Recognizing Patterns in Transmitted Signals for Identification Purposes

The ability to identify and authenticate entities in cyberspace such as users, computers, cell phones, smart cards, and radio frequency identification (RFID) tags is usually accomplished by having the entity demonstrate knowledge of a secret key. When the entity is portable and physically accessible, like an RFID tag, it can be difficult to secure given the memory, processing, and economic constraints. This work proposes to use unique patterns in the transmitted signals caused by manufacturing differences to identify and authenticate a wireless device such as an RFID tag. Both manufacturer identification and tag identification are performed on a population of 300 tags from three different manufacturers. A methodology to select features for identifying signals with high accuracy is developed and applied to passive RFID tags. The classifier algorithms K-Nearest Neighbors, Parzen Windows, and Support Vector Machines are investigated. The tag\u27s manufacturer can be identified with 99.93\% true positive rate. An individual tag is identified with 99.8\% accuracy, which is better than previously published work. Using a Hidden Markov Model with framed timing and power data, the tag manufacturer can be identified with 97.37\% accuracy and has a compact representation. An authentication system based on unique features of the signals is proposed assuming that the readers that interrogate the tags may be compromised by a malicious adversary. For RFID tags, a set of timing-only features can provide an accuracy of 97.22\%, which is better than previously published work, is easier to measure, and appears to be more stable than power features

Honeypot for wireless IoT networks

Ciele tejto práce ležia v teoretickej analýze konceptu Internet vecí (IoT) a jeho bezpečnostných problémov, praktickom výskume a vývoji nového unikát-neho zariadenia zvaného "IoT honeypot". Analytická časť práce sumarizuje existujúce hardvérové a softvérové riešenia, a sústredí sa na technológiu Soft-vérom definovaného rádia (SDR), ktorá bola použitá na vývoj IoT honeypot-u. Vyvíjaný prototyp v súčasnosti podporuje rozšírený Z-Wave protokol. Avšak, dizajn je dosť univerzálny na to, aby v budúcnosti podporoval ďalšie IoT protokoly. Motiváciou tejto práce bolo vytvoriť zariadenie, ktoré dokáže zbierať informácie o IoT komunikácii, detegovať potenciálnych útočníkov, a pôsobiť ako návnada, ktorá komplikuje útočníkom objaviť a prebrať kon-trolu nad skutočnými nasadenými IoT zariadeniami, ako sú senzory, spínače, a podobne. Výstupom tejto práce je funkčný IoT honeypot, ktorý podporuje viacero režimov fungovania (napríklad pasívny alebo interaktívny režim), a môže byť nasadený ako súčasť Z-Wave infraštruktúry. Predstavuje komple-ment k ostatným bezpečnostným nástrojom a mechanizmom, ktoré zvyšujú úroveň bezpečnosti IoT infraštruktúry.The goals of this thesis lay among theoretical analysis of the Internet of Things (IoT) concept and its security issues, and practical research and development of a new unique device called "IoT honeypot." The analytical part of the thesis summarizes existing hardware and software solutions and concentrates on Software Defined Radio (SDR) technology, which was used for the development of IoT honeypot. The developed prototype currently supports a wide-spread Z-Wave protocol. However, the design is universal enough to support other IoT protocols in the future. The motivation of this thesis was to create a device that can collect information about IoT traffic, detect potential attackers, and act as a decoy that complicates attackers to discover and hack real deployed IoT devices, such as sensors, switches, and so on. The result of the thesis is a working IoT honeypot that supports multiple modes of operation (such as passive or interactive mode), and that can be deployed as a part of a Z-Wave infrastructure. It is as a complement to other security tools and mechanisms that increase the security of IoT infrastructure

Wireless security for secure facilities

This thesis presents methods for securing a facility that has wireless connectivity. The goal of this research is to develop a solution to securing a facility that utilizes wireless communications. The research will introduce methods to track and locate the position of attackers. This research also introduces the idea of using a Honeynet system for added security. This research uses what is called Defense-In-Depth. Defense-in-depth is when multiple layers of security are used. The first of the layers is the Zone of Interference. This Zone is an area where jammer transmitters and directive antennas are set up to take advantage of the near-far-effect. The idea is to use the near-far-effect to give a stronger signal on the perimeter of the secure area, to mask any signals escaping from the secure area. This Zone uses directive Yagi antenna arrays to direct the radiation. There are multiple jamming methods that are utilized within this Zone. The next layer of security is the Honeynet Zone. The idea is to make an attacker believe that they are seeing real network traffic. This is done at the Honeynet Zone once a device has been determined to be unfriendly. Decoy mobile devices are first placed within the Honeynet Zone. Spoofed traffic is then created between the Honeynet base stations and the decoy mobile devices zone; using adaptive antennas incorporated within the design to face the signals away from the inside secure area. The third defense is position location and tracking. The idea is to have constant tracking of all devices in the area. There are several methods available to locate and track a device that is giving off an RF signal. This thesis looks at combining all these methods into an integrated, and more robust, facility security system

