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

Performance measurements of Bluetooth 5 technique under interference

Abstract. This thesis focuses on experimental performance of the Bluetooth 5 technology and compares results with the previous version. Bluetooth technology, institute of electrical and electronics engineers (IEEE) Std. 802.15.4, and other techniques share the same unlicensed 2.4 GHz industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM) spectrum. Various technologies are operating in the same frequency band, and if the channel utilized by these technologies overlap, end in cross-technology interference (CTI). Measurements have been performed in indoor scenario and ZigBee nodes were used as an interference. Performance output of the Bluetooth 5 is compared to a previous release Bluetooth low energy (BLE) 4 which is currently one of the popular technologies in commercial wireless devices and expected to be even more widespread in the future. This new Bluetooth technology has featured increased data rate, low power consumption, longer range, higher broadcasting capacity, and improved coexistence with other wireless technologies operating in the same frequency band. The main goal of this work was to evaluate the experimental communication range and throughput of the BLE 5 coded version under interference. Nordic Semiconductor nRF52840 chipset has been used for measurements and result shows the practical communication range and throughput of BLE 5 coded version under interference. In this work, with error correction coding, one-third BLE link gain was achieved when considering packet error rate (PER) less than 10%. In addition, ZigBee interference was found to be very harmful for the Bluetooth communication when operating in the same frequency band

A Coordination Model and Framework for Developing Distributed Mobile Applications

How to coordinate multiple devices to work together as a single application is one of the most important challenges for building a distributed mobile application. Mobile devices play important roles in daily life and resolving this challenge is vital. Many coordination models have already been developed to support the implementation of parallel applications, and LIME (Linda In a Mobile Environment) is the most popular member. This thesis evaluates and analyzes the advantages and disadvantages of the LIME, and its predecessor Linda coordination model. This thesis proposes a new coordination model that focuses on overcoming the drawbacks of LIME and Linda. The new coordination model leverages the features of consistent hashing in order to obtain better coordination performance. Additionally, this new coordination model utilizes the idea of replica mechanism to guarantee data integrity. A cross-platform coordination framework, based on the new coordination model, is presented by this thesis in order to facilitate and simplify the development of distributed mobile applications. This framework aims to be robust and high-performance, supporting not only powerful devices such as smartphones but also constrained devices, which includes IoT sensors. The framework utilizes many advanced concepts and technologies such as CoAP protocol, P2P networking, Wi-Fi Direct, and Bluetooth Low Energy to achieve the goals of high-performance and fault-tolerance. Six experiments have been done to test the coordination model and framework from di erent aspects including bandwidth, throughput, packages per second, hit rate, and data distribution. Results of the experiments demonstrate that the proposed coordination model and framework meet the requirements of high-performance and fault-tolerance

A Survey on Wireless Security: Technical Challenges, Recent Advances and Future Trends

This paper examines the security vulnerabilities and threats imposed by the inherent open nature of wireless communications and to devise efficient defense mechanisms for improving the wireless network security. We first summarize the security requirements of wireless networks, including their authenticity, confidentiality, integrity and availability issues. Next, a comprehensive overview of security attacks encountered in wireless networks is presented in view of the network protocol architecture, where the potential security threats are discussed at each protocol layer. We also provide a survey of the existing security protocols and algorithms that are adopted in the existing wireless network standards, such as the Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, WiMAX, and the long-term evolution (LTE) systems. Then, we discuss the state-of-the-art in physical-layer security, which is an emerging technique of securing the open communications environment against eavesdropping attacks at the physical layer. We also introduce the family of various jamming attacks and their counter-measures, including the constant jammer, intermittent jammer, reactive jammer, adaptive jammer and intelligent jammer. Additionally, we discuss the integration of physical-layer security into existing authentication and cryptography mechanisms for further securing wireless networks. Finally, some technical challenges which remain unresolved at the time of writing are summarized and the future trends in wireless security are discussed.Comment: 36 pages. Accepted to Appear in Proceedings of the IEEE, 201

