Security protocols suite for machine-to-machine systems

Nowadays, the great diffusion of advanced devices, such as smart-phones, has shown that there is a growing trend to rely on new technologies to generate and/or support progress; the society is clearly ready to trust on next-generation communication systems to face today’s concerns on economic and social fields. The reason for this sociological change is represented by the fact that the technologies have been open to all users, even if the latter do not necessarily have a specific knowledge in this field, and therefore the introduction of new user-friendly applications has now appeared as a business opportunity and a key factor to increase the general cohesion among all citizens. Within the actors of this technological evolution, wireless machine-to-machine (M2M) networks are becoming of great importance. These wireless networks are made up of interconnected low-power devices that are able to provide a great variety of services with little or even no user intervention. Examples of these services can be fleet management, fire detection, utilities consumption (water and energy distribution, etc.) or patients monitoring. However, since any arising technology goes together with its security threats, which have to be faced, further studies are necessary to secure wireless M2M technology. In this context, main threats are those related to attacks to the services availability and to the privacy of both the subscribers’ and the services providers’ data. Taking into account the often limited resources of the M2M devices at the hardware level, ensuring the availability and privacy requirements in the range of M2M applications while minimizing the waste of valuable resources is even more challenging. Based on the above facts, this Ph. D. thesis is aimed at providing efficient security solutions for wireless M2M networks that effectively reduce energy consumption of the network while not affecting the overall security services of the system. With this goal, we first propose a coherent taxonomy of M2M network that allows us to identify which security topics deserve special attention and which entities or specific services are particularly threatened. Second, we define an efficient, secure-data aggregation scheme that is able to increase the network lifetime by optimizing the energy consumption of the devices. Third, we propose a novel physical authenticator or frame checker that minimizes the communication costs in wireless channels and that successfully faces exhaustion attacks. Fourth, we study specific aspects of typical key management schemes to provide a novel protocol which ensures the distribution of secret keys for all the cryptographic methods used in this system. Fifth, we describe the collaboration with the WAVE2M community in order to define a proper frame format actually able to support the necessary security services, including the ones that we have already proposed; WAVE2M was funded to promote the global use of an emerging wireless communication technology for ultra-low and long-range services. And finally sixth, we provide with an accurate analysis of privacy solutions that actually fit M2M-networks services’ requirements. All the analyses along this thesis are corroborated by simulations that confirm significant improvements in terms of efficiency while supporting the necessary security requirements for M2M networks

Privacy in the Smart City - Applications, Technologies, Challenges and Solutions

Many modern cities strive to integrate information technology into every aspect of city life to create so-called smart cities. Smart cities rely on a large number of application areas and technologies to realize complex interactions between citizens, third parties, and city departments. This overwhelming complexity is one reason why holistic privacy protection only rarely enters the picture. A lack of privacy can result in discrimination and social sorting, creating a fundamentally unequal society. To prevent this, we believe that a better understanding of smart cities and their privacy implications is needed. We therefore systematize the application areas, enabling technologies, privacy types, attackers and data sources for the attacks, giving structure to the fuzzy term “smart city”. Based on our taxonomies, we describe existing privacy-enhancing technologies, review the state of the art in real cities around the world, and discuss promising future research directions. Our survey can serve as a reference guide, contributing to the development of privacy-friendly smart cities

Smart Grid Metering Networks: A Survey on Security, Privacy and Open Research Issues

Smart grid (SG) networks are newly upgraded networks of connected objects that greatly improve reliability, efficiency and sustainability of the traditional energy infrastructure. In this respect, the smart metering infrastructure (SMI) plays an important role in controlling, monitoring and managing multiple domains in the SG. Despite the salient features of SMI, security and privacy issues have been under debate because of the large number of heterogeneous devices that are anticipated to be coordinated through public communication networks. This survey paper shows a brief overview of real cyber attack incidents in traditional energy networks and those targeting the smart metering network. Specifically, we present a threat taxonomy considering: (i) threats in system-level security, (ii) threats and/or theft of services, and (iii) threats to privacy. Based on the presented threats, we derive a set of security and privacy requirements for SG metering networks. Furthermore, we discuss various schemes that have been proposed to address these threats, considering the pros and cons of each. Finally, we investigate the open research issues to shed new light on future research directions in smart grid metering networks

