SSD: New Challenges for Digital Forensics

ICT changes continuously and we are used to look at IT in a slightly dif-ferent way every year. Things are developed and manufactured to be smaller and faster but few changes are truly technologically revolutionary. Some changes creep up on us as they arrive under cover of previously known technology. Solid State Disks (SSD) is such a technology. The use of SSD is simple enough and for many purposes it can be used as if it was a normal hard disc but many times faster and with a very much lower power consumption. But, SSD is not an evolution of hard disc technology, it is a completely new technology which imitates the behav-iour of a hard disc. There are major underpinning differences which have serious consequences for security and for digital forensic. Due to how the SSDs work it is not always certain that deleted data are purged from the disc. On the other hand SSD‟s can sometimes purge data all by themselves even if they are not connected to any interface with only the power on. This means that normal guidelines aimed at hard discs for how to preserve digital forensic evidence are not just inappropri-ate but could if followed result in potential evidence being lost, destroyed or deemed unvalid as evidence. This paper gives an overview of some of the princi-pal and unexpected challenges that SSDs have brought with them for Digital Fo-rensics investigations

Analysis of Current State of The Art of RFID IC Chips

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a constantly developing technology particularly in the ultra-high-frequency (UHF) band for its long operating range, power efficiency, and maintenance-free characteristics. It has been successfully developed for many applications already, that includes identification, sensing, tracking, monitoring, etc. In terms of tag, the integrated circuit (IC) or chip play an essential part in the functionality of the tag, where logical information is programmed into. Nowadays, the chips come in a variety of memory options, sensitivity, supported protocols, with an optional battery-assisted mode, additional commands, and features. There are various methods that are followed to fabricate RFID tags, i.e. inkjet-printing, painting, 3D printing, etching, etc. On the way of completion of these procedures, some of the methods involve the use of chemicals, producing waste, which is unfavorable in respect of the cost, and as well as the environment. In addition, the substrate impacts tag’s performance. If the tag is going to be attached for instance, on a metal surface the radiation properties of the tag antenna would experience changes, as the electromagnetic waves will reflect on the metal surface, which will basically degrade tag’s performance. Maintaining multiple applications on a single chip has become common to a certain extent. It requires additional power than usual, which is an issue for passive tags. In order to overcome this hurdle, energy harvesting system is required, which is going to suffice the need for a power source. In this paper, the functionalities and applications of the RFID chips have been reviewed and some suggestions have been proposed on how RFID can be commercially manufactured, in terms of fabrication methods, supplying enough power for applications, and ensuring security of the tagged object

Internet of Things Strategic Research Roadmap

Internet of Things (IoT) is an integrated part of Future Internet including existing and evolving Internet and network developments and could be conceptually defined as a dynamic global network infrastructure with self configuring capabilities based on standard and interoperable communication protocols where physical and virtual “things” have identities, physical attributes, and virtual personalities, use intelligent interfaces, and are seamlessly integrated into the information network

Transiently Powered Computers

Demand for compact, easily deployable, energy-efficient computers has driven the development of general-purpose transiently powered computers (TPCs) that lack both batteries and wired power, operating exclusively on energy harvested from their surroundings. TPCs\u27 dependence solely on transient, harvested power offers several important design-time benefits. For example, omitting batteries saves board space and weight while obviating the need to make devices physically accessible for maintenance. However, transient power may provide an unpredictable supply of energy that makes operation difficult. A predictable energy supply is a key abstraction underlying most electronic designs. TPCs discard this abstraction in favor of opportunistic computation that takes advantage of available resources. A crucial question is how should a software-controlled computing device operate if it depends completely on external entities for power and other resources? The question poses challenges for computation, communication, storage, and other aspects of TPC design. The main idea of this work is that software techniques can make energy harvesting a practicable form of power supply for electronic devices. Its overarching goal is to facilitate the design and operation of usable TPCs. This thesis poses a set of challenges that are fundamental to TPCs, then pairs these challenges with approaches that use software techniques to address them. To address the challenge of computing steadily on harvested power, it describes Mementos, an energy-aware state-checkpointing system for TPCs. To address the dependence of opportunistic RF-harvesting TPCs on potentially untrustworthy RFID readers, it describes CCCP, a protocol and system for safely outsourcing data storage to RFID readers that may attempt to tamper with data. Additionally, it describes a simulator that facilitates experimentation with the TPC model, and a prototype computational RFID that implements the TPC model. To show that TPCs can improve existing electronic devices, this thesis describes applications of TPCs to implantable medical devices (IMDs), a challenging design space in which some battery-constrained devices completely lack protection against radio-based attacks. TPCs can provide security and privacy benefits to IMDs by, for instance, cryptographically authenticating other devices that want to communicate with the IMD before allowing the IMD to use any of its battery power. This thesis describes a simplified IMD that lacks its own radio, saving precious battery energy and therefore size. The simplified IMD instead depends on an RFID-scale TPC for all of its communication functions. TPCs are a natural area of exploration for future electronic design, given the parallel trends of energy harvesting and miniaturization. This work aims to establish and evaluate basic principles by which TPCs can operate

Development and Analysis of Low-Cost IoT Sensors for Urban Environmental Monitoring

The accelerated pace of urbanization is having a major impact over the world’s environment. Although urban dwellers have higher living standards and can access better public services as compared to their rural counterparts, they are usually exposed to poor environmental conditions such as air pollution and noise. In order for municipalities and citizens to mitigate the negative effects of pollution, the monitoring of certain parameters, such as air quality and ambient sound levels, both in indoor and outdoor locations, has to be performed. The current paper presents a complete solution that allows the monitoring of ambient parameters such as Volatile Organic Compounds, temperature, relative humidity, pressure, and sound intensity levels both in indoor and outdoor spaces. The presented solution comprises of low-cost, easy to deploy, wireless sensors and a cloud application for their management and for storing and visualizing the recorded data

Security in Computer and Information Sciences

This open access book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the Second International Symposium on Computer and Information Sciences, EuroCybersec 2021, held in Nice, France, in October 2021. The 9 papers presented together with 1 invited paper were carefully reviewed and selected from 21 submissions. The papers focus on topics of security of distributed interconnected systems, software systems, Internet of Things, health informatics systems, energy systems, digital cities, digital economy, mobile networks, and the underlying physical and network infrastructures. This is an open access book

Smartboard for surfing

The Internet of Things has democratized the use of sports' monitoring devices. The majority of these devices, available on the market, are targeted to the fitness practice creating the necessity of having different solutions for different sports. This work focuses on the development of a low-profile surf monitoring device capable of acquiring the required data for an existing algorithm developed by Fraunhofer Portugal. The resulting system should support long periods inside the water (low-power and waterproofed) without interfering with the athlete's performance (low-profile) and be able of transmitting the acquired data for an external device. Due to project's requirements, some of the technologies were already selected (microcontroller, gyroscope, magnetometer, accelerometer and GNSS module). However other technologies such as: the wireless communication system, storage method and power system needed to be selected. For the first, the system data throughput was estimated and the technology with the best relation throughput vs. power consumption was selected. To select the storage method, a survey was conducted to estimate the relation between each technology's price and data size. To select the power system, two studies were conducted in order to infer the hypothesis of supplying the system with photovoltaic cells, increasing the autonomy during a surf session: a power consumption study to estimate the system's power requirements and a solar irradiance study to predict the required area of photovoltaic cells. In order to determine the impact of having epoxy resin, commonly used to cover surf boards, some tests were conducted by applying this resin over the cells and measuring the output power