e-SAFE: Secure, Efficient and Forensics-Enabled Access to Implantable Medical Devices

To facilitate monitoring and management, modern Implantable Medical Devices (IMDs) are often equipped with wireless capabilities, which raise the risk of malicious access to IMDs. Although schemes are proposed to secure the IMD access, some issues are still open. First, pre-sharing a long-term key between a patient's IMD and a doctor's programmer is vulnerable since once the doctor's programmer is compromised, all of her patients suffer; establishing a temporary key by leveraging proximity gets rid of pre-shared keys, but as the approach lacks real authentication, it can be exploited by nearby adversaries or through man-in-the-middle attacks. Second, while prolonging the lifetime of IMDs is one of the most important design goals, few schemes explore to lower the communication and computation overhead all at once. Finally, how to safely record the commands issued by doctors for the purpose of forensics, which can be the last measure to protect the patients' rights, is commonly omitted in the existing literature. Motivated by these important yet open problems, we propose an innovative scheme e-SAFE, which significantly improves security and safety, reduces the communication overhead and enables IMD-access forensics. We present a novel lightweight compressive sensing based encryption algorithm to encrypt and compress the IMD data simultaneously, reducing the data transmission overhead by over 50% while ensuring high data confidentiality and usability. Furthermore, we provide a suite of protocols regarding device pairing, dual-factor authentication, and accountability-enabled access. The security analysis and performance evaluation show the validity and efficiency of the proposed scheme

Internet of Things-aided Smart Grid: Technologies, Architectures, Applications, Prototypes, and Future Research Directions

Traditional power grids are being transformed into Smart Grids (SGs) to address the issues in existing power system due to uni-directional information flow, energy wastage, growing energy demand, reliability and security. SGs offer bi-directional energy flow between service providers and consumers, involving power generation, transmission, distribution and utilization systems. SGs employ various devices for the monitoring, analysis and control of the grid, deployed at power plants, distribution centers and in consumers' premises in a very large number. Hence, an SG requires connectivity, automation and the tracking of such devices. This is achieved with the help of Internet of Things (IoT). IoT helps SG systems to support various network functions throughout the generation, transmission, distribution and consumption of energy by incorporating IoT devices (such as sensors, actuators and smart meters), as well as by providing the connectivity, automation and tracking for such devices. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey on IoT-aided SG systems, which includes the existing architectures, applications and prototypes of IoT-aided SG systems. This survey also highlights the open issues, challenges and future research directions for IoT-aided SG systems

Mobile integrated conditional access system

This paper presents design of a novel security architecture integrating mobile and broadcasting technologies in the Pay-TV system. The security architecture proposed herein is a state-of-the-art solution to tackle well-known problems challenging current Pay-TV systems including but not limited to interoperability amongst service providers, relatively high cost of the service deployment, the security compromise, limited interactivity and bespoken services offered to subscribers. It also proposes the Follow-me service that enables subscribers to access their entitlements via an arbitrary set-top box