Biblio

As 5G transitions from an industrial vision to a tangible, next-generation mobile technology, security remains key business driver. Heterogeneous environment, new networking paradigms and novel use cases makes 5G vulnerable to new security threats. This in turn necessitates a flexible and dependable security mechanism. End-to-End (E2E) data protection provides better security, avoids repeated security operations like encryption/decryption and provides differentiated security based on the services. E2E security deals with authentication, integrity, key management and confidentiality. The attack surface of a 5G system is larger as 5G aims for a heterogeneous networked society. Hence attack resistance needs to be a design consideration when defining new 5G protocols. This framework has been designed for accessing the manifold applications with high security and trust by offering E2E security for various services. The proposed framework is evaluated based on computation complexity, communication complexity, attack resistance rate and security defensive rate. The protocol is also evaluated for correctness, and resistance against passive, active and dictionary attacks using random oracle model and Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) tool.

The advancement and penetration of distributed energy resources (DERs) and renewable energy sources (RES) are transforming legacy energy systems in an attempt to reduce carbon emissions and energy waste. Demand Response (DR) has been identified as a key enabler of integrating these, and other, Smart Grid technologies, while, simultaneously, ensuring grid stability and secure energy supply. The massive deployment of smart meters, IoT devices and DERs dictate the need to move to decentralized, or even localized, DR schemes in the face of the increased scale and complexity of monitoring and coordinating the actors and devices in modern smart grids. Furthermore, there is an inherent need to guarantee interoperability, due to the vast number of, e.g., hardware and software stakeholders, and, more importantly, promote trust and incentivize the participation of customers in DR schemes, if they are to be successfully deployed.In this work, we illustrate the design of an energy system that addresses all of the roadblocks that hinder the large scale deployment of DR services. Our DR framework incorporates modern Smart Grid technologies, such as fog-enabled and IoT devices, DERs and RES to, among others, automate asset handling and various time-consuming workflows. To guarantee interoperability, our system employs OpenADR, which standardizes the communication of DR signals among energy stakeholders. Our approach acknowledges the need for decentralization and employs blockchains and smart contracts to deliver a secure, privacy-preserving, tamper-resistant, auditable and reliable DR framework. Blockchains provide the infrastructure to design innovative DR schemes and incentivize active consumer participation as their aforementioned properties promote transparency and trust. In addition, we harness the power of smart contracts which allows us to design and implement fully automated contractual agreements both among involved stakeholders, as well as on a machine-to-machine basis. Smart contracts are digital agents that "live" in the blockchain and can encode, execute and enforce arbitrary agreements. To illustrate the potential and effectiveness of our smart contract-based DR framework, we present a case study that describes the exchange of DR signals and the autonomous instantiation of smart contracts among involved participants to mediate and monitor transactions, enforce contractual clauses, regulate energy supply and handle payments/penalties.

Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT) is widely accepted as a data exchange protocol in Internet of Things (IoT) environment. For security, MQTT supports Transport Layer Security (MQTT-TLS). However, MQTT-TLS provides thing-to-broker channel encryption only because data can still be exposed after MQTT broker. In addition, ACL becomes impractical due to the increasing number of rules for authorizing massive IoT devices. For solving these problems, we propose MQTT Thing-to-Thing Security (MQTT-TTS) which provides thing-to-thing security which prevents data leak. MQTT-TTS also provides the extensibility to include demanded security mechanisms for various security requirements. Moreover, the transparency of MQTT-TTS lets IoT application developers implementing secure data exchange with less programming efforts. Our MQTT-TTS implementation is available on https://github.com/beebit-sec/beebit-mqttc-sdk for evaluation.

With WhatsApp's adoption of the Signal Protocol as its default, end-to-end encryption by the masses happened almost overnight. Unlike iMessage, WhatsApp notifies users that encryption is enabled, explicitly informing users about improved privacy. This rare feature gives us an opportunity to study people's understandings and perceptions of secure messaging pre-and post-mass messenger encryption (pre/post-MME). To study changes in perceptions, we compared the results of two mental models studies: one conducted in 2015 pre-MME and one in 2017 post-MME. Our primary finding is that users do not trust encryption as currently offered. When asked about encryption in the study, most stated that they had heard of encryption, but only a few understood the implications, even on a high level. Their consensus view was that no technical solution to stop skilled attackers from getting their data exists. Even with a major development, such as WhatsApp rolling out end-to-end encryption, people still do not feel well protected by their technology. Surprisingly, despite WhatsApp's end-to-end security info messages and the high media attention, the majority of the participants were not even aware of encryption. Most participants had an almost correct threat model, but don't believe that there is a technical solution to stop knowledgeable attackers to read their messages. Using technology made them feel vulnerable.

An increasing number of IoT scenarios involve mobile, resource-constrained IoT devices that rely on untrusted networks for Internet connectivity. In such environments, attackers can derive sensitive private information of IoT device owners, e.g., daily routines or secret supply chain procedures, when sniffing on IoT communication and linking IoT devices and owner. Furthermore, untrusted networks do not provide IoT devices with any protection against attacks from the Internet. Anonymous communication using onion routing provides a well-proven mechanism to keep the relationship between communication partners secret and (optionally) protect against network attacks. However, the application of onion routing is challenged by protocol incompatibilities and demanding cryptographic processing on constrained IoT devices, rendering its use infeasible. To close this gap, we tailor onion routing to the IoT by bridging protocol incompatibilities and offloading expensive cryptographic processing to a router or web server of the IoT device owner. Thus, we realize resource-conserving access control and end-to-end security for IoT devices. To prove applicability, we deploy onion routing for the IoT within the well-established Tor network enabling IoT devices to leverage its resources to achieve the same grade of anonymity as readily available to traditional devices.