이기종 IoT 기기간 협력을 통한 네트워크 성능 향상

학위논문(박사) -- 서울대학교대학원 : 공과대학 전기·정보공학부, 2022. 8. 박세웅.The Internet of Things (IoT) has become a daily life by pioneering applications in various fields. In this dissertation, we consider increasing transmission data rate with energy efficiency, extending transmission coverage with low power, and improving reliability in congested frequency bands as three challenges to expanding IoT applications. We address two issues to overcome these challenges. First, we design a layered network system with a new structure that combines Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and Wi-Fi networks in a multi-hop network. Based on the system, we propose methods to increase data rate with energy efficiency and extend transmission coverage in a low-power situation. We implement the proposed system in the Linux kernel and evaluate the performance through an indoor testbed. As a result, we confirmed that the proposed system supports high data traffic and reduces average power consumption in the testbed compared to the existing single BLE/Wi-Fi ad-hoc network in a multi-hop situation. Second, we tackle the adaptive frequency hopping (AFH) problem of BLE through cross-technology communication (CTC) and channel weighting. We design the AFH scheme that weights the channels used by BLE devices with improving reliability in the congested bands of both Wi-Fi and BLE devices. We evaluate the proposed scheme through prototype experiments and simulations, confirming that the proposed scheme increases the packet reception rate of BLE in the congested ISM band compared to the existing AFH algorithm.사물인터넷은 현재 다양한 영역에서 application을 개척하여 생활화되어 왔다. 이 학위 논문에서는 사물인터넷의 응용 사례 확장을 위해 에너지 효율적인 전송 속도 향상, 저전력 상황에서의 전송 범위 확장, 혼잡한 대역에서의 신뢰성 향상을 새로운 도전 과제로 삼고, 이러한 도전 과제를 극복할 두 가지 주제를 다룬다. 첫째, 다중 홉 네트워크 상황에서의 블루투스 저전력과 Wi-Fi 네트워크를 결합 한 새로운 구조의 계층적 네트워크 시스템을 설계하고 이에 기반한 에너지 효율적인 전송 속도 향상 및 저전력 상황에서의 전송 범위확장을 제안한다. 제안된 시스템은 Linux 커널에 구현하여 실내 테스트베드를 통해 성능을 평가한다. 결과적으로 제안 한 기법이 다중 홉 상황에서 기존 블루투스 저전력/Wi-Fi 단일 ad-hoc 네트워크와 비교하여 높은 데이터 트래픽을 지원하며, 테스트베드에서의 평균 전력 소비를 줄 이는 것을 확인한다. 둘째, Cross-technology Communication (CTC)과 채널 가중치를 통한 블루투스 저전력의 Adaptive Frequency Hopping (AFH) 문제를 해결한다. 최종적으로 블루투스 저전력 기기가 사용하는 채널에 가중치를 두는 AFH 기법을 설계하여 Wi-Fi 와 블루투스 저전력 기기가 모두 혼잡한 대역에서의 신뢰성을 향상한다. 프로토타입 실험과 시뮬레이션을 통해 제안한 기법이 기존의 AFH 기법과 비교하여 혼잡한 ISM 대역에서 블루투스 저전력의 패킷 수신율을 증가시키는 것을 확인한다.1 Introduction 1 1.1 Motivation 1 1.2 Contributions and Outline 2 2 Wi-BLE: On Cooperative Operation of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Low Energy under IPv6 4 2.1 Introduction 4 2.2 Related Work 7 2.2.1 Multihop Connectivity for Wi-Fi or BLE 7 2.2.2 Multi-radio Operation 11 2.3 System Overview 13 2.3.1 Control Plane 13 2.3.2 Data Plane 16 2.3.3 Overall Procedure 16 2.4 MABLE: AODV Routing over BLE 17 2.4.1 BLE Channel Utilization 17 2.4.2 Joint Establishment of Route and Connection 20 2.4.3 Link Quality Metric for BLE Data Channels 22 2.4.4 Bi-directional Route Error Propagation 25 2.5 Wi-BLE: Wi-Fi Ad-hoc over BLE 27 2.5.1 Radio Selection 27 2.5.2 Routing and Radio Wake-up for Wi-Fi 30 2.6 Evaluation 32 2.6.1 BLE Routing 33 2.6.2 Wi-Fi Routing over BLE 35 2.6.3 Radio Selection 38 2.7 Summary 40 3 WBC-AFH: Direct Wi-Fi to BLE Communication based AFH 41 3.1 Introduction 41 3.2 Background 45 3.2.1 Frequency hopping in BLE 45 3.2.2 Cross Technology Communication 47 3.3 Proposed AFH 49 3.3.1 CTC based informing 50 3.3.2 Weighted channel select 51 3.3.3 Hopping set size optimization 52 3.3.4 WBC-AFH 54 3.4 Evaluation 57 3.4.1 Setup 57 3.4.2 Robustness 60 3.4.3 Reliability 61 3.5 Future Work 65 3.6 Summary 66 4 Conclusion 67박

