Blockchain's adoption in IoT: The challenges, and a way forward

© 2018 Elsevier Ltd The underlying technology of Bitcoin is blockchain, which was initially designed for financial value transfer only. Nonetheless, due to its decentralized architecture, fault tolerance and cryptographic security benefits such as pseudonymous identities, data integrity and authentication, researchers and security analysts around the world are focusing on the blockchain to resolve security and privacy issues of IoT. However, presently, not much work has been done to assess blockchain's viability for IoT and the associated challenges. Hence, to arrive at intelligible conclusions, this paper carries out a systematic study of the peculiarities of the IoT environment including its security and performance requirements and progression in blockchain technologies. We have identified the gaps by mapping the security and performance benefits inferred by the blockchain technologies and some of the blockchain-based IoT applications against the IoT requirements. We also discovered some practical issues involved in the integration of IoT devices with the blockchain. In the end, we propose a way forward to resolve some of the significant challenges to the blockchain's adoption in IoT

A Bluetooth 5 Opportunistic Edge Computing System for Vehicular Scenarios

[Abstract]: The limitations of many IoT devices in terms of storage, computing power and energy consumption require them to be connected to other devices when performing computationally intensive tasks, as happens with IoT systems based on edge computing architectures. However, the lack of wireless connectivity in the places where IoT nodes are deployed or through which they move is still a problem. One of the solutions to mitigate this problem involves using opportunistic networks, which provide connectivity and processing resources efficiently while reducing the communications traffic with remote clouds. Thus, opportunistic networks are helpful in situations when wireless communication coverage is not available, as occurs in certain rural areas, during natural disasters, in wars or when other factors cause network disruptions, as well as in other IoT scenarios in which the cloud becomes saturated (for example, due to an excessive amount of concurrent communications or when denial-of-service (DoS) attacks occur). This article presents the design and initial validation of a novel opportunistic edge computing (OEC) system based on Bluetooth 5 and the use of low-cost single-board computers (SBCs). After describing the proposed OEC system, experimental results are presented for a real opportunistic vehicular IoT scenario. Specifically, the latency and packet loss are measured thanks to the use of an experimental testbed made of two separate IoT networks (each conformed by an IoT node and an OEC gateway): one located in a remote office and another one inside a moving vehicle, which was driven at different vehicular speeds. The obtained results show average latencies ranging from 716 to 955 ms with packet losses between 7% and 27%. As a result, the developed system is useful for providing opportunistic services to moving IoT nodes with relatively low latency requirements.Xunta de Galicia; ED431C 2020/15Xunta de Galicia; ED431G 2019/01Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación; PID2020-118857RA-I0

Survey on Security Issues and Protective Measures in Different Layers of Internet of Things (IoT)

In general perspective, Internet of things is defined as a network of physical objects by connecting” things to things” through the sensors, actuators and processors, to communicate and exchange data and information among each other along with other related devices and systems spread over different locations, without human-to-human or human-to-computer interactions. This survey summarises all the security threats along with privacy issues that may be confronted by the end users in Internet of Things (IoT). The majority of survey is to gather information about the current security requirements for IoT, the further scope and the challenges in IoT and the measures to prevent attacks upon the IoT systems

Designing and implementing a distributed earthquake early warning system for resilient communities: a PhD thesis

The present work aims to comprehensively contribute to the process, design, and technologies of Earthquake Early Warning (EEW). EEW systems aim to detect the earthquake immediately at the epicenter and relay the information in real-time to nearby areas, anticipating the arrival of the shake. These systems exploit the difference between the earthquake wave speed and the time needed to detect and send alerts. This Ph.D. thesis aims to improve the adoption, robustness, security, and scalability of Earthquake Early Warning systems using a decentralized approach to data processing and information exchange. The proposed architecture aims to have a more resilient detection, remove Single point of failure, higher efficiency, mitigate security vulnerabilities, and improve privacy regarding centralized EEW architectures. A prototype of the proposed architecture has been implemented using low-cost sensors and processing devices to quickly assess the ability to provide the expected information and guarantees. The capabilities of the proposed architecture are evaluated not only on the main EEW problem but also on the quick estimation of the epicentral area of an earthquake, and the results demonstrated that our proposal is capable of matching the performance of current centralized counterparts

