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Internet of Things (IoT) is a heterogeneous system comprising interrelated smart-objects, sensors and actuators. IoT systems are expected to ultimately usher significant advances in critical domains such as transportation, energy, and healthcare. Due to IoTs' pervasiveness and impact on the cyber-physical world, it is a vital requirement to guarantee their security. In particular, authentication is one of the most fundamental security services required for any viable IoT, since it is necessary to establish trust and secure the communication among parties in a network. However, despite their merits, the vast majority of existing authentication techniques may not fully meet the needs of IoTs, especially when such systems involve heterogeneous IoTs with resource-limited devices or, must meet real-time requirements for safety reasons (e.g., delay-sensitive networks). Hence, there is a critical need for developing authentication techniques, which are lightweight, fast and scalable for heterogeneous and delay-sensitive IoTs. The objective of this project is to establish an integrated program of research and education to develop practical cryptographic techniques towards the creation of secure IoTs, as well as to develop academic course materials and outreach activities for the education and broad dissemination of the proposed techniques. The successful completion of this project is expected to provide new opportunities to significantly enhance the trustworthiness of IoTs by enabling practical authentication techniques, thereby greatly contributing towards a broad adaptation of IoT.
The research activities in this project will be focused on the creation of a suite of lightweight and low-latency digital signatures. Expected outcomes include: (1) A new suite of highly lightweight digital signatures for resource-limited and heterogeneous IoTs. (2) A new series of high-performance, compromise-resilient and compact digital signatures. (3) A new suite of low-latency digital signatures for delay-sensitive IoTs. (4) A comprehensive formal security analysis, optimization and hardware-acceleration of the proposed techniques. (5) A new IoT testbed that will be used for the evaluation, improvement and education of the proposed techniques. (6) An industrial secure IoT research platform and open-source cryptographic framework, in which the proposed techniques will be deployed and improved on real-life IoT systems in collaboration with research laboratories. The educational objective is to design, implement and evaluate educational modules and outreach activities to educate students at various levels (i.e., high-school, undergraduate and graduate) in the field of cyber-security for IoT. This will be achieved via newly introduced course modules that focus on hands-on experience of the proposed techniques on real-life IoT platforms, and with various cyber-security outreach activities designed to target middle-school and female high-school and undergraduate students.
Continuation of Award #: 1652389
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CAREER: Light-Weight and Fast Authentication for Internet of Things