Fast Session Resumption in DTLS for Mobile Communications

DTLS is a protocol that provides security guarantees to Internet communications. It can operate on top of both TCP and UDP transport protocols. Thus, it is particularly suited for peer-to-peer and distributed multimedia applications. The same holds if the endpoints are mobile devices. In this scenario, mechanisms are needed to surmount possible network disconnections, often arising due to the mobility or the scarce resources of devices, that can jeopardize the quality of the communications. Session resumption is thus a main issue to deal with. To this aim, we propose a fast reconnection scheme that employs non-connected sockets to quickly resume DTLS communication sessions. The proposed scheme is assessed in a performance evaluation that confirms its viability.Comment: Proceedings of the IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking Conference 2020 (CCNC 2020

Towards end-to-end security in internet of things based healthcare

Healthcare IoT systems are distinguished in that they are designed to serve human beings, which primarily raises the requirements of security, privacy, and reliability. Such systems have to provide real-time notifications and responses concerning the status of patients. Physicians, patients, and other caregivers demand a reliable system in which the results are accurate and timely, and the service is reliable and secure. To guarantee these requirements, the smart components in the system require a secure and efficient end-to-end communication method between the end-points (e.g., patients, caregivers, and medical sensors) of a healthcare IoT system. The main challenge faced by the existing security solutions is a lack of secure end-to-end communication. This thesis addresses this challenge by presenting a novel end-to-end security solution enabling end-points to securely and efficiently communicate with each other. The proposed solution meets the security requirements of a wide range of healthcare IoT systems while minimizing the overall hardware overhead of end-to-end communication. End-to-end communication is enabled by the holistic integration of the following contributions. The first contribution is the implementation of two architectures for remote monitoring of bio-signals. The first architecture is based on a low power IEEE 802.15.4 protocol known as ZigBee. It consists of a set of sensor nodes to read data from various medical sensors, process the data, and send them wirelessly over ZigBee to a server node. The second architecture implements on an IP-based wireless sensor network, using IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN). The system consists of a IEEE 802.11 based sensor module to access bio-signals from patients and send them over to a remote server. In both architectures, the server node collects the health data from several client nodes and updates a remote database. The remote webserver accesses the database and updates the webpage in real-time, which can be accessed remotely. The second contribution is a novel secure mutual authentication scheme for Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) implant systems. The proposed scheme relies on the elliptic curve cryptography and the D-Quark lightweight hash design. The scheme consists of three main phases: (1) reader authentication and verification, (2) tag identification, and (3) tag verification. We show that among the existing public-key crypto-systems, elliptic curve is the optimal choice due to its small key size as well as its efficiency in computations. The D-Quark lightweight hash design has been tailored for resource-constrained devices. The third contribution is proposing a low-latency and secure cryptographic keys generation approach based on Electrocardiogram (ECG) features. This is performed by taking advantage of the uniqueness and randomness properties of ECG's main features comprising of PR, RR, PP, QT, and ST intervals. This approach achieves low latency due to its reliance on reference-free ECG's main features that can be acquired in a short time. The approach is called Several ECG Features (SEF)-based cryptographic key generation. The fourth contribution is devising a novel secure and efficient end-to-end security scheme for mobility enabled healthcare IoT. The proposed scheme consists of: (1) a secure and efficient end-user authentication and authorization architecture based on the certificate based Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) handshake protocol, (2) a secure end-to-end communication method based on DTLS session resumption, and (3) support for robust mobility based on interconnected smart gateways in the fog layer. Finally, the fifth and the last contribution is the analysis of the performance of the state-of-the-art end-to-end security solutions in healthcare IoT systems including our end-to-end security solution. In this regard, we first identify and present the essential requirements of robust security solutions for healthcare IoT systems. We then analyze the performance of the state-of-the-art end-to-end security solutions (including our scheme) by developing a prototype healthcare IoT system

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)

A SystemC Simulator for Secure Data Transfer in Healthcare Internet of Things

In this thesis, a simulator for secure data transfer between medical sensors and end-users is developed using smart e-health gateways in medical environments like hospitals, healthcare centers and old-age homes. The rate of adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) and the associated technology is on the rise but the security measures that accompany the said technology and the devices is not totally dependable. And the repercussions get serious when dealing with medical sensors because people’s lives are at stake. With medical sensors, due to their resource and energy constraints, it is difficult to apply strong and heavy cryptographic techniques to achieve maximum security. The use of smart e-health gateways here eases the burden on sensors by authenticating and authorizing the end-users on behalf of the sensors. This is achieved using certificate-based DTLS handshake protocol between the gateways and the end-user. Then, for end-to-end secure communication, session resumption is carried out between the sensors and the end-users which is not as energy consuming as the handshake. The whole simulator is designed using SystemC, which is a library of C++ classes. It is chosen for this implementation because of various advantages it has over other hardware programming languages. SystemC, along with its verification library covers almost all aspects related to system design and modeling and the syntax of SystemC and C++ are the same. All the components of the hardware design are defined as modules here and the target is to achieve communication between these modules. Finally, we calculate the time it takes for a set of values to go from the sensor to the gateway and the gateway to the end-user

