UniquID: A Quest to Reconcile Identity Access Management and the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) has caused a revolutionary paradigm shift in computer networking. After decades of human-centered routines, where devices were merely tools that enabled human beings to authenticate themselves and perform activities, we are now dealing with a device-centered paradigm: the devices themselves are actors, not just tools for people. Conventional identity access management (IAM) frameworks were not designed to handle the challenges of IoT. Trying to use traditional IAM systems to reconcile heterogeneous devices and complex federations of online services (e.g., IoT sensors and cloud computing solutions) adds a cumbersome architectural layer that can become hard to maintain and act as a single point of failure. In this paper, we propose UniquID, a blockchain-based solution that overcomes the need for centralized IAM architectures while providing scalability and robustness. We also present the experimental results of a proof-of-concept UniquID enrolment network, and we discuss two different use-cases that show the considerable value of a blockchain-based IAM.Comment: 15 pages, 10 figure

An Energy Aware and Secure MAC Protocol for Tackling Denial of Sleep Attacks in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks which form part of the core for the Internet of Things consist of resource constrained sensors that are usually powered by batteries. Therefore, careful energy awareness is essential when working with these devices. Indeed,the introduction of security techniques such as authentication and encryption, to ensure confidentiality and integrity of data, can place higher energy load on the sensors. However, the absence of security protection c ould give room for energy drain attacks such as denial of sleep attacks which have a higher negative impact on the life span ( of the sensors than the presence of security features. This thesis, therefore, focuses on tackling denial of sleep attacks from two perspectives A security perspective and an energy efficiency perspective. The security perspective involves evaluating and ranking a number of security based techniques to curbing denial of sleep attacks. The energy efficiency perspective, on the other hand, involves exploring duty cycling and simulating three Media Access Control ( protocols Sensor MAC, Timeout MAC andTunableMAC under different network sizes and measuring different parameters such as the Received Signal Strength RSSI) and Link Quality Indicator ( Transmit power, throughput and energy efficiency Duty cycling happens to be one of the major techniques for conserving energy in wireless sensor networks and this research aims to answer questions with regards to the effect of duty cycles on the energy efficiency as well as the throughput of three duty cycle protocols Sensor MAC ( Timeout MAC ( and TunableMAC in addition to creating a novel MAC protocol that is also more resilient to denial of sleep a ttacks than existing protocols. The main contributions to knowledge from this thesis are the developed framework used for evaluation of existing denial of sleep attack solutions and the algorithms which fuel the other contribution to knowledge a newly developed protocol tested on the Castalia Simulator on the OMNET++ platform. The new protocol has been compared with existing protocols and has been found to have significant improvement in energy efficiency and also better resilience to denial of sleep at tacks Part of this research has been published Two conference publications in IEEE Explore and one workshop paper

Survey on wireless technology trade-offs for the industrial internet of things

Aside from vast deployment cost reduction, Industrial Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks (IWSAN) introduce a new level of industrial connectivity. Wireless connection of sensors and actuators in industrial environments not only enables wireless monitoring and actuation, it also enables coordination of production stages, connecting mobile robots and autonomous transport vehicles, as well as localization and tracking of assets. All these opportunities already inspired the development of many wireless technologies in an effort to fully enable Industry 4.0. However, different technologies significantly differ in performance and capabilities, none being capable of supporting all industrial use cases. When designing a network solution, one must be aware of the capabilities and the trade-offs that prospective technologies have. This paper evaluates the technologies potentially suitable for IWSAN solutions covering an entire industrial site with limited infrastructure cost and discusses their trade-offs in an effort to provide information for choosing the most suitable technology for the use case of interest. The comparative discussion presented in this paper aims to enable engineers to choose the most suitable wireless technology for their specific IWSAN deployment

Towards Better Availability and Accountability for IoT Updates by means of a Blockchain

International audienceBuilding the Internet of Things requires deploying a huge number of devices with full or limited connectivity to the Internet. Given that these devices are exposed to attackers and generally not secured-by-design, it is essential to be able to update them, to patch their vulnerabilities and to prevent hackers from enrolling them into botnets. Ideally, the update infrastructure should implement the CIA triad properties, i.e., confidentiality, integrity and availability. In this work, we investigate how the use of a blockchain infrastructure can meet these requirements, with a focus on availability