Deep Dive into the IoT Backend Ecosystem

Internet of Things (IoT) devices are becoming increasingly ubiquitous, e.g., at home, in enterprise environments, and in production lines. To support the advanced functionalities of IoT devices, IoT vendors as well as service and cloud companies operate IoT backends -- the focus of this paper. We propose a methodology to identify and locate them by (a) compiling a list of domains used exclusively by major IoT backend providers and (b) then identifying their server IP addresses. We rely on multiple sources, including IoT backend provider documentation, passive DNS data, and active scanning. For analyzing IoT traffic patterns, we rely on passive network flows from a major European ISP. Our analysis focuses on the top IoT backends and unveils diverse operational strategies -- from operating their own infrastructure to utilizing the public cloud. We find that the majority of the top IoT backend providers are located in multiple locations and countries. Still, a handful are located only in one country, which could raise regulatory scrutiny as the client IoT devices are located in other regions. Indeed, our analysis shows that up to 35% of IoT traffic is exchanged with IoT backend servers located in other continents. We also find that at least six of the top IoT backends rely on other IoT backend providers. We also evaluate if cascading effects among the IoT backend providers are possible in the event of an outage, a misconfiguration, or an attack

THE UNIQUE PATIENT IDENTIFICATION (UPI) DEBATE: IMPLEMENTING A U.S. PATIENT IDENTIFICATION STANDARD

This study provides a comparison and contrast of the merits surrounding the implementation of a US national unique patient identification (UPI) system. Based on the lack of trust created in the minds of current US patients in how current medical records are distributed throughout the US medical system, this study reviews the UPI initiative in India, public trust concerns in the United Kingdom (UK), and trials and feedback from research and clinical review by the US medical community concerning the pros and cons of such a system. This study leads to a proposed patient trusted solution that could be implemented for the purpose of tracking and protecting confidential patient information in the US via the latest cloud based technologies. The proposed solution intends to bring more patient trust to the entire US national medical information technology system as a whole

Development of a Graduate Course on the Transition to Internet Protocol Version 6

Internet and mobile connectivity has grown tremendously in the last few decades, creating an ever increasing demand for Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. The pool of Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) addresses, once assumed to be more than sufficient for every person on this planet, has reached its final stages of depletion. With The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority’s (IANA) global pools depleted, and four of the five Regional Internet Registries (RIR) pools down to the their last /8 block, the remaining addresses will not last very long. In order to ensure continuous growth of the internet in the foreseeable future, we would need a newer internet protocol, with a much larger address space. Specifically, with that goal in mind the Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) was designed about two decades ago. Over the years it has matured, and has proven that it could eventually replace the existing IPv4. This thesis presents the development a graduate level course on the transition to IPv6. The course makes an attempt at understanding how the new IPv6 protocol is different than the currently used IPv4 protocol. And also tries to emphasize on the options existing to facilitate a smooth transition of production networks from IPv4 to IPv6

Assessing the Privacy Benefits of Domain Name Encryption

As Internet users have become more savvy about the potential for their Internet communication to be observed, the use of network traffic encryption technologies (e.g., HTTPS/TLS) is on the rise. However, even when encryption is enabled, users leak information about the domains they visit via DNS queries and via the Server Name Indication (SNI) extension of TLS. Two recent proposals to ameliorate this issue are DNS over HTTPS/TLS (DoH/DoT) and Encrypted SNI (ESNI). In this paper we aim to assess the privacy benefits of these proposals by considering the relationship between hostnames and IP addresses, the latter of which are still exposed. We perform DNS queries from nine vantage points around the globe to characterize this relationship. We quantify the privacy gain offered by ESNI for different hosting and CDN providers using two different metrics, the k-anonymity degree due to co-hosting and the dynamics of IP address changes. We find that 20% of the domains studied will not gain any privacy benefit since they have a one-to-one mapping between their hostname and IP address. On the other hand, 30% will gain a significant privacy benefit with a k value greater than 100, since these domains are co-hosted with more than 100 other domains. Domains whose visitors' privacy will meaningfully improve are far less popular, while for popular domains the benefit is not significant. Analyzing the dynamics of IP addresses of long-lived domains, we find that only 7.7% of them change their hosting IP addresses on a daily basis. We conclude by discussing potential approaches for website owners and hosting/CDN providers for maximizing the privacy benefits of ESNI.Comment: In Proceedings of the 15th ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ASIA CCS '20), October 5-9, 2020, Taipei, Taiwa

Secure service proxy : a CoAP(s) intermediary for a securer and smarter web of things

As the IoT continues to grow over the coming years, resource-constrained devices and networks will see an increase in traffic as everything is connected in an open Web of Things. The performance- and function-enhancing features are difficult to provide in resource-constrained environments, but will gain importance if the WoT is to be scaled up successfully. For example, scalable open standards-based authentication and authorization will be important to manage access to the limited resources of constrained devices and networks. Additionally, features such as caching and virtualization may help further reduce the load on these constrained systems. This work presents the Secure Service Proxy (SSP): a constrained-network edge proxy with the goal of improving the performance and functionality of constrained RESTful environments. Our evaluations show that the proposed design reaches its goal by reducing the load on constrained devices while implementing a wide range of features as different adapters. Specifically, the results show that the SSP leads to significant savings in processing, network traffic, network delay and packet loss rates for constrained devices. As a result, the SSP helps to guarantee the proper operation of constrained networks as these networks form an ever-expanding Web of Things

Practical privacy enhancing technologies for mobile systems

Mobile computers and handheld devices can be used today to connect to services available on the Internet. One of the predominant technologies in this respect for wireless Internet connection is the IEEE 802.11 family of WLAN standards. In many countries, WLAN access can be considered ubiquitous; there is a hotspot available almost anywhere. Unfortunately, the convenience provided by wireless Internet access has many privacy tradeoffs that are not obvious to mobile computer users. In this thesis, we investigate the lack of privacy of mobile computer users, and propose practical enhancements to increase the privacy of these users. We show how explicit information related to the users' identity leaks on all layers of the protocol stack. Even before an IP address is configured, the mobile computer may have already leaked their affiliation and other details to the local network as the WLAN interface openly broadcasts the networks that the user has visited. Free services that require authentication or provide personalization, such as online social networks, instant messengers, or web stores, all leak the user's identity. All this information, and much more, is available to a local passive observer using a mobile computer. In addition to a systematic analysis of privacy leaks, we have proposed four complementary privacy protection mechanisms. The main design guidelines for the mechanisms have been deployability and the introduction of minimal changes to user experience. More specifically, we mitigate privacy problems introduced by the standard WLAN access point discovery by designing a privacy-preserving access-point discovery protocol, show how a mobility management protocol can be used to protect privacy, and how leaks on all layers of the stack can be reduced by network location awareness and protocol stack virtualization. These practical technologies can be used in designing a privacy-preserving mobile system or can be retrofitted to current systems