Cryptographic Key Management in Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs): A survey

Since their appearance at the dawn of the second millennium, Delay or Disruption Tolerant Networks (DTNs) have gradually evolved, spurring the development of a variety of methods and protocols for making them more secure and resilient. In this context, perhaps, the most challenging problem to deal with is that of cryptographic key management. To the best of our knowledge, the work at hand is the first to survey the relevant literature and classify the various so far proposed key management approaches in such a restricted and harsh environment. Towards this goal, we have grouped the surveyed key management methods into three major categories depending on whether the particular method copes with a) security initialization, b) key establishment, and c) key revocation. We have attempted to provide a concise but fairly complete evaluation of the proposed up-to-date methods in a generalized way with the aim of offering a central reference point for future research

Cryptographic Key Management in Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs): A survey

Since their appearance at the dawn of the second millennium, Delay or Disruption Tolerant Networks (DTNs) have gradually evolved, spurring the development of a variety of methods and protocols for making them more secure and resilient. In this context, perhaps, the most challenging problem to deal with is that of cryptographic key management. To the best of our knowledge, the work at hand is the first to survey the relevant literature and classify the various so far proposed key management approaches in such a restricted and harsh environment. Towards this goal, we have grouped the surveyed key management methods into three major categories depending on whether the particular method copes with a) security initialization, b) key establishment, and c) key revocation. We have attempted to provide a concise but fairly complete evaluation of the proposed up-to-date methods in a generalized way with the aim of offering a central reference point for future research

Project BeARCAT : Baselining, Automation and Response for CAV Testbed Cyber Security : Connected Vehicle & Infrastructure Security Assessment

Connected, software-based systems are a driver in advancing the technology of transportation systems. Advanced automated and autonomous vehicles, together with electrification, will help reduce congestion, accidents and emissions. Meanwhile, vehicle manufacturers see advanced technology as enhancing their products in a competitive market. However, as many decades of using home and enterprise computer systems have shown, connectivity allows a system to become a target for criminal intentions. Cyber-based threats to any system are a problem; in transportation, there is the added safety implication of dealing with moving vehicles and the passengers within

Actas da 10ª Conferência sobre Redes de Computadores

Universidade do MinhoCCTCCentro AlgoritmiCisco SystemsIEEE Portugal Sectio

Security in Delay Tolerant Networks

Delay- and Disruption-tolerant wireless networks (DTN), or opportunistic networks, represent a class of networks where continuous end-to-end connectivity may not be possible. DTN is a well recognized area in networking research and has attracted extensive attentions from both network designers and application developers. Applications of this emergent communication paradigm are wide ranging and include sensor networks using scheduled intermittent connectivity, vehicular DTNs for dissemination of location-dependent information (e.g., local ads, traffic reports, parking information, etc.), pocket-switched networks to allow humans to communicate without network infrastructure, and underwater acoustic networks with moderate delays and frequent interruptions due to environmental factors, etc. Security is one of the main barriers to wide-scale deployment of DTNs, but has gained little attention so far. On the one hand, similar to traditional mobile ad hoc networks, the open channel and multi-hop transmission have made DTNs vulnerable to various security threats, such as message modification/injection attack or unauthorized access and utilization of DTN resources. On the other hand, the unique security characteristics of DTNs including: long round-trip delay, frequent disconnectivity, fragmentation, opportunistic routing as well as limited computational and storage capability, make the existing security protocols designed for the conventional ad hoc networks unsuitable for DTNs. Therefore, a series of new security protocols are highly desired to meet stringent security and efficiency requirements for securing DTNs. In this research, we focus on three fundamental security issues in DTNs: efficient DTN message (or bundle) authentication, which is a critical security service for DTN security; incentive issue, which targets at stimulating selfish nodes to forward data for others; and certificate revocation issue, which is an important part of public key management and serves the foundation of any DTN security protocols. We have made the following contributions: First of all, the unique ``store-carry-and-forward'' transmission characteristic of DTNs implies that bundles from distinct/common senders may opportunistically be buffered at some common intermediate nodes. Such a ``buffering'' characteristic distinguishes DTN from any other traditional wireless networks, for which intermediate cache is not supported. To exploit such buffering opportunities, we propose an Opportunistic Batch Bundle Authentication Scheme (OBBA) to dramatically reduce the bundle authentication cost by seamlessly integrating identity-based batch signatures and Merkle tree techniques. Secondly, we propose a secure multi-layer credit based incentive scheme to stimulate bundle forwarding cooperation among DTNs nodes. The proposed scheme can be implemented in a fully distributed manner to thwart various attacks without relying on any tamper-proof hardware. In addition, we introduce several efficiency-optimization techniques to improve the overall efficiency by exploiting the unique characteristics of DTNs. Lastly, we propose a storage-efficient public key certificate validation method. Our proposed scheme exploits the opportunistic propagation to transmit Certificate Revocation List (CRL) list while taking advantage of bloom filter technique to reduce the required buffer size. We also discuss how to take advantage of cooperative checking to minimize false positive rate and storage consumption. For each research issue, detailed simulation results in terms of computational time, transmission overhead and power consumption, are given to validate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed security solutions

A review of cyber threats and defence approaches in emergency management

Emergency planners, first responders and relief workers increasingly rely on computational and communication systems that support all aspects of emergency management, from mitigation and preparedness to response and recovery. Failure of these systems, whether accidental or because of malicious action, can have severe implications for emergency management. Accidental failures have been extensively documented in the past and significant effort has been put into the development and introduction of more resilient technologies. At the same time researchers have been raising concerns about the potential of cyber attacks to cause physical disasters or to maximise the impact of one by intentionally impeding the work of the emergency services. Here, we provide a review of current research on the cyber threats to communication, sensing, information management and vehicular technologies used in emergency management. We emphasise on open issues for research, which are the cyber threats that have the potential to affect emergency management severely and for which solutions have not yet been proposed in the literature

Exploring Computing Continuum in IoT Systems: Sensing, Communicating and Processing at the Network Edge

As Internet of Things (IoT), originally comprising of only a few simple sensing devices, reaches 34 billion units by the end of 2020, they cannot be defined as merely monitoring sensors anymore. IoT capabilities have been improved in recent years as relatively large internal computation and storage capacity are becoming a commodity. In the early days of IoT, processing and storage were typically performed in cloud. New IoT architectures are able to perform complex tasks directly on-device, thus enabling the concept of an extended computational continuum. Real-time critical scenarios e.g. autonomous vehicles sensing, area surveying or disaster rescue and recovery require all the actors involved to be coordinated and collaborate without human interaction to a common goal, sharing data and resources, even in intermittent networks covered areas. This poses new problems in distributed systems, resource management, device orchestration,as well as data processing. This work proposes a new orchestration and communication framework, namely CContinuum, designed to manage resources in heterogeneous IoT architectures across multiple application scenarios. This work focuses on two key sustainability macroscenarios: (a) environmental sensing and awareness, and (b) electric mobility support. In the first case a mechanism to measure air quality over a long period of time for different applications at global scale (3 continents 4 countries) is introduced. The system has been developed in-house from the sensor design to the mist-computing operations performed by the nodes. In the second scenario, a technique to transmit large amounts of fine-time granularity battery data from a moving vehicle to a control center is proposed jointly with the ability of allocating tasks on demand within the computing continuum