AMISEC: Leveraging Redundancy and Adaptability to Secure AmI Applications

Security in Ambient Intelligence (AmI) poses too many challenges due to the inherently insecure nature of wireless sensor nodes. However, there are two characteristics of these environments that can be used effectively to prevent, detect, and confine attacks: redundancy and continuous adaptation. In this article we propose a global strategy and a system architecture to cope with security issues in AmI applications at different levels. Unlike in previous approaches, we assume an individual wireless node is vulnerable. We present an agent-based architecture with supporting services that is proven to be adequate to detect and confine common attacks. Decisions at different levels are supported by a trust-based framework with good and bad reputation feedback while maintaining resistance to bad-mouthing attacks. We also propose a set of services that can be used to handle identification, authentication, and authorization in intelligent ambients. The resulting approach takes into account practical issues, such as resource limitation, bandwidth optimization, and scalability

Trust-based security for the OLSR routing protocol

International audienceThe trust is always present implicitly in the protocols based on cooperation, in particular, between the entities involved in routing operations in Ad hoc networks. Indeed, as the wireless range of such nodes is limited, the nodes mutually cooperate with their neighbors in order to extend the remote nodes and the entire network. In our work, we are interested by trust as security solution for OLSR protocol. This approach fits particularly with characteristics of ad hoc networks. Moreover, the explicit trust management allows entities to reason with and about trust, and to take decisions regarding other entities. In this paper, we detail the techniques and the contributions in trust-based security in OLSR. We present trust-based analysis of the OLSR protocol using trust specification language, and we show how trust-based reasoning can allow each node to evaluate the behavior of the other nodes. After the detection of misbehaving nodes, we propose solutions of prevention and countermeasures to resolve the situations of inconsistency, and counter the malicious nodes. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our solution taking different simulated attacks scenarios. Our approach brings few modifications and is still compatible with the bare OLSR

IETF standardization in the field of the Internet of Things (IoT): a survey

Smart embedded objects will become an important part of what is called the Internet of Things. However, the integration of embedded devices into the Internet introduces several challenges, since many of the existing Internet technologies and protocols were not designed for this class of devices. In the past few years, there have been many efforts to enable the extension of Internet technologies to constrained devices. Initially, this resulted in proprietary protocols and architectures. Later, the integration of constrained devices into the Internet was embraced by IETF, moving towards standardized IP-based protocols. In this paper, we will briefly review the history of integrating constrained devices into the Internet, followed by an extensive overview of IETF standardization work in the 6LoWPAN, ROLL and CoRE working groups. This is complemented with a broad overview of related research results that illustrate how this work can be extended or used to tackle other problems and with a discussion on open issues and challenges. As such the aim of this paper is twofold: apart from giving readers solid insights in IETF standardization work on the Internet of Things, it also aims to encourage readers to further explore the world of Internet-connected objects, pointing to future research opportunities