An Approach to Guide Users Towards Less Revealing Internet Browsers

When browsing the Internet, HTTP headers enable both clients and servers send extra data in their requests or responses such as the User-Agent string. This string contains information related to the sender’s device, browser, and operating system. Previous research has shown that there are numerous privacy and security risks result from exposing sensitive information in the User-Agent string. For example, it enables device and browser fingerprinting and user tracking and identification. Our large analysis of thousands of User-Agent strings shows that browsers differ tremendously in the amount of information they include in their User-Agent strings. As such, our work aims at guiding users towards using less exposing browsers. In doing so, we propose to assign an exposure score to browsers based on the information they expose and vulnerability records. Thus, our contribution in this work is as follows: first, provide a full implementation that is ready to be deployed and used by users. Second, conduct a user study to identify the effectiveness and limitations of our proposed approach. Our implementation is based on using more than 52 thousand unique browsers. Our performance and validation analysis show that our solution is accurate and efficient. The source code and data set are publicly available and the solution has been deployed

Security in Distributed, Grid, Mobile, and Pervasive Computing

This book addresses the increasing demand to guarantee privacy, integrity, and availability of resources in networks and distributed systems. It first reviews security issues and challenges in content distribution networks, describes key agreement protocols based on the Diffie-Hellman key exchange and key management protocols for complex distributed systems like the Internet, and discusses securing design patterns for distributed systems. The next section focuses on security in mobile computing and wireless networks. After a section on grid computing security, the book presents an overview of security solutions for pervasive healthcare systems and surveys wireless sensor network security

Secure Geo-location Techniques using Trusted Hyper-visor

Για πολλούς, η γεωγραφική θέση είναι μια απλή διαδικασία όπου με τη χρήση του GPS ένα άτομο μπορεί να εντοπιστεί όπου και όποτε ζητείται. Ωστόσο, ακόμη και αν η χρήση του GPS για γεωγραφική τοποθέτηση είναι ο πιο συνηθισμένος τρόπος και ταυτόχρονα ακριβής ως σύστημα, αποτελεί μια τεράστια κατανάλωση ενέργειας για να επιτευχθεί αυτή η διαδικασία και υστερεί σε μηχανισμούς και τεχνικές ασφαλείας. Σκοπός αυτής της εργασίας είναι να παρουσιάσουμε μια άλλη όψη για το πώς μπορούμε να εντοπίσουμε μια άγνωστη θέση ενός κόμβου σε ένα σύστημα και πώς θα μπορούσε να δημιουργηθεί ένα ασφαλές περιβάλλον για αυτόν τον κόμβο. Βασική μας ιδέα ήταν η δημιουργία ενός μηχανισμού όπου θα μπορούσαμε να δημιουργήσουμε ένα τρισδιάστατο πεδίο στο οποίο θα μπορούσε να εντοπιστεί άγνωστος κόμβος και στη συνέχεια θα δημιουργηθεί ένα ασφαλές περιβάλλον για τον νέο κόμβο. Μετά από μια έρευνα σε δημοσιεύσεις σχετικά με τρισδιάστατους μηχανισμούς και τεχνικές γεω-εντοπισμού, παράλληλα με την έννοια των hypervisors για τη δημιουργία ασφαλούς περιβάλλοντος με την αξιοποίηση της κρυπτογραφίας, καταλήξαμε στο συμπέρασμα της δημιουργίας ενός πλαισίου που θα ικανοποιούσε αυτά απαιτήσεις. Δημιουργήσαμε ένα τρισδιάστατο πεδίο τεσσάρων σταθμών κόμβων, όπου χρησιμοποιήσαμε δύο αλγορίθμους εντοπισμού, χωρίς GPS, για τον εντοπισμό της θέση ενός πέμπτου άγνωστου κόμβου παράλληλα με έναν hypervisor για τη δημιουργία περιβάλλοντος εμπιστοσύνης. Χρησιμοποιήσαμε ένα TPM για τη δημιουργία κρυπτογραφικών μηχανισμών και κλειδιών ασφαλείας. Σε αυτή την εργασία δημιουργήσαμε μια προσομοίωση όπου συγκρίνουμε την απόδοση αυτών των δύο αλγορίθμων γεωγραφικής τοποθέτησης από την άποψη της ταχύτητας και της ακρίβειας του υπολογισμού, παράλληλα με την απόδοση των μηχανισμών ασφαλείας του hypervisor και την ικανότητά του για ασφάλιση ακεραιότητας δεδομένων. Εκτός από τα συστατικά του προτεινόμενου μηχανισμού, παρουσιάζουμε και άλλες πληροφορίες που βρήκαμε σε σχετικά έγγραφα, όπως μια ποικιλία από hypervisors και μια ποικιλία τεχνικών εντοπισμού, για περισσότερες πληροφορίες για μελλοντικές εργασίες παράλληλα με τα βήματα υλοποίησης και εκτέλεσης.For many, geo-location is a simple process where with the utilization of GPS a person can be located wherever and whenever is requested. However, even if the utilization of GPS for geolocation is the most common way and accurate as a system, it is a huge consumption of energy in order to achieve this process and it lucks on safety mechanisms and techniques. The purpose of this paper is to present another view of how we could locate an unknown node position in a system and how a safe environment could be created for this node. Our main idea was about the creation of a framework where we could create a three-dimensional field in which an unknown node could be located and afterwards a safe environment would be created for the new node. After a research on papers relevant with three-dimensional geo-localization mechanisms and techniques, alongside with the concept of hypervisors for the creation of safe environment with the utilization of cryptography, we came to the conclusion of the creation of a framework which would satisfy those requirements. We created a 3-Dimentional field of four base nodes stations, where we utilized two localization GPS-free algorithms for the location of a fifth unknown node alongside with a hypervisor for the trust environment creation. We utilized a TPM for the cryptography mechanisms and safety keys creation. In this paper we created a simulation where we compare the performance of those two geolocation algorithms in terms of accuracy and computation speed and accuracy, alongside with the hypervisor’s security mechanisms performance and its ability for data integrity insurance. Except our proposed framework components, we present also further information that we found in relevant papers, such as a variety of hypervisors and a variety of localization techniques, for more information for future work alongside with implementation steps and guidanc

