SecuCode: Intrinsic PUF Entangled Secure Wireless Code Dissemination for Computational RFID Devices

The simplicity of deployment and perpetual operation of energy harvesting devices provides a compelling proposition for a new class of edge devices for the Internet of Things. In particular, Computational Radio Frequency Identification (CRFID) devices are an emerging class of battery-free, computational, sensing enhanced devices that harvest all of their energy for operation. Despite wireless connectivity and powering, secure wireless firmware updates remains an open challenge for CRFID devices due to: intermittent powering, limited computational capabilities, and the absence of a supervisory operating system. We present, for the first time, a secure wireless code dissemination (SecuCode) mechanism for CRFIDs by entangling a device intrinsic hardware security primitive Static Random Access Memory Physical Unclonable Function (SRAM PUF) to a firmware update protocol. The design of SecuCode: i) overcomes the resource-constrained and intermittently powered nature of the CRFID devices; ii) is fully compatible with existing communication protocols employed by CRFID devices in particular, ISO-18000-6C protocol; and ii) is built upon a standard and industry compliant firmware compilation and update method realized by extending a recent framework for firmware updates provided by Texas Instruments. We build an end-to-end SecuCode implementation and conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate standards compliance, evaluate performance and security.Comment: Accepted to the IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computin

Design of Combined Coverage Area Reporting and Geo-casting of Queries for Wireless Sensor Networks

In order to efficiently deal with queries or other location dependent information, it is key that the wireless sensor network informs gateways what geographical area is serviced by which gateway. The gateways are then able to e.g. efficiently route queries which are only valid in particular regions of the deployment. The proposed algorithms combine coverage area reporting and geographical routing of queries which are injected by gateways.\u

PADS: Practical Attestation for Highly Dynamic Swarm Topologies

Remote attestation protocols are widely used to detect device configuration (e.g., software and/or data) compromise in Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios. Unfortunately, the performances of such protocols are unsatisfactory when dealing with thousands of smart devices. Recently, researchers are focusing on addressing this limitation. The approach is to run attestation in a collective way, with the goal of reducing computation and communication. Despite these advances, current solutions for attestation are still unsatisfactory because of their complex management and strict assumptions concerning the topology (e.g., being time invariant or maintaining a fixed topology). In this paper, we propose PADS, a secure, efficient, and practical protocol for attesting potentially large networks of smart devices with unstructured or dynamic topologies. PADS builds upon the recent concept of non-interactive attestation, by reducing the collective attestation problem into a minimum consensus one. We compare PADS with a state-of-the art collective attestation protocol and validate it by using realistic simulations that show practicality and efficiency. The results confirm the suitability of PADS for low-end devices, and highly unstructured networks.Comment: Submitted to ESORICS 201

Recent advances in industrial wireless sensor networks towards efficient management in IoT

With the accelerated development of Internet-of- Things (IoT), wireless sensor networks (WSN) are gaining importance in the continued advancement of information and communication technologies, and have been connected and integrated with Internet in vast industrial applications. However, given the fact that most wireless sensor devices are resource constrained and operate on batteries, the communication overhead and power consumption are therefore important issues for wireless sensor networks design. In order to efficiently manage these wireless sensor devices in a unified manner, the industrial authorities should be able to provide a network infrastructure supporting various WSN applications and services that facilitate the management of sensor-equipped real-world entities. This paper presents an overview of industrial ecosystem, technical architecture, industrial device management standards and our latest research activity in developing a WSN management system. The key approach to enable efficient and reliable management of WSN within such an infrastructure is a cross layer design of lightweight and cloud-based RESTful web service

IETF standardization in the field of the Internet of Things (IoT): a survey

Smart embedded objects will become an important part of what is called the Internet of Things. However, the integration of embedded devices into the Internet introduces several challenges, since many of the existing Internet technologies and protocols were not designed for this class of devices. In the past few years, there have been many efforts to enable the extension of Internet technologies to constrained devices. Initially, this resulted in proprietary protocols and architectures. Later, the integration of constrained devices into the Internet was embraced by IETF, moving towards standardized IP-based protocols. In this paper, we will briefly review the history of integrating constrained devices into the Internet, followed by an extensive overview of IETF standardization work in the 6LoWPAN, ROLL and CoRE working groups. This is complemented with a broad overview of related research results that illustrate how this work can be extended or used to tackle other problems and with a discussion on open issues and challenges. As such the aim of this paper is twofold: apart from giving readers solid insights in IETF standardization work on the Internet of Things, it also aims to encourage readers to further explore the world of Internet-connected objects, pointing to future research opportunities

Enhancing Trust in Devices and Transactions of the Internet of Things

With the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT), billions of smart embedded devices will interact frequently.These interactions will produce billions of transactions.With IoT, users can utilize their phones, home appliances, wearables, or any other wireless embedded device to conduct transactions.For example, a smart car and a parking lot can utilize their sensors to negotiate the fees of a parking spot.The success of IoT applications highly depends on the ability of wireless embedded devices to cope with a large number of transactions.However, these devices face significant constraints in terms of memory, computation, and energy capacity.With our work, we target the challenges of accurately recording IoT transactions from resource-constrained devices. We identify three domain-problems: a) malicious software modification, b) non-repudiation of IoT transactions, and c) inability of IoT transactions to include sensors readings and actuators.The motivation comes from two key factors.First, with Internet connectivity, IoT devices are exposed to cyber-attacks.Internet connectivity makes it possible for malicious users to find ways to connect and modify the software of a device.Second, we need to store transactions from IoT devices that are owned or operated by different stakeholders.The thesis includes three papers. In the first paper, we perform an empirical evaluation of Secure Boot on embedded devices.In the second paper, we propose IoTLogBlock, an architecture to record off-line transactions of IoT devices.In the third paper, we propose TinyEVM, an architecture to execute off-chain smart contracts on IoT devices with an ability to include sensor readings and actuators as part of IoT transactions