Massive Machine-Type Communication (mMTC) Access with Integrated Authentication

We present a connection establishment protocol with integrated authentication, suited for Massive Machine-Type Communications (mMTC). The protocol is contention-based and its main feature is that a device contends with a unique signature that also enables the authentication of the device towards the network. The signatures are inspired by Bloom filters and are created based on the output of the MILENAGE authentication and encryption algorithm set, which is used in the authentication and security procedures in the LTE protocol family. We show that our method utilizes the system resources more efficiently, achieves lower latency of connection establishment for Poisson arrivals and allows a $87\%$ signalling overhead reduction. An important conclusion is that the mMTC traffic benefits profoundly from integration of security features into the connection establishment/access protocols, instead of addressing them post-hoc, which has been a common practice.Comment: Accepted for presentation at ICC 201

GPS Anomaly Detection And Machine Learning Models For Precise Unmanned Aerial Systems

The rapid development and deployment of 5G/6G networks have brought numerous benefits such as faster speeds, enhanced capacity, improved reliability, lower latency, greater network efficiency, and enablement of new applications. Emerging applications of 5G impacting billions of devices and embedded electronics also pose cyber security vulnerabilities. This thesis focuses on the development of Global Positioning Systems (GPS) Based Anomaly Detection and corresponding algorithms for Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS). Chapter 1 provides an overview of the thesis background and its objectives. Chapter 2 presents an overview of the 5G architectures, their advantages, and potential cyber threat types. Chapter 3 addresses the issue of GPS dropouts by taking the use case of the Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) airport. By analyzing data from surveillance drones in the (DFW) area, its message frequency, and statistics on time differences between GPS messages were examined. Chapter 4 focuses on modeling and detecting false data injection (FDI) on GPS. Specifically, three scenarios, including Gaussian noise injection, data duplication, data manipulation are modeled. Further, multiple detection schemes that are Clustering-based and reinforcement learning techniques are deployed and detection accuracy were investigated. Chapter 5 shows the results of Chapters 3 and 4. Overall, this research provides a categorization and possible outlier detection to minimize the GPS interference for UAS enhancing the security and reliability of UAS operations

Towards Massive Connectivity Support for Scalable mMTC Communications in 5G networks

The fifth generation of cellular communication systems is foreseen to enable a multitude of new applications and use cases with very different requirements. A new 5G multiservice air interface needs to enhance broadband performance as well as provide new levels of reliability, latency and supported number of users. In this paper we focus on the massive Machine Type Communications (mMTC) service within a multi-service air interface. Specifically, we present an overview of different physical and medium access techniques to address the problem of a massive number of access attempts in mMTC and discuss the protocol performance of these solutions in a common evaluation framework

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