Security and trust in cloud computing and IoT through applying obfuscation, diversification, and trusted computing technologies

Cloud computing and Internet of Things (IoT) are very widely spread and commonly used technologies nowadays. The advanced services offered by cloud computing have made it a highly demanded technology. Enterprises and businesses are more and more relying on the cloud to deliver services to their customers. The prevalent use of cloud means that more data is stored outside the organization’s premises, which raises concerns about the security and privacy of the stored and processed data. This highlights the significance of effective security practices to secure the cloud infrastructure. The number of IoT devices is growing rapidly and the technology is being employed in a wide range of sectors including smart healthcare, industry automation, and smart environments. These devices collect and exchange a great deal of information, some of which may contain critical and personal data of the users of the device. Hence, it is highly significant to protect the collected and shared data over the network; notwithstanding, the studies signify that attacks on these devices are increasing, while a high percentage of IoT devices lack proper security measures to protect the devices, the data, and the privacy of the users. In this dissertation, we study the security of cloud computing and IoT and propose software-based security approaches supported by the hardware-based technologies to provide robust measures for enhancing the security of these environments. To achieve this goal, we use obfuscation and diversification as the potential software security techniques. Code obfuscation protects the software from malicious reverse engineering and diversification mitigates the risk of large-scale exploits. We study trusted computing and Trusted Execution Environments (TEE) as the hardware-based security solutions. Trusted Platform Module (TPM) provides security and trust through a hardware root of trust, and assures the integrity of a platform. We also study Intel SGX which is a TEE solution that guarantees the integrity and confidentiality of the code and data loaded onto its protected container, enclave. More precisely, through obfuscation and diversification of the operating systems and APIs of the IoT devices, we secure them at the application level, and by obfuscation and diversification of the communication protocols, we protect the communication of data between them at the network level. For securing the cloud computing, we employ obfuscation and diversification techniques for securing the cloud computing software at the client-side. For an enhanced level of security, we employ hardware-based security solutions, TPM and SGX. These solutions, in addition to security, ensure layered trust in various layers from hardware to the application. As the result of this PhD research, this dissertation addresses a number of security risks targeting IoT and cloud computing through the delivered publications and presents a brief outlook on the future research directions.Pilvilaskenta ja esineiden internet ovat nykyään hyvin tavallisia ja laajasti sovellettuja tekniikkoja. Pilvilaskennan pitkälle kehittyneet