Key recovery in a business environment

This thesis looks at the use of key recovery primarily from the perspective of business needs, as opposed to the needs of governments or regulatory bodies. The threats that necessitate the use of key recovery as a countermeasure are identified together with the requirements for a key recovery mechanism deployed in a business environment. The applicability of mechanisms (mainly designed for law enforcement access purposes) is also examined. What follows from this analysis is that whether the target data is being communicated or archived can influence the criticality of some of the identified requirements. As a result, key recovery mechanisms used for archived data need to be distinguished from those used for communicated data, and the different issues surrounding those two categories are further investigated. Two mechanisms specifically designed for use on archived data are proposed. An investigation is also carried out regarding the interoperability of dissimilar key recovery mechanisms, when these are used for encrypted communicated data. We study a scheme proposed by the Key Recovery Alliance to promote interoperability between dissimilar mechanisms and we show that it fails to achieve one of its objectives. Instead, a negotiation protocol is proposed where the communicating parties can agree on a mutually acceptable or different, yet interoperable, key recovery mechanism(s). The issue of preventing unfair key recovery by either of two communicating parties, where one of the parties activates a covert channel for key recovery by a third party, is also investigated. A protocol is proposed that can prevent this. This protocol can also be used as a certification protocol for Diffie-Hellman keys in cases where neither the user nor the certification authority are trusted to generate the user’s key on their own. Finally, we study the use of key recovery in one of the authentication protocols proposed in the context of third generation mobile communications. We propose certain modifications that give it a key recovery capability in an attempt to assist its international deployment given potential government demands for access to encrypted communications

Smart Grid Communications: Overview of Research Challenges, Solutions, and Standardization Activities

Optimization of energy consumption in future intelligent energy networks (or Smart Grids) will be based on grid-integrated near-real-time communications between various grid elements in generation, transmission, distribution and loads. This paper discusses some of the challenges and opportunities of communications research in the areas of smart grid and smart metering. In particular, we focus on some of the key communications challenges for realizing interoperable and future-proof smart grid/metering networks, smart grid security and privacy, and how some of the existing networking technologies can be applied to energy management. Finally, we also discuss the coordinated standardization efforts in Europe to harmonize communications standards and protocols.Comment: To be published in IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial

A critical analysis of research potential, challenges and future directives in industrial wireless sensor networks

In recent years, Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks (IWSNs) have emerged as an important research theme with applications spanning a wide range of industries including automation, monitoring, process control, feedback systems and automotive. Wide scope of IWSNs applications ranging from small production units, large oil and gas industries to nuclear fission control, enables a fast-paced research in this field. Though IWSNs offer advantages of low cost, flexibility, scalability, self-healing, easy deployment and reformation, yet they pose certain limitations on available potential and introduce challenges on multiple fronts due to their susceptibility to highly complex and uncertain industrial environments. In this paper a detailed discussion on design objectives, challenges and solutions, for IWSNs, are presented. A careful evaluation of industrial systems, deadlines and possible hazards in industrial atmosphere are discussed. The paper also presents a thorough review of the existing standards and industrial protocols and gives a critical evaluation of potential of these standards and protocols along with a detailed discussion on available hardware platforms, specific industrial energy harvesting techniques and their capabilities. The paper lists main service providers for IWSNs solutions and gives insight of future trends and research gaps in the field of IWSNs

Poor Man's Content Centric Networking (with TCP)

A number of different architectures have been proposed in support of data-oriented or information-centric networking. Besides a similar visions, they share the need for designing a new networking architecture. We present an incrementally deployable approach to content-centric networking based upon TCP. Content-aware senders cooperate with probabilistically operating routers for scalable content delivery (to unmodified clients), effectively supporting opportunistic caching for time-shifted access as well as de-facto synchronous multicast delivery. Our approach is application protocol-independent and provides support beyond HTTP caching or managed CDNs. We present our protocol design along with a Linux-based implementation and some initial feasibility checks