Intelligent Buildings in Smart Grids: A Survey on Security and Privacy Issues Related to Energy Management

During the last decade, the smart grid (SG) concept has started to become a reality, mainly thanks to the technical progress achieved in telecommunications, informatics and power electronics, among other domains, leading to an evolution of the traditional electrical grid into an intelligent one. Nowadays, the SG can be seen as a system of smart systems that include cyber and physical parts from different technologies that interact with each other. In this context, intelligent buildings (IBs) constitute a paradigm in which such smart systems are able to guarantee the comfort of residents while ensuring an appropriate tradeoff of energy production and consumption by means of an energy management system (EMS). These interconnected EMSs remain the objective of potential cyber-attacks, which is a major concern. Therefore, this paper conducts a survey, from a multidisciplinary point of view, of some of the main security and privacy issues related to IBs as part of the SG, including an overview of EMS, smart meters, and the main communication networks employed to connect IBs to the overall SG. Future research directions towards a security enhancement from both technical and human perspectives are also provided

A blockchain-based architecture for secure and trustworthy operations in the industrial Internet of Things

The industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) plays an important role in the industrial sector, where secure, scalable, and easily adopted technologies are being implemented for the smart industry. The traditional IIoT architectures are generally based on centralized architectures that are vulnerable to a single point of failure and to several cyber-attacks. Blockchain technology is frequently adopted in the modern industry because of its security and decentralization. This paper proposes a blockchain-based architecture that ensures secure and trustworthy industrial operations. A private and lightweight blockchain architecture is proposed to regulate access to valuable sensor and actuator data. To enhance the computational performance of the proposed architecture, real-time cryptographic algorithms are processed using a low-power ARM Cortex-M4 processor, and a highly scalable, fast, and energy-efficient consensus mechanism proof of authentication (PoAh) is deployed in the blockchain network. Extensive experiments and analysis proved the effectiveness of the proposed framework for smart industrial environments. Finally, we transform a conventional fruit processing plant into a secure and smart industrial platform by implementing the proposed architecture

Segurança de computadores por meio de autenticação intrínseca de hardware

Orientadores: Guido Costa Souza de Araújo, Mario Lúcio Côrtes e Diego de Freitas AranhaTese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de ComputaçãoResumo: Neste trabalho apresentamos Computer Security by Hardware-Intrinsic Authentication (CSHIA), uma arquitetura de computadores segura para sistemas embarcados que tem como objetivo prover autenticidade e integridade para código e dados. Este trabalho está divido em três fases: Projeto da Arquitetura, sua Implementação, e sua Avaliação de Segurança. Durante a fase de projeto, determinamos como integridade e autenticidade seriam garantidas através do uso de Funções Fisicamente Não Clonáveis (PUFs) e propusemos um algoritmo de extração de chaves criptográficas de memórias cache de processadores. Durante a implementação, flexibilizamos o projeto da arquitetura para fornecer diferentes possibilidades de configurações sem comprometimento da segurança. Então, avaliamos seu desempenho levando em consideração o incremento em área de chip, aumento de consumo de energia e memória adicional para diferentes configurações. Por fim, analisamos a segurança de PUFs e desenvolvemos um novo ataque de canal lateral que circunvê a propriedade de unicidade de PUFs por meio de seus elementos de construçãoAbstract: This work presents Computer Security by Hardware-Intrinsic Authentication (CSHIA), a secure computer architecture for embedded systems that aims at providing authenticity and integrity for code and data. The work encompassed three phases: Design, Implementation, and Security Evaluation. In design, we laid out the basic ideas behind CSHIA, namely, how integrity and authenticity are employed through the use of Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs), and we proposed an algorithm to extract cryptographic keys from the intrinsic memories of processors. In implementation, we made CSHIA¿s design more flexible, allowing different configurations without compromising security. Then, we evaluated CSHIA¿s performance and overheads, such as area, energy, and memory, for multiple configurations. Finally, we evaluated security of PUFs, which led us to develop a new side-channel-based attack that enabled us to circumvent PUFs¿ uniqueness property through their architectural elementsDoutoradoCiência da ComputaçãoDoutor em Ciência da Computação2015/06829-2; 2016/25532-3147614/2014-7FAPESPCNP