Towards Security and Privacy in Networked Medical Devices and Electronic Healthcare Systems

E-health is a growing eld which utilizes wireless sensor networks to enable access to effective and efficient healthcare services and provide patient monitoring to enable early detection and treatment of health conditions. Due to the proliferation of e-health systems, security and privacy have become critical issues in preventing data falsification, unauthorized access to the system, or eavesdropping on sensitive health data. Furthermore, due to the intrinsic limitations of many wireless medical devices, including low power and limited computational resources, security and device performance can be difficult to balance. Therefore, many current networked medical devices operate without basic security services such as authentication, authorization, and encryption. In this work, we survey recent work on e-health security, including biometric approaches, proximity-based approaches, key management techniques, audit mechanisms, anomaly detection, external device methods, and lightweight encryption and key management protocols. We also survey the state-of-the art in e-health privacy, including techniques such as obfuscation, secret sharing, distributed data mining, authentication, access control, blockchain, anonymization, and cryptography. We then propose a comprehensive system model for e-health applications with consideration of battery capacity and computational ability of medical devices. A case study is presented to show that the proposed system model can support heterogeneous medical devices with varying power and resource constraints. The case study demonstrates that it is possible to signicantly reduce the overhead for security on power-constrained devices based on the proposed system model

Digital contact tracing/notification for SARS-CoV-2: navigating six points of failure

Digital contact tracing/notification was initially hailed as a promising strategy to combat SARS-CoV-2, but in most jurisdictions it did not live up to its promise. To avert a given transmission event, both parties must have adopted the tech, it must detect the contact, the primary case must be promptly diagnosed, notifications must be triggered, and the secondary case must change their behavior to avoid the focal tertiary transmission event. If we approximate these as independent events, achieving a 26% reduction in R(t) would require 80% success rates at each of these six points of failure. Here we review the six failure rates experienced by a variety of digital contact tracing/notification schemes, including Singapore's TraceTogether, India's Aarogya Setu, and leading implementations of the Google Apple Exposure Notification system. This leads to a number of recommendations, e.g. that tracing/notification apps be multi-functional and integrated with testing, manual contact tracing, and the gathering of critical scientific data, and that the narrative be framed in terms of user autonomy rather than user privacy

The Influence of Breeding Density on Female Aggression, Parental Care, and Ornamentation in a Secondary-Cavity Nesting Warbler

Tradeoffs between individual survival and reproductive success associated with aggressive behaviors are a driving force of evolution, but these tradeoffs are often overlooked for aggressive conspecific interactions between females. For avian males, it is well documented that more aggressive individuals tend to provide less parental care. In the few studies that address this in females, the tradeoffs seem to be more context-dependent, varying due to factors such as predation pressure and habitat quality. The relationship between female ornamentation and aggression is similarly understudied, but evidence suggests that both aggression and ornamentation are important traits involved in social selection – the competition for resources other than mates. This study assessed the tradeoffs of female aggression related to parental care and reproductive success within the context of breeding density in the Prothonotary Warbler (Protonotaria citrea), a secondary cavity-nesting warbler that readily uses nest boxes. Breeding density is a proxy for reproductive resource availability in box nesting species. During incubation, we conducted staged nest intruder trials with a female decoy “perched” on the box, paired with playback of female chips, and recorded the focal female’s response. We also examined whether breast and crown feather coloration were correlated with female aggressive response. Our results show that females nesting in high-density environments were less aggressive and provisioned their young more often. We also observed that total nestling provisioning (male and female) was lower in pairs with more aggressive females. Additionally, one female breast feather ornamentation metric (yellow intensity) was negatively associated with aggression regardless of density, while another (carotenoid content) was positively associated with aggression only in high-density environments. Together with previous studies in this system that have found positive relationships between female ornamentation and individual fitness, our results suggest that female ornamentation may provide both inter- and intra-sexual signals and therefore function in both sexual and social selection, respectively. Through explicit consideration of the potential tradeoffs of female aggression, our results also suggest that the costs associated with female competitive traits can be mediated by breeding density

Cybersecurity of Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems: A Review

Industrial cyber-physical systems (ICPSs) manage critical infrastructures by controlling the processes based on the "physics" data gathered by edge sensor networks. Recent innovations in ubiquitous computing and communication technologies have prompted the rapid integration of highly interconnected systems to ICPSs. Hence, the "security by obscurity" principle provided by air-gapping is no longer followed. As the interconnectivity in ICPSs increases, so does the attack surface. Industrial vulnerability assessment reports have shown that a variety of new vulnerabilities have occurred due to this transition while the most common ones are related to weak boundary protection. Although there are existing surveys in this context, very little is mentioned regarding these reports. This paper bridges this gap by defining and reviewing ICPSs from a cybersecurity perspective. In particular, multi-dimensional adaptive attack taxonomy is presented and utilized for evaluating real-life ICPS cyber incidents. We also identify the general shortcomings and highlight the points that cause a gap in existing literature while defining future research directions.Comment: 32 pages, 10 figure