Managed ecosystems of networked objects

Small embedded devices such as sensors and actuators will become the cornerstone of the Future Internet. To this end, generic, open and secure communication and service platforms are needed in order to be able to exploit the new business opportunities these devices bring. In this paper, we evaluate the current efforts to integrate sensors and actuators into the Internet and identify the limitations at the level of cooperation of these Internet-connected objects and the possible intelligence at the end points. As a solution, we propose the concept of Managed Ecosystem of Networked Objects, which aims to create a smart network architecture for groups of Internet-connected objects by combining network virtualization and clean-slate end-to-end protocol design. The concept maps to many real-life scenarios and should empower application developers to use sensor data in an easy and natural way. At the same time, the concept introduces many new challenging research problems, but their realization could offer a meaningful contribution to the realization of the Internet of Things

A secure over-the-air programming scheme in wireless sensor networks

Over-The-Air dissemination of code updates in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have been researchers’ point of interest in past a few years and more importantly security challenges toward remote propagation of code update have taken the majority of efforts in this context. Many security models have been proposed to establish a balance between the energy consumption and security strengthen with having their concentration on constraint nature of WSN nodes. For authentication purposes most of them have used Merkle-Hash-Tree to avoid using multiple public cryptography operations. These models mostly have assumed an environment in which security has to be in a standard level and therefore they have not investigated the tree structure for mission-critical situations in which security has to be in maximum possible extent (e.g. military zones). Two major problems have been identified in Merkle Tree structure which is used in Seluge scheme, including: 1) an exponential growth in number of overhead packets when block size of hash algorithm used in design is increased. 2) Limitation of using hash algorithms with larger block size of 11 bytes when payload size is set to 72 bytes. Then several existing security models are investigated for possible vulnerabilities and a set of countermeasures correspondingly named Security Model Requirements (SMR) is provided. After concentrating on Seluge’s design, a new secure Over-The-Air Programming (OTAP) scheme named Seluge++ is proposed that complies with SMR and replaces the use of inefficient Merkle Tree with a novel method