Security architectures in mobile integrated pay-TV

This paper presents the design and describes the advantage of the state-of-the-art Mobile Integrated Conditional Access System (MICAS) concerning interoperability, personalisation, security and operational costs in Pay-TV systems. The Message Handling Subsystem is proposed and outlined together with ‘Follow-Me’ service, which proposed herewith to extend mobility and personalisation concepts on Pay-TV service

Mobile integrated conditional access system

This paper presents design of a novel security architecture integrating mobile and broadcasting technologies in the Pay-TV system. The security architecture proposed herein is a state-of-the-art solution to tackle well-known problems challenging current Pay-TV systems including but not limited to interoperability amongst service providers, relatively high cost of the service deployment, the security compromise, limited interactivity and bespoken services offered to subscribers. It also proposes the Follow-me service that enables subscribers to access their entitlements via an arbitrary set-top box

Cooperating broadcast and cellular conditional access system for digital television

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.The lack of interoperability between Pay‐TV service providers and a horizontally integrated business transaction model have compromised the competition in the Pay‐TV market. In addition, the lack of interactivity with customers has resulted in high churn rate and improper security measures have contributed into considerable business loss. These issues are the main cause of high operational costs and subscription fees in the Pay‐TV systems. This paper presents a novel end‐to‐end system architecture for Pay‐TV systems cooperating mobile and broadcasting technologies. It provides a cost‐effective, scalable, dynamic and secure access control mechanism supporting converged services and new business opportunities in Pay‐TV systems. It enhances interactivity, security and potentially reduces customer attrition and operational cost. In this platform, service providers can effectively interact with their customers, personalise their services and adopt appropriate security measures. It breaks up the rigid relationship between a viewer and set‐top box as imposed by traditional conditional access systems, thus, a viewer can fully enjoy his entitlements via an arbitrary set‐top box. Having thoroughly considered state‐of‐the‐art technologies currently being used across the world, the thesis highlights novel use cases and presents the full design and implementation aspects of the system. The design section is enriched by providing possible security structures supported thereby. A business collaboration structure is proposed, followed by a reference model for implementing the system. Finally, the security architectures are analysed to propose the best architecture on the basis of security, complexity and set‐top box production cost criteria

Community-Based Security for the Internet of Things

With more and more devices becoming connectable to the internet, the number of services but also a lot of threats increases dramatically. Security is often a secondary matter behind functionality and comfort, but the problem has already been recognized. Still, with many IoT devices being deployed already, security will come step-by-step and through updates, patches and new versions of apps and IoT software. While these updates can be safely retrieved from app stores, the problems kick in via jailbroken devices and with the variety of untrusted sources arising on the internet. Since hacking is typically a community effort? these days, security could be a community goal too. The challenges are manifold, and one reason for weak or absent security on IoT devices is their weak computational power. In this chapter, we discuss a community based security mechanism in which devices mutually aid each other in secure software management. We discuss game-theoretic methods of community formation and light-weight cryptographic means to accomplish authentic software deployment inside the IoT device community

Survey and Systematization of Secure Device Pairing

Secure Device Pairing (SDP) schemes have been developed to facilitate secure communications among smart devices, both personal mobile devices and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Comparison and assessment of SDP schemes is troublesome, because each scheme makes different assumptions about out-of-band channels and adversary models, and are driven by their particular use-cases. A conceptual model that facilitates meaningful comparison among SDP schemes is missing. We provide such a model. In this article, we survey and analyze a wide range of SDP schemes that are described in the literature, including a number that have been adopted as standards. A system model and consistent terminology for SDP schemes are built on the foundation of this survey, which are then used to classify existing SDP schemes into a taxonomy that, for the first time, enables their meaningful comparison and analysis.The existing SDP schemes are analyzed using this model, revealing common systemic security weaknesses among the surveyed SDP schemes that should become priority areas for future SDP research, such as improving the integration of privacy requirements into the design of SDP schemes. Our results allow SDP scheme designers to create schemes that are more easily comparable with one another, and to assist the prevention of persisting the weaknesses common to the current generation of SDP schemes.Comment: 34 pages, 5 figures, 3 tables, accepted at IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials 2017 (Volume: PP, Issue: 99

Privacy-Preserving Electronic Ticket Scheme with Attribute-based Credentials

Electronic tickets (e-tickets) are electronic versions of paper tickets, which enable users to access intended services and improve services' efficiency. However, privacy may be a concern of e-ticket users. In this paper, a privacy-preserving electronic ticket scheme with attribute-based credentials is proposed to protect users' privacy and facilitate ticketing based on a user's attributes. Our proposed scheme makes the following contributions: (1) users can buy different tickets from ticket sellers without releasing their exact attributes; (2) two tickets of the same user cannot be linked; (3) a ticket cannot be transferred to another user; (4) a ticket cannot be double spent; (5) the security of the proposed scheme is formally proven and reduced to well known (q-strong Diffie-Hellman) complexity assumption; (6) the scheme has been implemented and its performance empirically evaluated. To the best of our knowledge, our privacy-preserving attribute-based e-ticket scheme is the first one providing these five features. Application areas of our scheme include event or transport tickets where users must convince ticket sellers that their attributes (e.g. age, profession, location) satisfy the ticket price policies to buy discounted tickets. More generally, our scheme can be used in any system where access to services is only dependent on a user's attributes (or entitlements) but not their identities.Comment: 18pages, 6 figures, 2 table

Multimedia delivery in the future internet

The term “Networked Media” implies that all kinds of media including text, image, 3D graphics, audio and video are produced, distributed, shared, managed and consumed on-line through various networks, like the Internet, Fiber, WiFi, WiMAX, GPRS, 3G and so on, in a convergent manner [1]. This white paper is the contribution of the Media Delivery Platform (MDP) cluster and aims to cover the Networked challenges of the Networked Media in the transition to the Future of the Internet. Internet has evolved and changed the way we work and live. End users of the Internet have been confronted with a bewildering range of media, services and applications and of technological innovations concerning media formats, wireless networks, terminal types and capabilities. And there is little evidence that the pace of this innovation is slowing. Today, over one billion of users access the Internet on regular basis, more than 100 million users have downloaded at least one (multi)media file and over 47 millions of them do so regularly, searching in more than 160 Exabytes1 of content. In the near future these numbers are expected to exponentially rise. It is expected that the Internet content will be increased by at least a factor of 6, rising to more than 990 Exabytes before 2012, fuelled mainly by the users themselves. Moreover, it is envisaged that in a near- to mid-term future, the Internet will provide the means to share and distribute (new) multimedia content and services with superior quality and striking flexibility, in a trusted and personalized way, improving citizens’ quality of life, working conditions, edutainment and safety. In this evolving environment, new transport protocols, new multimedia encoding schemes, cross-layer inthe network adaptation, machine-to-machine communication (including RFIDs), rich 3D content as well as community networks and the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) overlays are expected to generate new models of interaction and cooperation, and be able to support enhanced perceived quality-of-experience (PQoE) and innovative applications “on the move”, like virtual collaboration environments, personalised services/ media, virtual sport groups, on-line gaming, edutainment. In this context, the interaction with content combined with interactive/multimedia search capabilities across distributed repositories, opportunistic P2P networks and the dynamic adaptation to the characteristics of diverse mobile terminals are expected to contribute towards such a vision. Based on work that has taken place in a number of EC co-funded projects, in Framework Program 6 (FP6) and Framework Program 7 (FP7), a group of experts and technology visionaries have voluntarily contributed in this white paper aiming to describe the status, the state-of-the art, the challenges and the way ahead in the area of Content Aware media delivery platforms