Security of IoT in 5G Cellular Networks: A Review of Current Status, Challenges and Future Directions

The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to a global network that integrates real life physical objects with the virtual world through the Internet for making intelligent decisions. In a pervasive computing environment, thousands of smart devices, that are constrained in storage, battery backup and computational capability, are connected with each other. In such an environment, cellular networks that are evolving from 4G to 5G, are set to play a crucial role. Distinctive features like high bandwidth, wider coverage, easy connectivity, in-built billing mechanism, interface for M2M communication, etc., makes 5G cellular network a perfect candidate to be adopted as a backbone network for the future IoT. However, due to resource constrained nature of the IoT devices, researchers have anticipated several security and privacy issues in IoT deployments over 5G cellular network. Off late, several schemes and protocols have been proposed to handle these issues. This paper performs a comprehensive review of such schemes and protocols proposed in recent times. Different open security issues, challenges and future research direction are also summarized in this review paper

An Outline of Security in Wireless Sensor Networks: Threats, Countermeasures and Implementations

With the expansion of wireless sensor networks (WSNs), the need for securing the data flow through these networks is increasing. These sensor networks allow for easy-to-apply and flexible installations which have enabled them to be used for numerous applications. Due to these properties, they face distinct information security threats. Security of the data flowing through across networks provides the researchers with an interesting and intriguing potential for research. Design of these networks to ensure the protection of data faces the constraints of limited power and processing resources. We provide the basics of wireless sensor network security to help the researchers and engineers in better understanding of this applications field. In this chapter, we will provide the basics of information security with special emphasis on WSNs. The chapter will also give an overview of the information security requirements in these networks. Threats to the security of data in WSNs and some of their counter measures are also presented

Authenticated Key Agreement with Rekeying for Secured Body Sensor Networks

Many medical systems are currently equipped with a large number of tiny, non-invasive sensors, located on, or close to, the patient’s body for health monitoring purposes. These groupings of sensors constitute a body sensor network (BSN). Key management is a fundamental service for medical BSN security. It provides and manages the cryptographic keys to enable essential security features such as confidentiality, integrity and authentication. Achieving key agreement in BSNs is a difficult task. Many key agreement schemes lack sensor addition, revocation, and rekeying properties, which are very important. Our proposed protocol circumvents these shortcomings by providing node rekeying properties, as well as node addition and revocation. It proposes a key distribution protocol based on public key cryptography—the RSA (Rivest, Shamir and Adleman) algorithm, and the DHECC (Diffie-Hellman Elliptic Curve Cryptography) algorithm. The proposed protocol does not trust individual sensors, and partially trusts the base station (hospital). Instead of loading full pair-wise keys into each node, after installation our protocol establishes pair-wise keys between nodes according to a specific routing algorithm. In this case, each node doesn’t have to share a key with all of its neighbors, only those involved in the routing path; this plays a key role in increasing the resiliency against node capture attacks and the network storage efficiency. Finally we evaluate our algorithm from the BSN security viewpoint and evaluate its performance in comparison with other proposals

Authentication techniques in smart grid: a systematic review

Smart Grid (SG) provides enhancement to existing grids with two-way communication between the utility, sensors, and consumers, by deploying smart sensors to monitor and manage power consumption. However due to the vulnerability of SG, secure component authenticity necessitates robust authentication approaches relative to limited resource availability (i.e. in terms of memory and computational power). SG communication entails optimum efficiency of authentication approaches to avoid any extraneous burden. This systematic review analyses 27 papers on SG authentication techniques and their effectiveness in mitigating certain attacks. This provides a basis for the design and use of optimized SG authentication approaches

End-to-end security for mobile devices

Thesis (Master)--Izmir Institute of Technology, Computer Engineering, Izmir, 2004Includes bibliographical references (leaves: 120)Text in English; Abstract: Turkish and Englishix, 133 leavesEnd-to-end security has been an emerging need for mobile devices with the widespread use of personal digital assistants and mobile phones. Transport Layer Security Protocol (TLS) is an end-to-end security protocol that is commonly used in Internet, together with its predecessor, SSL protocol. By using TLS protocol in mobile world, the advantage of the proven security model of this protocol can be taken.J2ME (Java 2 Micro Edition) has been the de facto application platform used in mobile devices. This thesis aims to provide an end-to-end security protocol implementation based on TLS 1.0 specification and that can run on J2ME MIDP (Mobile Information Device Profile) environment. Because of the resource intensive public-key operations used in TLS, this protocol needs high resources and has low performance. Another motivation for the thesis is to adapt the protocol for mobile environment and to show that it is possible to use the protocol implementation in both client and server modes. An alternative serialization mechanism is used instead of the standard Java object serialization that is lacking in MIDP. In this architecture, XML is used to transmit object data.The mobile end-to-end security protocol has the main design issues of maintainability and extensibility. Cryptographic operations are performed with a free library, Bouncy Castle Cryptography Package. The object-oriented architecture of the protocol implementation makes the replacement of this library with another cryptography package easier.Mobile end-to-end security protocol is tested with a mobile hospital reservation system application. Test cases are prepared to measure the performance of the protocol implementation with different cipher suites and platforms. Measured values of all handshake operation and defined time spans are given in tables and compared with graphs

Analysis of Key Establishment Techniques for Secure D2D Communication in Emerging 5G Cellular Networks