As a national strategic hot spot, the Internet of Things (IoT) has shown its vigor and vitality. With the development of IoT, its application in power grid is more and more extensive. As an advanced technology for information sensing and transmission, IoT has been applied extensively in power generation, transmission, transformation, distribution, utilization and other processes, and will develop with broad prospect in smart grid. Narrow Band Internet of Things (NB-IoT) is of broad application prospects in production management, life-cycle asset management and smart power utilization of smart grid. Its characteristics and security demands of application domain present a challenge for the security of electric power business. However, current protocols either need dual authentication and key agreements, or have poor compatibility with current network architecture. In order to improve the high security of power network data transmission, an end-to-end security authentication protocol of NB-IoT for smart grid based on physical unclonable function and state secret algorithm SM3 is proposed in this paper. A self-controllable NB-IoT application layer security architecture was designed by introducing the domestic cryptographic algorithm, extending the existing key derivation structure of LTE, and combining the physical unclonable function to ensure the generation of encryption keys between NB-IoT terminals and power grid business platforms. The protocol of this paper realizes secure data transmission and bidirectional identity authentication between IoT devices and terminals. It is of low communication costs, lightweight and flexible key update. In addition, the protocol also supports terminal authentication during key agreement, which furtherly enhances the security of business systems in smart grid.

The Internet of Things (IoT) market is growing rapidly, allowing continuous evolution of new technologies. Alongside this development, most IoT devices are easy to compromise, as security is often not a prioritized characteristic. This paper proposes a novel IoT Security Model (IoTSM) that can be used by organizations to formulate and implement a strategy for developing end-to-end IoT security. IoTSM is grounded by the Software Assurance Maturity Model (SAMM) framework, however it expands it with new security practices and empirical data gathered from IoT practitioners. Moreover, we generalize the model into a conceptual framework. This approach allows the formal analysis for security in general and evaluates an organization's security practices. Overall, our proposed approach can help researchers, practitioners, and IoT organizations, to discourse about IoT security from an end-to-end perspective.

When clients interact with a cloud-based service, they expect certain levels of quality of service guarantees. These are expressed as security and privacy policies, interaction authorization policies, and service performance policies among others. The main security challenge in a cloud-based service environment, typically modeled using service-oriented architecture (SOA), is that it is difficult to trust all services in a service composition. In addition, the details of the services involved in an end-to-end service invocation chain are usually not exposed to the clients. The complexity of the SOA services and multi-tenancy in the cloud environment leads to a large attack surface. In this paper we propose a novel approach for end-to-end security and privacy in cloud-based service orchestrations, which uses a service activity monitor to audit activities of services in a domain. The service monitor intercepts interactions between a client and services, as well as among services, and provides a pluggable interface for different modules to analyze service interactions and make dynamic decisions based on security policies defined over the service domain. Experiments with a real-world service composition scenario demonstrate that the overhead of monitoring is acceptable for real-time operation of Web services.

For efficient deployment of sensor nodes required in many logistic applications, it's necessary to build security mechanisms for a secure wireless communication. End-to-end security plays a crucial role for the communication in these networks. This provides the confidentiality, the authentication and mostly the prevention from many attacks at high level. In this paper, we propose a lightweight key exchange protocol WSKE (Wireless Sensor Key Exchange) for IP-based wireless sensor networks. This protocol proposes techniques that allows to adapt IKEv2 (Internet Key Exchange version 2) mechanisms of IPSEC/6LoWPAN networks. In order to check these security properties, we have used a formal verification tools called AVISPA.
 

Critical Infrastructure represents the basic facilities, services and installations necessary for functioning of a community, such as water, power lines, transportation, or communication systems. Any act or practice that causes a real-time Critical Infrastructure System to impair its normal function and performance will have debilitating impact on security and economy, with direct implication on the society. SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) system is a control system which is widely used in Critical Infrastructure System to monitor and control industrial processes autonomously. As SCADA architecture relies on computers, networks, applications and programmable controllers, it is more vulnerable to security threats/attacks. Traditional SCADA communication protocols such as IEC 60870, DNP3, IEC 61850, or Modbus did not provide any security services. Newer standards such as IEC 62351 and AGA-12 offer security features to handle the attacks on SCADA system. However there are performance issues with the cryptographic solutions of these specifications when applied to SCADA systems. This research is aimed at improving the performance of SCADA security standards by employing NTRU, a faster and light-weight NTRU public key algorithm for providing end-to-end security.

Due to the high volume and velocity of big data, it is an effective option to store big data in the cloud, because the cloud has capabilities of storing big data and processing high volume of user access requests. Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) is a promising technique to ensure the end-to-end security of big data in the cloud. However, the policy updating has always been a challenging issue when ABE is used to construct access control schemes. A trivial implementation is to let data owners retrieve the data and re-encrypt it under the new access policy, and then send it back to the cloud. This method incurs a high communication overhead and heavy computation burden on data owners. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme that enabling efficient access control with dynamic policy updating for big data in the cloud. We focus on developing an outsourced policy updating method for ABE systems. Our method can avoid the transmission of encrypted data and minimize the computation work of data owners, by making use of the previously encrypted data with old access policies. Moreover, we also design policy updating algorithms for different types of access policies. The analysis show that our scheme is correct, complete, secure and efficient.