Lightweight IoT security middleware for end-to-end cloud-fog communication

Dr. Prasad Calyam, Thesis Supervisor.Field of study: Computer science."May 2017."IoT (Internet of Things) based smart devices such as sensors and wearables have been actively used in edge clouds i.e., 'fogs' to provide critical data during scenarios ranging from e.g., disaster response to in-home healthcare. Since these devices typically operate in resource constrained environments at the network-edge, end-to-end security protocols have to be lightweight while also being robust, flexible and energy-efficient for data import/ export to/from cloud platforms. In this thesis, we present the design and implementation of a lightweight IoT security middleware for end-to-end cloud-fog communications involving smart devices and cloud-hosted applications. The novelty of our middleware is in its ability to cope with intermittent network connectivity as well as device constraints in terms of computational power, memory and network bandwidth. To provide security during intermittent network conditions, we use a Session Resumption concept in order to reuse encrypted sessions from recent past, if a recently disconnected device wants to resume a prior connection that was interrupted. The primary design goal is to not only secure IoT device communications, but also to maintain security compatibility with an existing core cloud infrastructure. Experiment results show how our middleware implementation provides fast and resource-aware security by leveraging static pre-shared keys (PSKs) for a variety of IoT-based application requirements. Thus, our work lays a foundation for promoting increased adoption of static properties such as Static PSKs that can be highly suitable for handling the trade-offs in high security or faster data transfer requirements within IoT-based applications.Includes bibliographical references (pages 58-60)

An Autonomous Surface Vehicle for Long Term Operations

Environmental monitoring of marine environments presents several challenges: the harshness of the environment, the often remote location, and most importantly, the vast area it covers. Manual operations are time consuming, often dangerous, and labor intensive. Operations from oceanographic vessels are costly and limited to open seas and generally deeper bodies of water. In addition, with lake, river, and ocean shoreline being a finite resource, waterfront property presents an ever increasing valued commodity, requiring exploration and continued monitoring of remote waterways. In order to efficiently explore and monitor currently known marine environments as well as reach and explore remote areas of interest, we present a design of an autonomous surface vehicle (ASV) with the power to cover large areas, the payload capacity to carry sufficient power and sensor equipment, and enough fuel to remain on task for extended periods. An analysis of the design and a discussion on lessons learned during deployments is presented in this paper.Comment: In proceedings of MTS/IEEE OCEANS, 2018, Charlesto

EC-CENTRIC: An Energy- and Context-Centric Perspective on IoT Systems and Protocol Design

The radio transceiver of an IoT device is often where most of the energy is consumed. For this reason, most research so far has focused on low power circuit and energy efficient physical layer designs, with the goal of reducing the average energy per information bit required for communication. While these efforts are valuable per se, their actual effectiveness can be partially neutralized by ill-designed network, processing and resource management solutions, which can become a primary factor of performance degradation, in terms of throughput, responsiveness and energy efficiency. The objective of this paper is to describe an energy-centric and context-aware optimization framework that accounts for the energy impact of the fundamental functionalities of an IoT system and that proceeds along three main technical thrusts: 1) balancing signal-dependent processing techniques (compression and feature extraction) and communication tasks; 2) jointly designing channel access and routing protocols to maximize the network lifetime; 3) providing self-adaptability to different operating conditions through the adoption of suitable learning architectures and of flexible/reconfigurable algorithms and protocols. After discussing this framework, we present some preliminary results that validate the effectiveness of our proposed line of action, and show how the use of adaptive signal processing and channel access techniques allows an IoT network to dynamically tune lifetime for signal distortion, according to the requirements dictated by the application

Design of a flexible and robust gateway to collect sensor data in intermittent power environments

The development of a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) gateway is challenging for sites where limited infrastructures lead to frequent power shortages and network unreliability. In this paper, we present a low-power, low-cost 802.15.4 and 802.11 compatible solution which uses open source software to meet local conditions. Using the SunSPOT motes on a system which is mostly platform independent, our system is based on the Fox embedded Linux board and equipped with a USB flash drive and a USB WiFi adapter. The system can be solar powered, and the results of a solar system design are presented. All the hardware components are available off-the-shelf and are easy to assemble. We conclude that our system is preferred for applications in remote areas, where a stable power supply and a reliable network infrastructure are lacking. Furthermore, it can be used to extend the range of WSNs by layering a network of long-range motes above islands of low-range motes

Enabling Micro-level Demand-Side Grid Flexiblity in Resource Constrained Environments

The increased penetration of uncertain and variable renewable energy presents various resource and operational electric grid challenges. Micro-level (household and small commercial) demand-side grid flexibility could be a cost-effective strategy to integrate high penetrations of wind and solar energy, but literature and field deployments exploring the necessary information and communication technologies (ICTs) are scant. This paper presents an exploratory framework for enabling information driven grid flexibility through the Internet of Things (IoT), and a proof-of-concept wireless sensor gateway (FlexBox) to collect the necessary parameters for adequately monitoring and actuating the micro-level demand-side. In the summer of 2015, thirty sensor gateways were deployed in the city of Managua (Nicaragua) to develop a baseline for a near future small-scale demand response pilot implementation. FlexBox field data has begun shedding light on relationships between ambient temperature and load energy consumption, load and building envelope energy efficiency challenges, latency communication network challenges, and opportunities to engage existing demand-side user behavioral patterns. Information driven grid flexibility strategies present great opportunity to develop new technologies, system architectures, and implementation approaches that can easily scale across regions, incomes, and levels of development

On the development of IoT systems

Peer reviewe

HoPP: Robust and Resilient Publish-Subscribe for an Information-Centric Internet of Things

This paper revisits NDN deployment in the IoT with a special focus on the interaction of sensors and actuators. Such scenarios require high responsiveness and limited control state at the constrained nodes. We argue that the NDN request-response pattern which prevents data push is vital for IoT networks. We contribute HoP-and-Pull (HoPP), a robust publish-subscribe scheme for typical IoT scenarios that targets IoT networks consisting of hundreds of resource constrained devices at intermittent connectivity. Our approach limits the FIB tables to a minimum and naturally supports mobility, temporary network partitioning, data aggregation and near real-time reactivity. We experimentally evaluate the protocol in a real-world deployment using the IoT-Lab testbed with varying numbers of constrained devices, each wirelessly interconnected via IEEE 802.15.4 LowPANs. Implementations are built on CCN-lite with RIOT and support experiments using various single- and multi-hop scenarios