Blockchain for IoT Access Control: Recent Trends and Future Research Directions

With the rapid development of wireless sensor networks, smart devices, and traditional information and communication technologies, there is tremendous growth in the use of Internet of Things (IoT) applications and services in our everyday life. IoT systems deal with high volumes of data. This data can be particularly sensitive, as it may include health, financial, location, and other highly personal information. Fine-grained security management in IoT demands effective access control. Several proposals discuss access control for the IoT, however, a limited focus is given to the emerging blockchain-based solutions for IoT access control. In this paper, we review the recent trends and critical needs for blockchain-based solutions for IoT access control. We identify several important aspects of blockchain, including decentralised control, secure storage and sharing information in a trustless manner, for IoT access control including their benefits and limitations. Finally, we note some future research directions on how to converge blockchain in IoT access control efficiently and effectively

Towards end-to-end security in internet of things based healthcare

Healthcare IoT systems are distinguished in that they are designed to serve human beings, which primarily raises the requirements of security, privacy, and reliability. Such systems have to provide real-time notifications and responses concerning the status of patients. Physicians, patients, and other caregivers demand a reliable system in which the results are accurate and timely, and the service is reliable and secure. To guarantee these requirements, the smart components in the system require a secure and efficient end-to-end communication method between the end-points (e.g., patients, caregivers, and medical sensors) of a healthcare IoT system. The main challenge faced by the existing security solutions is a lack of secure end-to-end communication. This thesis addresses this challenge by presenting a novel end-to-end security solution enabling end-points to securely and efficiently communicate with each other. The proposed solution meets the security requirements of a wide range of healthcare IoT systems while minimizing the overall hardware overhead of end-to-end communication. End-to-end communication is enabled by the holistic integration of the following contributions. The first contribution is the implementation of two architectures for remote monitoring of bio-signals. The first architecture is based on a low power IEEE 802.15.4 protocol known as ZigBee. It consists of a set of sensor nodes to read data from various medical sensors, process the data, and send them wirelessly over ZigBee to a server node. The second architecture implements on an IP-based wireless sensor network, using IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN). The system consists of a IEEE 802.11 based sensor module to access bio-signals from patients and send them over to a remote server. In both architectures, the server node collects the health data from several client nodes and updates a remote database. The remote webserver accesses the database and updates the webpage in real-time, which can be accessed remotely. The second contribution is a novel secure mutual authentication scheme for Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) implant systems. The proposed scheme relies on the elliptic curve cryptography and the D-Quark lightweight hash design. The scheme consists of three main phases: (1) reader authentication and verification, (2) tag identification, and (3) tag verification. We show that among the existing public-key crypto-systems, elliptic curve is the optimal choice due to its small key size as well as its efficiency in computations. The D-Quark lightweight hash design has been tailored for resource-constrained devices. The third contribution is proposing a low-latency and secure cryptographic keys generation approach based on Electrocardiogram (ECG) features. This is performed by taking advantage of the uniqueness and randomness properties of ECG's main features comprising of PR, RR, PP, QT, and ST intervals. This approach achieves low latency due to its reliance on reference-free ECG's main features that can be acquired in a short time. The approach is called Several ECG Features (SEF)-based cryptographic key generation. The fourth contribution is devising a novel secure and efficient end-to-end security scheme for mobility enabled healthcare IoT. The proposed scheme consists of: (1) a secure and efficient end-user authentication and authorization architecture based on the certificate based Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) handshake protocol, (2) a secure end-to-end communication method based on DTLS session resumption, and (3) support for robust mobility based on interconnected smart gateways in the fog layer. Finally, the fifth and the last contribution is the analysis of the performance of the state-of-the-art end-to-end security solutions in healthcare IoT systems including our end-to-end security solution. In this regard, we first identify and present the essential requirements of robust security solutions for healthcare IoT systems. We then analyze the performance of the state-of-the-art end-to-end security solutions (including our scheme) by developing a prototype healthcare IoT system

Security and Privacy for Green IoT-based Agriculture: Review, Blockchain solutions, and Challenges

open access articleThis paper presents research challenges on security and privacy issues in the field of green IoT-based agriculture. We start by describing a four-tier green IoT-based agriculture architecture and summarizing the existing surveys that deal with smart agriculture. Then, we provide a classification of threat models against green IoT-based agriculture into five categories, including, attacks against privacy, authentication, confidentiality, availability, and integrity properties. Moreover, we provide a taxonomy and a side-by-side comparison of the state-of-the-art methods toward secure and privacy-preserving technologies for IoT applications and how they will be adapted for green IoT-based agriculture. In addition, we analyze the privacy-oriented blockchain-based solutions as well as consensus algorithms for IoT applications and how they will be adapted for green IoT-based agriculture. Based on the current survey, we highlight open research challenges and discuss possible future research directions in the security and privacy of green IoT-based agriculture