End-to-end security scheme for mobility enabled healthcare Internet of Things

We propose an end-to-end security scheme for mobility enabled healthcare Internet of Things (IoT). The proposed scheme consists of (i) a secure and efficient end-user authentication and authorization architecture based on the certificate based DTLS handshake, (ii) secure end-to-end communication based on session resumption, and (iii) robust mobility based on interconnected smart gateways. The smart gateways act as an intermediate processing layer (called fog layer) between IoT devices and sensors (device layer) and cloud services (cloud layer). In our scheme, the fog layer facilitates ubiquitous mobility without requiring any reconfiguration at the device layer. The scheme is demonstrated by simulation and a full hardware software prototype. Based on our analysis, our scheme has the most extensive set of security features in comparison to related approaches found in literature. Energy-performance evaluation results show that compared to existing approaches, our scheme reduces the communication overhead by 26% and the communication latency between smart gateways and end users by 16%. In addition, our scheme is approximately 97% faster than certificate based and 10% faster than symmetric key based DTLS. Compared to our scheme, certificate based DTLS consumes about 2.2 times more RAM and 2.9 times more ROM resources. On the other hand, the RAM and ROM requirements of our scheme are almost as low as in symmetric key-based DTLS. Analysis of our implementation revealed that the handover latency caused by mobility is low and the handover process does not incur any processing or communication overhead on the sensors. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

A Review on Internet of Things (IoT): Security and Privacy Requirements and the Solution Approaches

The world is undergoing a dramatic rapid transformation from isolated systems to ubiquitous Internet-based-enabled 2018;things2019; capable of interacting each other and generating data that can be analyzed to extract valuable information. This highly interconnected global network structure known as Internet of Things will enrich everyone2019;s life, increase business productivity, improve government efficiency, and the list just goes on. However, this new reality (IoT) built on the basis of Internet, contains new kind of challenges from a security and privacy perspective. Traditional security primitives cannot be directly applied to IoT technologies due to the different standards and communication stacks involved. Along with scalability and heterogeneity issues, major part of IoT infrastructure consists of resource constrained devices such as RFIDs and wireless sensor nodes. Therefore, a flexible infrastructure is required capable to deal with security and privacy issues in such a dynamic environment. This paper presents an overview of IoT, security and privacy challenges and the existing security solutions and identifying some open issues for future research

Improving efficiency and security of IIoT communications using in-network validation of server certificate

The use of advanced communications and smart mechanisms in industry is growing rapidly, making cybersecurity a critical aspect. Currently, most industrial communication protocols rely on the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol to build their secure version, providing confidentiality, integrity and authentication. In the case of UDP-based communications, frequently used in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) scenarios, the counterpart of TLS is Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS), which includes some mechanisms to deal with the high unreliability of the transport layer. However, the (D)TLS handshake is a heavy process, specially for resource-deprived IIoT devices and frequently, security is sacrificed in favour of performance. More specifically, the validation of digital certificates is an expensive process from the time and resource consumption point of view. For this reason, digital certificates are not always properly validated by IIoT devices, including the verification of their revocation status; and when it is done, it introduces an important delay in the communications. In this context, this paper presents the design and implementation of an in-network server certificate validation system that offloads this task from the constrained IIoT devices to a resource-richer network element, leveraging data plane programming (DPP). This approach enhances security as it guarantees that a comprehensive server certificate verification is always performed. Additionally, it increases performance as resource-expensive tasks are moved from IIoT devices to a resource-richer network element. Results show that the proposed solution reduces DTLS handshake times by 50–60 %. Furthermore, CPU use in IIoT devices is also reduced, resulting in an energy saving of about 40 % in such devices.This work was financially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation through the TRUE-5G project PID2019-108713RB-C54/AEI/10.13039/501100011033. It was also partially supported by the Ayudas Cervera para Centros Tecnológicos grant of the Spanish Centre for the Development of Industrial Technology (CDTI) under the project EGIDA (CER-20191012), and by the Basque Country Government under the ELKARTEK Program, project REMEDY - Real tiME control and embeddeD securitY (KK-2021/00091)

Revisiting the Feasibility of Public Key Cryptography in Light of IIoT Communications

Digital certificates are regarded as the most secure and scalable way of implementing authentication services in the Internet today. They are used by most popular security protocols, including Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS). The lifecycle management of digital certificates relies on centralized Certification Authority (CA)-based Public Key Infrastructures (PKIs). However, the implementation of PKIs and certificate lifecycle management procedures in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) environments presents some challenges, mainly due to the high resource consumption that they imply and the lack of trust in the centralized CAs. This paper identifies and describes the main challenges to implement certificate-based public key cryptography in IIoT environments and it surveys the alternative approaches proposed so far in the literature to address these challenges. Most proposals rely on the introduction of a Trusted Third Party to aid the IIoT devices in tasks that exceed their capacity. The proposed alternatives are complementary and their application depends on the specific challenge to solve, the application scenario, and the capacities of the involved IIoT devices. This paper revisits all these alternatives in light of industrial communication models, identifying their strengths and weaknesses, and providing an in-depth comparative analysis.This work was financially supported by the European commission through ECSEL-JU 2018 program under the COMP4DRONES project (grant agreement N∘ 826610), with national financing from France, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, Austria, Czech, Belgium and Latvia. It was also partially supported by the Ayudas Cervera para Centros Tecnológicos grant of the Spanish Centre for the Development of Industrial Technology (CDTI) under the project EGIDA (CER-20191012), and in part by the Department of Economic Development and Competitiveness of the Basque Government through the project TRUSTIND—Creating Trust in the Industrial Digital Transformation (KK-2020/00054)