XSACd—Cross-domain resource sharing & access control for smart environments

Computing devices permeate working and living environments, affecting all aspects of modern everyday lives; a trend which is expected to intensify in the coming years. In the residential setting, the enhanced features and services provided by said computing devices constitute what is typically referred to as a “smart home”. However, the direct interaction smart devices often have with the physical world, along with the processing, storage and communication of data pertaining to users’ lives, i.e. private sensitive in nature, bring security concerns into the limelight. The resource-constraints of the platforms being integrated into a smart home environment, and their heterogeneity in hardware, network and overlaying technologies, only exacerbate the above issues. This paper presents XSACd, a cross-domain resource sharing & access control framework for smart environments, combining the well-studied fine-grained access control provided by the eXtensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML) with the benefits of Service Oriented Architectures, through the use of the Devices Profile for Web Services (DPWS). Based on standardized technologies, it enables seamless interactions and fine-grained policy-based management of heterogeneous smart devices, including support for communication between distributed networks, via the associated MQ Telemetry Transport protocol (MQTT)–based proxies. The framework is implemented in full, and its performance is evaluated on a test bed featuring relatively resource-constrained smart platforms and embedded devices, verifying the feasibility of the proposed approac

Wireless Information-Theoretic Security: Theoretical analysis & experimental measurements with multiple eavesdroppers in an outdoor obstacle-dense MANET

Wireless Information-Theoretic Security (WITS) has been suggested as a robust security scheme, especially for infrastructure-less networks. Based on the physical layer, WITS considers quasi-static Rayleigh fading instead of the classic Gaussian wiretap scenario. In this paper, they key parameters of WITS are investigated by implementing an 802.11n ad-hoc network in an outdoor obstacle-dense topology. Measurements performed throughout the topology allow for a realistic evaluation of a scenario with multiple moving eavesdroppers. Low speed user movement has been considered, so that Doppler spread can be discarded. A set of discrete field test trials have been conducted, based on simulation of human mobility throughout an obstacle-constrained environment. Average Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) values have been measured for all moving nodes, and the Probability of Non-Zero Secrecy Capacity has been calculated for different eavesdropping cooperative schemes (Selection Combining and Maximal-Ratio Combining). In addition, the Outage Probability has been estimated with regard to a nonzero target Secrecy Rate for both techniques. The results have been compared with the respective values of WITS key parameters derived from theoretical analysis

Security and resilience for smart devices and applications

International audienc