Security architecture for Fog-To-Cloud continuum system

Nowadays, by increasing the number of connected devices to Internet rapidly, cloud computing cannot handle the real-time processing. Therefore, fog computing was emerged for providing data processing, filtering, aggregating, storing, network, and computing closer to the users. Fog computing provides real-time processing with lower latency than cloud. However, fog computing did not come to compete with cloud, it comes to complete the cloud. Therefore, a hierarchical Fog-to-Cloud (F2C) continuum system was introduced. The F2C system brings the collaboration between distributed fogs and centralized cloud. In F2C systems, one of the main challenges is security. Traditional cloud as security provider is not suitable for the F2C system due to be a single-point-of-failure; and even the increasing number of devices at the edge of the network brings scalability issues. Furthermore, traditional cloud security cannot be applied to the fog devices due to their lower computational power than cloud. On the other hand, considering fog nodes as security providers for the edge of the network brings Quality of Service (QoS) issues due to huge fog device’s computational power consumption by security algorithms. There are some security solutions for fog computing but they are not considering the hierarchical fog to cloud characteristics that can cause a no-secure collaboration between fog and cloud. In this thesis, the security considerations, attacks, challenges, requirements, and existing solutions are deeply analyzed and reviewed. And finally, a decoupled security architecture is proposed to provide the demanded security in hierarchical and distributed fashion with less impact on the QoS.Hoy en día, al aumentar rápidamente el número de dispositivos conectados a Internet, el cloud computing no puede gestionar el procesamiento en tiempo real. Por lo tanto, la informática de niebla surgió para proporcionar procesamiento de datos, filtrado, agregación, almacenamiento, red y computación más cercana a los usuarios. La computación nebulizada proporciona procesamiento en tiempo real con menor latencia que la nube. Sin embargo, la informática de niebla no llegó a competir con la nube, sino que viene a completar la nube. Por lo tanto, se introdujo un sistema continuo jerárquico de niebla a nube (F2C). El sistema F2C aporta la colaboración entre las nieblas distribuidas y la nube centralizada. En los sistemas F2C, uno de los principales retos es la seguridad. La nube tradicional como proveedor de seguridad no es adecuada para el sistema F2C debido a que se trata de un único punto de fallo; e incluso el creciente número de dispositivos en el borde de la red trae consigo problemas de escalabilidad. Además, la seguridad tradicional de la nube no se puede aplicar a los dispositivos de niebla debido a su menor poder computacional que la nube. Por otro lado, considerar los nodos de niebla como proveedores de seguridad para el borde de la red trae problemas de Calidad de Servicio (QoS) debido al enorme consumo de energía computacional del dispositivo de niebla por parte de los algoritmos de seguridad. Existen algunas soluciones de seguridad para la informática de niebla, pero no están considerando las características de niebla a nube jerárquica que pueden causar una colaboración insegura entre niebla y nube. En esta tesis, las consideraciones de seguridad, los ataques, los desafíos, los requisitos y las soluciones existentes se analizan y revisan en profundidad. Y finalmente, se propone una arquitectura de seguridad desacoplada para proporcionar la seguridad exigida de forma jerárquica y distribuida con menor impacto en la QoS.Postprint (published version

