Protocol for a Systematic Literature Review on Security-related Research in Ubiquitous Computing

Context: This protocol is as a supplementary document to our review paper that investigates security-related challenges and solutions that have occurred during the past decade (from January 2003 to December 2013). Objectives: The objective of this systematic review is to identify security-related challenges, security goals and defenses in ubiquitous computing by answering to three main research questions. First, demographic data and trends will be given by analyzing where, when and by whom the research has been carried out. Second, we will identify security goals that occur in ubiquitous computing, along with attacks, vulnerabilities and threats that have motivated the research. Finally, we will examine the differences in addressing security in ubiquitous computing with those in traditional distributed systems. Method: In order to provide an overview of security-related challenges, goals and solutions proposed in the literature, we will use a systematic literature review (SLR). This protocol describes the steps which are to be taken in order to identify papers relevant to the objective of our review. The first phase of the method includes planning, in which we define the scope of our review by identifying the main research questions, search procedure, as well as inclusion and exclusion criteria. Data extracted from the relevant papers are to be used in the second phase of the method, data synthesis, to answer our research questions. The review will end by reporting on the results. Results and conclusions: The expected results of the review should provide an overview of attacks, vulnerabilities and threats that occur in ubiquitous computing and that have motivated the research in the last decade. Moreover, the review will indicate which security goals are gaining on their significance in the era of ubiquitous computing and provide a categorization of the security-related countermeasures, mechanisms and techniques found in the literature. (authors' abstract)Series: Working Papers on Information Systems, Information Business and Operation

FPGA based remote code integrity verification of programs in distributed embedded systems

The explosive growth of networked embedded systems has made ubiquitous and pervasive computing a reality. However, there are still a number of new challenges to its widespread adoption that include scalability, availability, and, especially, security of software. Among the different challenges in software security, the problem of remote-code integrity verification is still waiting for efficient solutions. This paper proposes the use of reconfigurable computing to build a consistent architecture for generation of attestations (proofs) of code integrity for an executing program as well as to deliver them to the designated verification entity. Remote dynamic update of reconfigurable devices is also exploited to increase the complexity of mounting attacks in a real-word environment. The proposed solution perfectly fits embedded devices that are nowadays commonly equipped with reconfigurable hardware components that are exploited to solve different computational problems

SpaceSemantics: an architecture for modeling environments

The notion of modeling location is fundamental to location awareness in ubiquitous computing environments. The investigation of models and the integration with the myriad of location sensing technologies makes for a challenging discipline. Despite notable development of location models, we believe that many challenges remain unresolved. Complexity and scalability, diverse environments coupled with various sensors and managing the privacy and security of sensitive information are open issues. In this paper we discuss our previous experience combining location sensing with mobile agents and how the lessons learnt have lead to the conception of SpaceSemantics, an open architecture for modeling environments

Capturing personal health data from wearable sensors

Recently, there has been a significant growth in pervasive computing and ubiquitous sensing which strives to develop and deploy sensing technology all around us. We are also seeing the emergence of applications such as environmental and personal health monitoring to leverage data from a physical world. Most of the developments in this area have been concerned with either developing the sensing technologies, or the infrastructure (middleware) to gather this data and the issues which have been addressed include power consumption on the devices, security of data transmission, networking challenges in gathering and storing the data and fault tolerance in the event of network and/or device failure. Research is focusing on harvesting and managing data and providing query capabilities

Sensor Network Security: More Interesting Than You Think

With the advent of low-power wireless sensor networks, a wealth of new applications at the interface of the real and digital worlds is emerging. A distributed computing platform that can measure properties of the real world, formulate intelligent inferences, and instrument responses, requires strong foundations in distributed computing, artificial intelligence, databases, control theory, and security. Before these intelligent systems can be deployed in critical infrastructures such as emergency rooms and powerplants, the security properties of sensors must be fully understood. Existing wisdom has been to apply the traditional security models and techniques to sensor networks. However, sensor networks are not traditional computing devices, and as a result, existing security models and methods are ill suited. In this position paper, we take the first steps towards producing a comprehensive security model that is tailored for sensor networks. Incorporating work from Internet security, ubiquitous computing, and distributed systems, we outline security properties that must be considered when designing a secure sensor network. We propose challenges for sensor networks – security obstacles that, when overcome, will move us closer to decreasing the divide between computers and the physical world

Lightweight Mutual Authentication Protocol for Low Cost RFID Tags

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology one of the most promising technologies in the field of ubiquitous computing. Indeed, RFID technology may well replace barcode technology. Although it offers many advantages over other identification systems, there are also associated security risks that are not easy to be addressed. When designing a real lightweight authentication protocol for low cost RFID tags, a number of challenges arise due to the extremely limited computational, storage and communication abilities of Low-cost RFID tags. This paper proposes a real mutual authentication protocol for low cost RFID tags. The proposed protocol prevents passive attacks as active attacks are discounted when designing a protocol to meet the requirements of low cost RFID tags. However the implementation of the protocol meets the limited abilities of low cost RFID tags.Comment: 11 Pages, IJNS