palvelut ovat tehneet siitä hyvin kysytyn teknologian. Yritykset enenevässä määrin nojaavat pilviteknologiaan toteuttaessaan palveluita asiakkailleen. Vallitsevassa pilviteknologian soveltamistilanteessa yritykset ulkoistavat tietojensa käsittelyä yrityksen ulkopuolelle, minkä voidaan nähdä nostavan esiin huolia taltioitavan ja käsiteltävän tiedon turvallisuudesta ja yksityisyydestä. Tämä korostaa tehokkaiden turvallisuusratkaisujen merkitystä osana pilvi-infrastruktuurin turvaamista. Esineiden internet -laitteiden lukumäärä on nopeasti kasvanut. Teknologiana sitä sovelletaan laajasti monilla sektoreilla, kuten älykkäässä terveydenhuollossa, teollisuusautomaatiossa ja älytiloissa. Sellaiset laitteet keräävät ja välittävät suuria määriä informaatiota, joka voi sisältää laitteiden käyttäjien kannalta kriittistä ja yksityistä tietoa. Tästä syystä johtuen on erittäin merkityksellistä suojata verkon yli kerättävää ja jaettavaa tietoa. Monet tutkimukset osoittavat esineiden internet -laitteisiin kohdistuvien tietoturvahyökkäysten määrän olevan nousussa, ja samaan aikaan suuri osuus näistä laitteista ei omaa kunnollisia teknisiä ominaisuuksia itse laitteiden tai niiden käyttäjien yksityisen tiedon suojaamiseksi. Tässä väitöskirjassa tutkitaan pilvilaskennan sekä esineiden internetin tietoturvaa ja esitetään ohjelmistopohjaisia tietoturvalähestymistapoja turvautumalla osittain laitteistopohjaisiin teknologioihin. Esitetyt lähestymistavat tarjoavat vankkoja keinoja tietoturvallisuuden kohentamiseksi näissä konteksteissa. Tämän saavuttamiseksi työssä sovelletaan obfuskaatiota ja diversifiointia potentiaalisiana ohjelmistopohjaisina tietoturvatekniikkoina. Suoritettavan koodin obfuskointi suojaa pahantahtoiselta ohjelmiston takaisinmallinnukselta ja diversifiointi torjuu tietoturva-aukkojen laaja-alaisen hyödyntämisen riskiä. Väitöskirjatyössä tutkitaan luotettua laskentaa ja luotettavan laskennan suoritusalustoja laitteistopohjaisina tietoturvaratkaisuina. TPM (Trusted Platform Module) tarjoaa turvallisuutta ja luottamuksellisuutta rakentuen laitteistopohjaiseen luottamukseen. Pyrkimyksenä on taata suoritusalustan eheys. Työssä tutkitaan myös Intel SGX:ää yhtenä luotettavan suorituksen suoritusalustana, joka takaa suoritettavan koodin ja datan eheyden sekä luottamuksellisuuden pohjautuen suojatun säiliön, saarekkeen, tekniseen toteutukseen. Tarkemmin ilmaistuna työssä turvataan käyttöjärjestelmä- ja sovellusrajapintatasojen obfuskaation ja diversifioinnin kautta esineiden internet -laitteiden ohjelmistokerrosta. Soveltamalla samoja tekniikoita protokollakerrokseen, työssä suojataan laitteiden välistä tiedonvaihtoa verkkotasolla. Pilvilaskennan turvaamiseksi työssä sovelletaan obfuskaatio ja diversifiointitekniikoita asiakaspuolen ohjelmistoratkaisuihin. Vankemman tietoturvallisuuden saavuttamiseksi työssä hyödynnetään laitteistopohjaisia TPM- ja SGX-ratkaisuja. Tietoturvallisuuden lisäksi nämä ratkaisut tarjoavat monikerroksisen luottamuksen rakentuen laitteistotasolta ohjelmistokerrokseen asti. Tämän väitöskirjatutkimustyön tuloksena, osajulkaisuiden kautta, vastataan moniin esineiden internet -laitteisiin ja pilvilaskentaan kohdistuviin tietoturvauhkiin. Työssä esitetään myös näkemyksiä jatkotutkimusaiheista