Hardware security design from circuits to systems

The security of hardware implementations is of considerable importance, as even the most secure and carefully analyzed algorithms and protocols can be vulnerable in their hardware realization. For instance, numerous successful attacks have been presented against the Advanced Encryption Standard, which is approved for top secret information by the National Security Agency. There are numerous challenges for hardware security, ranging from critical power and resource constraints in sensor networks to scalability and automation for large Internet of Things (IoT) applications. The physically unclonable function (PUF) is a promising building block for hardware security, as it exposes a device-unique challenge-response behavior which depends on process variations in fabrication. It can be used in a variety of applications including random number generation, authentication, fingerprinting, and encryption. The primary concerns for PUF are reliability in presence of environmental variations, area and power overhead, and process-dependent randomness of the challenge-response behavior. Carbon nanotube field-effect transistors (CNFETs) have been shown to have excellent electrical and unique physical characteristics. They are a promising candidate to replace silicon transistors in future very large scale integration (VLSI) designs. We present the Carbon Nanotube PUF (CNPUF), which is the first PUF design that takes advantage of unique CNFET characteristics. CNPUF achieves higher reliability against environmental variations and increases the resistance against modeling attacks. Furthermore, CNPUF has a considerable power and energy reduction in comparison to previous ultra-low power PUF designs of 89.6% and 98%, respectively. Moreover, CNPUF allows a power-security tradeoff in an extended design, which can greatly increase the resilience against modeling attacks. Despite increasing focus on defenses against physical attacks, consistent security oriented design of embedded systems remains a challenge, as most formalizations and security models are concerned with isolated physical components or a high-level concept. Therefore, we build on existing work on hardware security and provide four contributions to system-oriented physical defense: (i) A system-level security model to overcome the chasm between secure components and requirements of high-level protocols; this enables synergy between component-oriented security formalizations and theoretically proven protocols. (ii) An analysis of current practices in PUF protocols using the proposed system-level security model; we identify significant issues and expose assumptions that require costly security techniques. (iii) A System-of-PUF (SoP) that utilizes the large PUF design-space to achieve security requirements with minimal resource utilization; SoP requires 64% less gate-equivalent units than recently published schemes. (iv) A multilevel authentication protocol based on SoP which is validated using our system-level security model and which overcomes current vulnerabilities. Furthermore, this protocol offers breach recognition and recovery. Unpredictability and reliability are core requirements of PUFs: unpredictability implies that an adversary cannot sufficiently predict future responses from previous observations. Reliability is important as it increases the reproducibility of PUF responses and hence allows validation of expected responses. However, advanced machine-learning algorithms have been shown to be a significant threat to the practical validity of PUFs, as they can accurately model PUF behavior. The most effective technique was shown to be the XOR-based combination of multiple PUFs, but as this approach drastically reduces reliability, it does not scale well against software-based machine-learning attacks. We analyze threats to PUF security and propose PolyPUF, a scalable and secure architecture to introduce polymorphic PUF behavior. This architecture significantly increases model-building resistivity while maintaining reliability. An extensive experimental evaluation and comparison demonstrate that the PolyPUF architecture can secure various PUF configurations and is the only evaluated approach to withstand highly complex neural network machine-learning attacks. Furthermore, we show that PolyPUF consumes less energy and has less implementation overhead in comparison to lightweight reference architectures. Emerging technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT) heavily rely on hardware security for data and privacy protection. The outsourcing of integrated circuit (IC) fabrication introduces diverse threat vectors with different characteristics, such that the security of each device has unique focal points. Hardware Trojan horses (HTH) are a significant threat for IoT devices as they process security critical information with limited resources. HTH for information leakage are particularly difficult to detect as they have minimal footprint. Moreover, constantly increasing integration complexity requires automatic synthesis to maintain the pace of innovation. We introduce the first high-level synthesis (HLS) flow that produces a threat-targeted and security enhanced hardware design to prevent HTH injection by a malicious foundry. Through analysis of entropy loss and criticality decay, the presented algorithms implement highly resource-efficient targeted information dispersion. An obfuscation flow is introduced to camouflage the effects of dispersion and reduce the effectiveness of reverse engineering. A new metric for the combined security of the device is proposed, and dispersion and obfuscation are co-optimized to target user-supplied threat parameters under resource constraints. The flow is evaluated on existing HLS benchmarks and a new IoT-specific benchmark, and shows significant resource savings as well as adaptability. The IoT and cloud computing rely on strong confidence in security of confidential or highly privacy sensitive data. As (differential) power attacks can take advantage of side-channel leakage to expose device-internal secrets, side-channel leakage is a major concern with ongoing research focus. However, countermeasures typically require expert-level security knowledge for efficient application, which limits adaptation in the highly competitive and time-constrained IoT field. We address this need by presenting the first HLS flow with primary focus on side-channel leakage reduction. Minimal security annotation to the high-level C-code is sufficient to perform automatic analysis of security critical operations with corresponding insertion of countermeasures. Additionally, imbalanced branches are detected and corrected. For practicality, the flow can meet both resource and information leakage constraints. The presented flow is extensively evaluated on established HLS benchmarks and a general IoT benchmark. Under identical resource constraints, leakage is reduced between 32% and 72% compared to the baseline. Under leakage target, the constraints are achieved with 31% to 81% less resource overhead

