is considered. The paper will investigate whether the accepted worst-case communication cost is sufficient to achieve a specific query anonymity or not. By way of extensive theoretical analysis, it shows that the bounds of worst-case communication cost is quadratically increased as the offered level of anonymity is increased, and they are quadratic in the network diameter for the opposite range. Extensive simulation is conducted to verify the analytical assertions.

We survey the state-of-the-art on the Internet-of-Things (IoT) from a wireless communications point of view, as a result of the European FP7 project BUTLER which has its focus on pervasiveness, context-awareness and security for IoT. In particular, we describe the efforts to develop so-called (wireless) enabling technologies, aimed at circumventing the many challenges involved in extending the current set of domains (“verticals”) of IoT applications towards a “horizontal” (i.e. integrated) vision of the IoT. We start by illustrating current research effort in machine-to-machine (M2M), which is mainly focused on vertical domains, and we discuss some of them in details, depicting then the necessary horizontal vision for the future intelligent daily routine (“Smart Life”). We then describe the technical features of the most relevant heterogeneous communications technologies on which the IoT relies, under the light of the on-going M2M service layer standardization. Finally we identify and present the key aspects, within three major cross-vertical categories, under which M2M technologies can function as enablers for the horizontal vision of the IoT.