Device-to-Device (D2D) communication as part of emerging 5G wireless networks presents a new paradigm for enhancing the performance of traditional cellular networks. The number of devices connected over the internet is dramatically increasing, and cellular operators are struggling to harness the overwhelming data traffic on their networks. D2D communication in a cellular network allows two cellular devices in close proximity to communicate directly with each other without going through the base station. D2D communication faces various challenges that include device discovery, resource allocation, interference and security; however, the security aspects of D2D are not sufficiently addressed. Due to limited computing capability and energy-constrained D2D devices, effective and lightweight security solutions are required for enabling successful D2D capability. To secure D2D communication, session key establishment is the most vital task. Public Key Cryptography (PKC) is the most widely used cryptosystem and have numerous security applications such as encryption, digital signature, and key exchange. This work analyses the performance of three PKC protocols that are commonly used for session key establishment and exchange, namely, Diffie-Hellman (DH), Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA) and Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH), with a focus on D2D communication. We performed extensive simulations for DH, RSA and ECDH, in D2D communication scenarios using OMNET++ simulator and explored the effect of various network factors on key establishment delays such as network size, the impact of interference between D2D pairs and the effect of interference from cellular users upon D2D users as well. The results reported in this paper can provide significant insight in assessing the suitability of DH, RSA and ECDH for the key establishment for D2D in 5G networks

An Overview of Cryptography (Updated Version, 3 March 2016)

There are many aspects to security and many applications, ranging from secure commerce and payments to private communications and protecting passwords. One essential aspect for secure communications is that of cryptography...While cryptography is necessary for secure communications, it is not by itself sufficient. This paper describes the first of many steps necessary for better security in any number of situations. A much shorter, edited version of this paper appears in the 1999 edition of Handbook on Local Area Networks published by Auerbach in September 1998

Enhanced Security and Privacy for Blockchain-enabled Electronic Medical Records in eHealth.

PhD Theses.Electronic medical records (EMRs) as part of an eHealth system are vital assets centrally managed by medical institutions and used to maintain up to date patients' medical histories. Such centralised management of EMRs may result in an increased risk of EMR damage or loss to medical institutions. In addition, it is di cult to monitor and control who can access their EMRs and for what reasons as eHealth may increasingly involve the use of IoT devices such as eHealth wearables and distributed networks. Blockchain is proposed as a promising method applied to support distributed data storage to maintain and share EMRs using its inherent immutability (forgery resistance). However, the original blockchain design cannot restrict unauthenticated or unauthorised data access for use as part of EMR management. Therefore, two novel authorisation schemes to enhance the security and privacy of blockchain use for EMRs are proposed in this work. The rst one can omit the agent layer (gateway) to authorise users' access to blockchain-enabled EMRs with block level gran- ularity, whilst maintaining compatibility with the underlying Blockchain data structure. Then, an improved scheme is proposed to implement multiple levels of granularity autho- risation, whilst supporting exible data queries. This scheme dispenses with the need to use a public key infrastructure (PKI) in authorisation and hence reduces the resource cost of computation and communication. Furthermore, to realise privacy preservation during authorisation, a challenge-response anonymous authorisation is proposed that avoids the disclosure of users' credentials when authorising data access requests. Compared with the baseline schemes, the proposed authorisation schemes can decrease the time consumption of computation and data transmission and reduce the transmitted data size so that they can be used in low-resource IoT devices applied to blockchain- enabled EMRs as demonstrated in performance experiments. In addition, theoretical i validations of correctness demonstrate that the proposed authorisation schemes work correctly

A Mobile Secure Bluetooth-Enabled Cryptographic Provider

The use of digital X509v3 public key certificates, together with different standards for secure digital signatures are commonly adopted to establish authentication proofs between principals, applications and services. One of the robustness characteristics commonly associated with such mechanisms is the need of hardware-sealed cryptographic devices, such as Hardware-Security Modules (or HSMs), smart cards or hardware-enabled tokens or dongles. These devices support internal functions for management and storage of cryptographic keys, allowing the isolated execution of cryptographic operations, with the keys or related sensitive parameters never exposed. The portable devices most widely used are USB-tokens (or security dongles) and internal ships of smart cards (as it is also the case of citizen cards, banking cards or ticketing cards). More recently, a new generation of Bluetooth-enabled smart USB dongles appeared, also suitable to protect cryptographic operations and digital signatures for secure identity and payment applications. The common characteristic of such devices is to offer the required support to be used as secure cryptographic providers. Among the advantages of those portable cryptographic devices is also their portability and ubiquitous use, but, in consequence, they are also frequently forgotten or even lost. USB-enabled devices imply the need of readers, not always and not commonly available for generic smartphones or users working with computing devices. Also, wireless-devices can be specialized or require a development effort to be used as standard cryptographic providers. An alternative to mitigate such problems is the possible adoption of conventional Bluetooth-enabled smartphones, as ubiquitous cryptographic providers to be used, remotely, by client-side applications running in users’ devices, such as desktop or laptop computers. However, the use of smartphones for safe storage and management of private keys and sensitive parameters requires a careful analysis on the adversary model assumptions. The design options to implement a practical and secure smartphone-enabled cryptographic solution as a product, also requires the approach and the better use of the more interesting facilities provided by frameworks, programming environments and mobile operating systems services. In this dissertation we addressed the design, development and experimental evaluation of a secure mobile cryptographic provider, designed as a mobile service provided in a smartphone. The proposed solution is designed for Android-Based smartphones and supports on-demand Bluetooth-enabled cryptographic operations, including standard digital signatures. The addressed mobile cryptographic provider can be used by applications running on Windows-enabled computing devices, requesting digital signatures. The solution relies on the secure storage of private keys related to X509v3 public certificates and Android-based secure elements (SEs). With the materialized solution, an application running in a Windows computing device can request standard digital signatures of documents, transparently executed remotely by the smartphone regarded as a standard cryptographic provider