Context-Awareness Enhances 5G Multi-Access Edge Computing Reliability

The fifth generation (5G) mobile telecommunication network is expected to support Multi- Access Edge Computing (MEC), which intends to distribute computation tasks and services from the central cloud to the edge clouds. Towards ultra-responsive, ultra-reliable and ultra-low-latency MEC services, the current mobile network security architecture should enable a more decentralized approach for authentication and authorization processes. This paper proposes a novel decentralized authentication architecture that supports flexible and low-cost local authentication with the awareness of context information of network elements such as user equipment and virtual network functions. Based on a Markov model for backhaul link quality, as well as a random walk mobility model with mixed mobility classes and traffic scenarios, numerical simulations have demonstrated that the proposed approach is able to achieve a flexible balance between the network operating cost and the MEC reliability.Comment: Accepted by IEEE Access on Feb. 02, 201

Reliable and secure low energy sensed spectrum communication for time critical cloud computing applications

Reliability and security of data transmission and access are of paramount importance to enhance the dependability of time critical remote monitoring systems (e.g. tele-monitoring patients, surveillance of smart grid components). Potential failures for data transmissions include wireless channel unavailability and delays due to the interruptions. Reliable data transmission demands seamless channel availability with minimum delays in spite of interruptions (e.g. fading, denial-of-service attacks). Secure data transmissions require sensed data to be transmitted over unreliable wireless channels with sucient security using suitable encryption techniques. The transmitted data are stored in secure cloud repositories. Potential failures for data access include unsuccessful user authentications due to mis-management of digital identities and insucient permissions to authorize situation specic data access requests. Reliable and secure data access requires robust user authentication and context-dependent authorization to fulll situation specic data utility needs in cloud repositories. The work herein seeks to enhance the dependability of time critical remote monitoring applications, by reducing these failure conditions which may degrade the reliability and security of data transmission or access. As a result of an extensive literature survey, in order to achieve the above said security and reliability, the following areas have been selected for further investigations. The enhancement of opportunistic transmissions in cognitive radio networks to provide greater channel availability as opposed to xed spectrum allocations in conventional wireless networks. Delay sensitive channel access methods to ensure seamless connectivity in spite of multiple interruptions in cognitive radio networks. Energy ecient encryption and route selection mechanisms to enhance both secure and reliable data transmissions. Trustworthy digital identity management in cloud platforms which can facilitate ecient user authentication to ensure reliable access to the sensed remote monitoring data. Context-aware authorizations to reliably handle the exible situation specic data access requests. Main contributions of this thesis include a novel trust metric to select non-malicious cooperative spectrum sensing users to reliably detect vacant channels, a reliable delaysensitive cognitive radio spectrum hand-o management method for seamless connectivity and an energy-aware physical unclonable function based encryption key size selection method for secure data transmission. Furthermore, a trust based identity provider selection method for user authentications and a reliable context-aware situation specic authorization method are developed for more reliable and secure date access in cloud repositories. In conclusion, these contributions can holistically contribute to mitigate the above mentioned failure conditions to achieve the intended dependability of the timecritical remote monitoring applications

Socially Trusted Collaborative Edge Computing in Ultra Dense Networks

Small cell base stations (SBSs) endowed with cloud-like computing capabilities are considered as a key enabler of edge computing (EC), which provides ultra-low latency and location-awareness for a variety of emerging mobile applications and the Internet of Things. However, due to the limited computation resources of an individual SBS, providing computation services of high quality to its users faces significant challenges when it is overloaded with an excessive amount of computation workload. In this paper, we propose collaborative edge computing among SBSs by forming SBS coalitions to share computation resources with each other, thereby accommodating more computation workload in the edge system and reducing reliance on the remote cloud. A novel SBS coalition formation algorithm is developed based on the coalitional game theory to cope with various new challenges in small-cell-based edge systems, including the co-provisioning of radio access and computing services, cooperation incentives, and potential security risks. To address these challenges, the proposed method (1) allows collaboration at both the user-SBS association stage and the SBS peer offloading stage by exploiting the ultra dense deployment of SBSs, (2) develops a payment-based incentive mechanism that implements proportionally fair utility division to form stable SBS coalitions, and (3) builds a social trust network for managing security risks among SBSs due to collaboration. Systematic simulations in practical scenarios are carried out to evaluate the efficacy and performance of the proposed method, which shows that tremendous edge computing performance improvement can be achieved.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1010.4501 by other author

Game Theory Meets Network Security: A Tutorial at ACM CCS

The increasingly pervasive connectivity of today's information systems brings up new challenges to security. Traditional security has accomplished a long way toward protecting well-defined goals such as confidentiality, integrity, availability, and authenticity. However, with the growing sophistication of the attacks and the complexity of the system, the protection using traditional methods could be cost-prohibitive. A new perspective and a new theoretical foundation are needed to understand security from a strategic and decision-making perspective. Game theory provides a natural framework to capture the adversarial and defensive interactions between an attacker and a defender. It provides a quantitative assessment of security, prediction of security outcomes, and a mechanism design tool that can enable security-by-design and reverse the attacker's advantage. This tutorial provides an overview of diverse methodologies from game theory that includes games of incomplete information, dynamic games, mechanism design theory to offer a modern theoretic underpinning of a science of cybersecurity. The tutorial will also discuss open problems and research challenges that the CCS community can address and contribute with an objective to build a multidisciplinary bridge between cybersecurity, economics, game and decision theory

Internet of Things-aided Smart Grid: Technologies, Architectures, Applications, Prototypes, and Future Research Directions

Traditional power grids are being transformed into Smart Grids (SGs) to address the issues in existing power system due to uni-directional information flow, energy wastage, growing energy demand, reliability and security. SGs offer bi-directional energy flow between service providers and consumers, involving power generation, transmission, distribution and utilization systems. SGs employ various devices for the monitoring, analysis and control of the grid, deployed at power plants, distribution centers and in consumers' premises in a very large number. Hence, an SG requires connectivity, automation and the tracking of such devices. This is achieved with the help of Internet of Things (IoT). IoT helps SG systems to support various network functions throughout the generation, transmission, distribution and consumption of energy by incorporating IoT devices (such as sensors, actuators and smart meters), as well as by providing the connectivity, automation and tracking for such devices. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey on IoT-aided SG systems, which includes the existing architectures, applications and prototypes of IoT-aided SG systems. This survey also highlights the open issues, challenges and future research directions for IoT-aided SG systems