An introduction of a modular framework for securing 5G networks and beyond

Fifth Generation Mobile Network (5G) is a heterogeneous network in nature, made up of multiple systems and supported by different technologies. It will be supported by network services such as device-to-device (D2D) communications. This will enable the new use cases to provide access to other services within the network and from third-party service providers (SPs). End-users with their user equipment (UE) will be able to access services ubiquitously from multiple SPs that might share infrastructure and security management, whereby implementing security from one domain to another will be a challenge. This highlights a need for a new and effective security approach to address the security of such a complex system. This article proposes a network service security (NSS) modular framework for 5G and beyond that consists of different security levels of the network. It reviews the security issues of D2D communications in 5G, and it is used to address security issues that affect the users and SPs in an integrated and heterogeneous network such as the 5G enabled D2D communications network. The conceptual framework consists of a physical layer, network access, service and D2D security levels. Finally, it recommends security mechanisms to address the security issues at each level of the 5G-enabled D2D communications network

Global Data Plane: A Widely Distributed Storage and Communication Infrastructure

With the advancement of technology, richer computation devices are making their way into everyday life. However, such smarter devices merely act as a source and sink of information; the storage of information is highly centralized in data-centers in today’s world. Even though such data-centers allow for amortization of cost per bit of information, the density and distribution of such data-centers is not necessarily representative of human population density. This disparity of where the information is produced and consumed vs where it is stored only slightly affects the applications of today, but it will be the limiting factor for applications of tomorrow.The computation resources at the edge are more powerful than ever, and present an opportunity to address this disparity. We envision that a seamless combination of these edge-resources with the data-center resources is the way forward. However, the resulting issues of trust and data-security are not easy to solve in a world full of complexity. Toward this vision of a federated infrastructure composed of resources at the edge as well as those in data-centers, we describe the architecture and design of a widely distributed system for data storage and communication that attempts to alleviate some of these data security challenges; we call this system the Global Data Plane (GDP).The key abstraction in the GDP is a secure cohesive container of information called a DataCapsule, which provides a layer of uniformity on top of a heterogeneous infrastructure. A DataCapsule represents a secure history of transactions in a persistent form that can be used for building other applications on top. Existing applications can be refactored to use DataCapsules as the ground truth of persistent state; such a refactoring enables cleaner application design that allows for better security analysis of information flows. Not only cleaner design, the GDP also enables locality of access for performance and data privacy—an ever growing concern in the information age.The DataCapsules are enabled by an underlying routing fabric, called the GDP network, which provides secure routing for datagrams in a flat namespace. The GDP network is a core component of the GDP that enables various GDP components to interact with each other. In addition to the DataCapsules, this underlying network is available to applications for native communication as well. Flat namespace networks are known to provide a number of desirable properties, such as location independence, built-in multicast, etc. However, existing architectures for such networks suffer from routing security issues, typically because malicious entities can claim to possess arbitrary names and thus, receive traffic intended for arbitrary destinations. GDP network takes a different approach by defining an ownership of the name and the associated mechanisms for participants to delegate routing for such names to others. By directly integrating with GDP network, applications can enjoy the benefits of flat namespace networks without compromising routing security.The Global Data Plane and DataCapsules together represent our vision for secure ubiquitous storage. As opposed to the current approach of perimeter security for infrastructure, i.e. drawing a perimeter around parts of infrastructure and trusting everything inside it, our vision is to use cryptographic tools to enable intrinsic security for the information itself regardless of the context in which such information lives. In this dissertation, we show how to make this vision a reality, and how to adapt real world applications to reap the benefits of secure ubiquitous storage

A Holistic Analysis of Internet of Things (IoT) Security : Principles, Practices, and New Perspectives

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Formal verification of authentication and service authorization protocols in 5G-enabled device-to-device communications using ProVerif

Device-to-Device (D2D) communications will be used as an underlay technology in the Fifth Generation mobile network (5G), which will make network services of multiple Service Providers (SP) available anywhere. The end users will be allowed to access and share services using their User Equipments (UEs), and thus they will require seamless and secured connectivity. At the same time, Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) will use the UE to offload traffic and push contents closer to users relying on D2D communications network. This raises security concerns at different levels of the system architecture and highlights the need for robust authentication and authorization mechanisms to provide secure services access and sharing between D2D users. Therefore, this paper proposes a D2D level security solution that comprises two security protocols, namely, the D2D Service security (DDSec) and the D2D Attributes and Capability security (DDACap) protocols, to provide security for access, caching and sharing data in network-assisted and non-network-assisted D2D communications scenarios. The proposed solution applies Identity-based Encryption (IBE), Elliptic Curve Integrated Encryption Scheme (ECIES) and access control mechanisms for authentication and authorization procedures. We formally verified the proposed protocols using ProVerif and applied pi calculus. We also conducted a security analysis of the proposed protocols

Mobile Edge Computing Based Immersive Virtual Reality Streaming Scheme

Recently, new services using virtual reality (VR)/augmented reality (AR) have appeared and then exploded in entertainment fields like video games and multimedia contents. In order to efficiently provide these services to users, an infrastructure for mobile cloud computing with powerful computing capabilities is widely utilized. However, existing mobile cloud system utilizes a cloud server located at a relatively long distance, so that there are problems that a user is not effectively provided with personalized immersive multimedia service. So, this paper proposes the home VR streaming system that can provide fast content access time and high immersiveness by using mobile edge computing (MEC)