Efficient Key Management Schemes for Smart Grid

With the increasing digitization of different components of Smart Grid by incorporating smart(er) devices, there is an ongoing effort to deploy them for various applications. However, if these devices are compromised, they can reveal sensitive information from such systems. Therefore, securing them against cyber-attacks may represent the first step towards the protection of the critical infrastructure. Nevertheless, realization of the desirable security features such as confidentiality, integrity and authentication relies entirely on cryptographic keys that can be either symmetric or asymmetric. A major need, along with this, is to deal with managing these keys for a large number of devices in Smart Grid. While such key management can be easily addressed by transferring the existing protocols to Smart Grid domain, this is not an easy task, as one needs to deal with the limitations of the current communication infrastructures and resource-constrained devices in Smart Grid. In general, effective mechanisms for Smart Grid security must guarantee the security of the applications by managing (1) key revocation; and (2) key exchange. Moreover, such management should be provided without compromising the general performance of the Smart Grid applications and thus needs to incur minimal overhead to Smart Grid systems. This dissertation aims to fill this gap by proposing specialized key management techniques for resource and communication constrained Smart Grid environments. Specifically, motivated by the need of reducing the revocation management overhead, we first present a distributed public key revocation management scheme for Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) by utilizing distributed hash trees (DHTs). The basic idea is to enable sharing of the burden among smart meters to reduce the overall overhead. Second, we propose another revocation management scheme by utilizing cryptographic accumulators, which reduces the space requirements for revocation information significantly. Finally, we turn our attention to symmetric key exchange problem and propose a 0-Round Trip Time (RTT) message exchange scheme to minimize the message exchanges. This scheme enables a lightweight yet secure symmetric key-exchange between field devices and the control center in Smart Gird by utilizing a dynamic hash chain mechanism. The evaluation of the proposed approaches show that they significantly out-perform existing conventional approaches

A Novel Architectural Framework on IoT Ecosystem, Security Aspects and Mechanisms: A Comprehensive Survey

For the past few years, the Internet of Things (IoT) technology continues to not only gain popularity and importance, but also witnesses the true realization of everything being smart. With the advent of the concept of smart everything, IoT has emerged as an area of great potential and incredible growth. An IoT ecosystem centers around innovation perspective which is considered as its fundamental core. Accordingly, IoT enabling technologies such as hardware and software platforms as well as standards become the core of the IoT ecosystem. However, any large-scale technological integration such as the IoT development poses the challenge to ensure secure data transmission. Perhaps, the ubiquitous and the resource-constrained nature of IoT devices and the sensitive and private data being generated by IoT systems make them highly vulnerable to physical and cyber threats. In this paper, we re-define an IoT ecosystem from the core technologies view point. We propose a modified three layer IoT architecture by dividing the perception layer into elementary blocks based on their attributed functions. Enabling technologies, attacks and security countermeasures are classified under each layer of the proposed architecture. Additionally, to give the readers a broader perspective of the research area, we discuss the role of various state-of-the-art emerging technologies in the IoT security. We present the security aspects of the most prominent standards and other recently developed technologies for IoT which might have the potential to form the yet undefined IoT architecture. Among the technologies presented in this article, we give a special interest to one recent technology in IoT domain. This technology is named IQRF that stands for Intelligent Connectivity using Radio Frequency. It is an emerging technology for wireless packet-oriented communication that operates in sub-GHz ISM band (868 MHz) and which is intended for general use where wireless connectivity is needed, either in a mesh network or point-to-point (P2P) configuration. We also highlighted the security aspects implemented in this technology and we compare it with the other already known technologies. Moreover, a detailed discussion on the possible attacks is presented. These attacks are projected on the IoT technologies presented in this article including IQRF. In addition, lightweight security solutions, implemented in these technologies, to counter these threats in the proposed IoT ecosystem architecture are also presented. Lastly, we summarize the survey by listing out some common challenges and the future research directions in this field.publishedVersio