From security to assurance in the cloud: a survey

The cloud computing paradigm has become a mainstream solution for the deployment of business processes and applications. In the public cloud vision, infrastructure, platform, and software services are provisioned to tenants (i.e., customers and service providers) on a pay-as-you-go basis. Cloud tenants can use cloud resources at lower prices, and higher performance and flexibility, than traditional on-premises resources, without having to care about infrastructure management. Still, cloud tenants remain concerned with the cloud's level of service and the nonfunctional properties their applications can count on. In the last few years, the research community has been focusing on the nonfunctional aspects of the cloud paradigm, among which cloud security stands out. Several approaches to security have been described and summarized in general surveys on cloud security techniques. The survey in this article focuses on the interface between cloud security and cloud security assurance. First, we provide an overview of the state of the art on cloud security. Then, we introduce the notion of cloud security assurance and analyze its growing impact on cloud security approaches. Finally, we present some recommendations for the development of next-generation cloud security and assurance solutions

Emerging Communications for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks are deployed in a rapidly increasing number of arenas, with uses ranging from healthcare monitoring to industrial and environmental safety, as well as new ubiquitous computing devices that are becoming ever more pervasive in our interconnected society. This book presents a range of exciting developments in software communication technologies including some novel applications, such as in high altitude systems, ground heat exchangers and body sensor networks. Authors from leading institutions on four continents present their latest findings in the spirit of exchanging information and stimulating discussion in the WSN community worldwide

Challenges in Cybersecurity and Privacy - the European Research Landscape

Cybersecurity and Privacy issues are becoming an important barrier for a trusted and dependable global digital society development. Cyber-criminals are continuously shifting their cyber-attacks specially against cyber-physical systems and IoT, since they present additional vulnerabilities due to their constrained capabilities, their unattended nature and the usage of potential untrustworthiness components. Likewise, identity-theft, fraud, personal data leakages, and other related cyber-crimes are continuously evolving, causing important damages and privacy problems for European citizens in both virtual and physical scenarios. In this context, new holistic approaches, methodologies, techniques and tools are needed to cope with those issues, and mitigate cyberattacks, by employing novel cyber-situational awareness frameworks, risk analysis and modeling, threat intelligent systems, cyber-threat information sharing methods, advanced big-data analysis techniques as well as exploiting the benefits from latest technologies such as SDN/NFV and Cloud systems. In addition, novel privacy-preserving techniques, and crypto-privacy mechanisms, identity and eID management systems, trust services, and recommendations are needed to protect citizens’ privacy while keeping usability levels. The European Commission is addressing the challenge through different means, including the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation program, thereby financing innovative projects that can cope with the increasing cyberthreat landscape. This book introduces several cybersecurity and privacy research challenges and how they are being addressed in the scope of 15 European research projects. Each chapter is dedicated to a different funded European Research project, which aims to cope with digital security and privacy aspects, risks, threats and cybersecurity issues from a different perspective. Each chapter includes the project’s overviews and objectives, the particular challenges they are covering, research achievements on security and privacy, as well as the techniques, outcomes, and evaluations accomplished in the scope of the EU project. The book is the result of a collaborative effort among relative ongoing European Research projects in the field of privacy and security as well as related cybersecurity fields, and it is intended to explain how these projects meet the main cybersecurity and privacy challenges faced in Europe. Namely, the EU projects analyzed in the book are: ANASTACIA, SAINT, YAKSHA, FORTIKA, CYBECO, SISSDEN, CIPSEC, CS-AWARE. RED-Alert, Truessec.eu. ARIES, LIGHTest, CREDENTIAL, FutureTrust, LEPS. Challenges in Cybersecurity and Privacy - the European Research Landscape is ideal for personnel in computer/communication industries as well as academic staff and master/research students in computer science and communications networks interested in learning about cyber-security and privacy aspects