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) data streaming and integration of BLE and 5G mobile connectivity implementation

Abstract. The energy-efficient wireless connectivity is among the crucial enabler technologies for the Internet of Things (IoT) employed throughout a great number of different verticals. The Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) radio access technology is today among the most widely spread short-range wireless communication technologies for the energy-limited IoT devices available on the market. The thesis focuses on understanding and experimentally assessing the performance of the BLE technology with respect to the maximum communication link throughput and discovering the ways how BLE can be integrated with the 5th Generation Mobile Network (5G). To reach this goal, the study investigates the BLE technology focusing specifically on the parameters affecting the communication throughput, implements and carries the empirical throughput performance measurements for various architectures involving communication between embedded devices and the communication between an embedded device and a mobile terminal, and explore the means of boosting the communication performance range of BLE-enabled devices by integrating BLE with 5G and enabling streaming of the BLE data over 5G. Based on the study, it has been shown that the Nordic UART service achieves a BLE communication throughput of 92 kbps for most of the parameter configurations of connection interval, physical layer configuration, and data lengths. Based on the observed Phone-to-Server mean throughput of 23.11 Mbps, it can be stated that the overall throughput of the end-to-end system, which includes a Board-to-Phone BLE connection and a Phone-to-Server TCP/IP connection, is entirely reliant on the throughput of the BLE connection

BotSpine - A Generic Simple Development Platform of Smartphones and Sensors or Robotics

The Internet of Things (IoT) emergence leads to an “intelligence” technology revolution in industrial, social, environmental and almost every aspect of life and objectives. Sensor and actuators are heavily employed in industrial production and, under the trend of IoT, smart sensors are in great demand. Smartphones stand out from other computing terminals as a result of their incomparable popularity, mobility and computer comparable computing capability. However, current IoT designs are developed among diverse platforms and systems and are usually specific to applications and patterns. There is no a standardized developing interface between smartphones and sensors/electronics that is facile and rapid for either developers or consumers to connect and control through smartphones. The goal of this thesis is to develop a simple and generic platform interconnecting smartphones and sensors and/or robotics, allowing users to develop, monitor and control all types of sensors, robotics or customer electronics simply over their smartphones through the developed platform. The research is in cooperation with a local company, Environmental Instruments Canada Inc. From the perspective of research and industrial interests, the proposed platform is designed for generally applicable, low cost, low energy, easily programmed, and smartphone based sensor and/or robotic development purposes. I will build a platform interfacing smartphones and sensors including hardware, firmware structures and software application. The platform is named BotSpine and it provides an energy-efficient real-time wireless communication. This thesis also implements BotSpine by redesigning a radon sniffer robot with the developed interface, demonstrated that BotSpine is able to achieve expectations. BotSpine performs a fast and secure connection with smartphones and its command/BASIC program features render controlling and developing robotics and electronics easy and simple

File Tracking For Mobile Devices

Since 2010, the smart device has become an integral part of people’s daily lives. The popularity of smart devices has increased dramatically. However, as the number of devices owned by an individual user increases, so does the risk of data leakage and loss. This problem has started to draw attention because the data contained on smart devices tends to be personal or sensitive in nature. Many people have so much data on their devices that they have no idea as to what they are missing when a device is lost. Although there are already some solutions for data recovery, a data backup system on a remote server, these solutions are not accessible in the non-Internet environment. Development of a data recovery system that is accessible in the non-Internet environment is essential because of the constraints of mobile devices, such as unreliable network. This research proposes an architecture that allows the data recovery in both Internet (cloud) and Non-Internet (local) network by using different connection technologies. A data tracking mechanism has also been designed to monitor data flow among multiple devices, such as the cloud server, mobile devices, and tablets. Additionally, a synchronization system has been developed to ensure the consistency of tracking information. By designing and implementing this architecture, the two problems regarding to the data: "what is where" and "who has what" are resolved