New Trends in Development of Services in the Modern Economy

The services sector strategic development unites a multitude of economic and managerial aspects and is one of the most important problems of economic management. Many researches devoted to this industry study are available. Most of them are performed in the traditional aspect of the voluminous calendar approach to strategic management, characteristic of the national scientific school. Such an approach seems archaic, forming false strategic benchmarks. The services sector is of special scientific interest in this context due to the fact that the social production structure to the services development model attraction in many countries suggests transition to postindustrial economy type where the services sector is a system-supporting sector of the economy. Actively influencing the economy, the services sector in the developed countries dominates in the GDP formation, primary capital accumulation, labor, households final consumption and, finally, citizens comfort of living. However, a clear understanding of the services sector as a hyper-sector permeating all spheres of human activity has not yet been fully developed, although interest in this issue continues to grow among many authors. Target of strategic management of the industry development setting requires substantive content and the services sector target value assessment

Personalized ambient parameters monitoring: design and implementing of a wrist-worn prototype for hazardous gases and sound level detection

The concentration is on “3D space utilization” as the concept and infrastructure of designing of a wearable in ambient parameters monitoring. This strategy is implemented according to “multi-layer” approach. In this approach, each group of parameters from the same category is monitored by a modular physical layer enriched with the respected sensors. Depending on the number of parameters and layers, each physical layer is located on top of another. The intention is to implement a device for “everyone in everywhere for everything”

Attacking and Defending Emerging Computer Systems Using The Memory Remanence Effect

In computer systems, manufacturing variances and hardware effects are typically abstracted away by the software layer. This dissertation explores how these effects, specifically memory remanence, can be used both as an attack vector and a tool to defend emerging computing systems. To achieve this, we show how time-keeping, anonymity, and authenticity can be affected by memory remanence. In terms of attacks, we explore the deanonymizing effect of approximate computing in the context of approximate memory in Probable Cause. We show how data passing through an approximate memory is watermarked with a device specific tag that points the attacker back to the device. In terms of defenses, we first present TARDIS: an approach to provide a notion of time for transiently powered embedded devices without requiring any hardware modification using remanence effect of SRAM. TARDIS allows these devices to keep a coarse-grained notion of time without the need for a running clock. Second, we propose data retention voltage of memory cells as a new type of physical unclonable function that allows for low-cost authentication and counterfeit resistance in computer systems.PHDComputer Science & EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/136985/1/rahmati_1.pd

Enabling Cyber-Physical Communication in 5G Cellular Networks: Challenges, Solutions and Applications

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are expected to revolutionize the world through a myriad of applications in health-care, disaster event applications, environmental management, vehicular networks, industrial automation, and so on. The continuous explosive increase in wireless data traffic, driven by the global rise of smartphones, tablets, video streaming, and online social networking applications along with the anticipated wide massive sensors deployments, will create a set of challenges to network providers, especially that future fifth generation (5G) cellular networks will help facilitate the enabling of CPS communications over current network infrastructure. In this dissertation, we first provide an overview of CPS taxonomy along with its challenges from energy efficiency, security, and reliability. Then we present different tractable analytical solutions through different 5G technologies, such as device-to-device (D2D) communications, cell shrinking and offloading, in order to enable CPS traffic over cellular networks. These technologies also provide CPS with several benefits such as ubiquitous coverage, global connectivity, reliability and security. By tuning specific network parameters, the proposed solutions allow the achievement of balance and fairness in spectral efficiency and minimum achievable throughout among cellular users and CPS devices. To conclude, we present a CPS mobile-health application as a case study where security of the medical health cyber-physical space is discussed in details