Challenges of Multi-Factor Authentication for Securing Advanced IoT (A-IoT) Applications

The unprecedented proliferation of smart devices together with novel communication, computing, and control technologies have paved the way for the Advanced Internet of Things~(A-IoT). This development involves new categories of capable devices, such as high-end wearables, smart vehicles, and consumer drones aiming to enable efficient and collaborative utilization within the Smart City paradigm. While massive deployments of these objects may enrich people's lives, unauthorized access to the said equipment is potentially dangerous. Hence, highly-secure human authentication mechanisms have to be designed. At the same time, human beings desire comfortable interaction with their owned devices on a daily basis, thus demanding the authentication procedures to be seamless and user-friendly, mindful of the contemporary urban dynamics. In response to these unique challenges, this work advocates for the adoption of multi-factor authentication for A-IoT, such that multiple heterogeneous methods - both well-established and emerging - are combined intelligently to grant or deny access reliably. We thus discuss the pros and cons of various solutions as well as introduce tools to combine the authentication factors, with an emphasis on challenging Smart City environments. We finally outline the open questions to shape future research efforts in this emerging field.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures, 2 tables. The work has been accepted for publication in IEEE Network, 2019. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessibl

Security and blockchain convergence with internet of multimedia things : current trends, research challenges and future directions

The Internet of Multimedia Things (IoMT) orchestration enables the integration of systems, software, cloud, and smart sensors into a single platform. The IoMT deals with scalar as well as multimedia data. In these networks, sensor-embedded devices and their data face numerous challenges when it comes to security. In this paper, a comprehensive review of the existing literature for IoMT is presented in the context of security and blockchain. The latest literature on all three aspects of security, i.e., authentication, privacy, and trust is provided to explore the challenges experienced by multimedia data. The convergence of blockchain and IoMT along with multimedia-enabled blockchain platforms are discussed for emerging applications. To highlight the significance of this survey, large-scale commercial projects focused on security and blockchain for multimedia applications are reviewed. The shortcomings of these projects are explored and suggestions for further improvement are provided. Based on the aforementioned discussion, we present our own case study for healthcare industry: a theoretical framework having security and blockchain as key enablers. The case study reflects the importance of security and blockchain in multimedia applications of healthcare sector. Finally, we discuss the convergence of emerging technologies with security, blockchain and IoMT to visualize the future of tomorrow's applications. © 2020 Elsevier Lt

SFDDM: a secure distributed database management in combined fog-to-cloud systems

© 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Technological revolutions have greatly increased the use of IoT devices for our daily life. Driving the fact that everything surrounding us is getting connected what turns into an unstoppable increase in the amount of data produced. This data represents the state of diverse environmental events and helps to control a large set of distinct activities. So, accurate and secure management of this data is essential for any computing platform. Moreover, in order to provide real-time services in a distributed system (i.e., smart city), the data should be properly and securely managed. It is well known that shifting these tasks to the edge (i.e., near to the end users), highly facilitates these two objectives. The recently proposed Fog-to-Cloud (F2C) model is intended to enable data processing near to the edge, which helps to get better latency-sensitive services. However, some challenges remain to accurately and securely manage this data over the system, mainly due to the distributed F2C nature. Thus, considering these facts and challenges, in this paper we propose an architectural solution aimed at building a secure distributed database for F2C systems. Then, considering a real-case scenario, we perform some tests to measure the performance of our proposing schema. Finally, by comparing the performance between traditional cloud, fog/edge based execution model and our proposing SFDDM, we validate the effectiveness of our proposing schema.This work has been supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities and the European Regional Development Fund (FEDER) under contract RTI2018- 094532-B-I00, and by the H2020 European Union mF2C project with reference 730929.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft