Synthesising end-to-end security schemes through endorsement intermediaries

Composing secure interaction protocols dynamically for e-commerce continue to pose a number of challenges, such as lack of standard notations for expressing requirements and the difficulty involved in enforcing them. Furthermore, interaction with unknown entities may require finding common trusted intermediaries. Securing messages sent through such intermediaries require schemes that provide end-to-end security guarantees. In the past, e-commerce protocols such as SET were created to provide such end-to-end guarantees. However, such complex hand crafted protocols proved difficult to model check. This thesis addresses the end-to-end problems in an open dynamic setting where trust relationships evolve, and requirements of interacting entities change over time. Before interaction protocols can be synthesised, a number of research questions must be addressed. Firstly, to meet end-to-end security requirements, the security level along the message path must be made to reflect the requirements. Secondly, the type of endorsement intermediaries must reflect the message category. Thirdly, intermediaries must be made liable for their endorsements. This thesis proposes a number of solutions to address the research problems. End-to-end security requirements were arrived by aggregating security requirements of all interacting parties. These requirements were enforced by interleaving and composing basic schemes derived from challenge-response mechanisms. The institutional trust promoting mechanism devised allowed all vital data to be endorsed by authorised category specific intermediaries. Intermediaries were made accountable for their endorsements by being required to discharge or transfer proof obligations placed on them. The techniques devised for aggregating and enforcing security requirements allow dynamic creation of end-to-end security schemes. The novel interleaving technique devised allows creation of provably secure multiparty schemes for any number of recipients. The structured technique combining compositional approach with appropriate invariants and preconditions makes model checking of synthesised schemes unnecessary. The proposed framework combining endorsement trust with schemes making intermediaries accountable provides a way to alleviate distrust between previously unknown e-commerce entities

An adaptive approach for optimized opportunistic routing over Delay Tolerant Mobile Ad hoc Networks

This thesis presents a framework for investigating opportunistic routing in Delay Tolerant Mobile Ad hoc Networks (DTMANETs), and introduces the concept of an Opportunistic Confidence Index (OCI). The OCI enables multiple opportunistic routing protocols to be applied as an adaptive group to improve DTMANET routing reliability, performance, and efficiency. The DTMANET is a recently acknowledged networkarchitecture, which is designed to address the challenging and marginal environments created by adaptive, mobile, and unreliable network node presence. Because of its ad hoc and autonomic nature, routing in a DTMANET is a very challenging problem. The design of routing protocols in such environments, which ensure a high percentage delivery rate (reliability), achieve a reasonable delivery time (performance), and at the same time maintain an acceptable communication overhead (efficiency), is of fundamental consequence to the usefulness of DTMANETs. In recent years, a number of investigations into DTMANET routing have been conducted, resulting in the emergence of a class of routing known as opportunistic routing protocols. Current research into opportunistic routing has exposed opportunities for positive impacts on DTMANET routing. To date, most investigations have concentrated upon one or other of the quality metrics of reliability, performance, or efficiency, while some approaches have pursued a balance of these metrics through assumptions of a high level of global knowledge and/or uniform mobile device behaviours. No prior research that we are aware of has studied the connection between multiple opportunistic elements and their influences upon one another, and none has demonstrated the possibility of modelling and using multiple different opportunistic elements as an adaptive group to aid the routing process in a DTMANET. This thesis investigates OCI opportunities and their viability through the design of an extensible simulation environment, which makes use of methods and techniques such as abstract modelling, opportunistic element simplification and isolation, random attribute generation and assignment, localized knowledge sharing, automated scenario generation, intelligent weight assignment and/or opportunistic element permutation. These methods and techniques are incorporated at both data acquisition and analysis phases. Our results show a significant improvement in all three metric categories. In one of the most applicable scenarios tested, OCI yielded a 31.05% message delivery increase (reliability improvement), 22.18% message delivery time reduction (performance improvement), and 73.64% routing depth decrement (efficiency improvement). We are able to conclude that the OCI approach is feasible across a range of scenarios, and that the use of multiple opportunistic elements to aid decision-making processes in DTMANET environments has value

Utilizing Public Blockchains for the Sybil-Resistant Bootstrapping of Distributed Anonymity Services

Distributed anonymity services, such as onion routing networks or cryptocurrency tumblers, promise privacy protection without trusted third parties. While the security of these services is often well-researched, security implications of their required bootstrapping processes are usually neglected: Users either jointly conduct the anonymization themselves, or they need to rely on a set of non-colluding privacy peers. However, the typically small number of privacy peers enable single adversaries to mimic distributed services. We thus present AnonBoot, a Sybil-resistant medium to securely bootstrap distributed anonymity services via public blockchains. AnonBoot enforces that peers periodically create a small proof of work to refresh their eligibility for providing secure anonymity services. A pseudo-random, locally replicable bootstrapping process using on-chain entropy then prevents biasing the election of eligible peers. Our evaluation using Bitcoin as AnonBoot's underlying blockchain shows its feasibility to maintain a trustworthy repository of 1000 peers with only a small storage footprint while supporting arbitrarily large user bases on top of most blockchains.Comment: To be published in the proceedings of the 15th ACM ASIA Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ACM ASIACCS'20

A critical literature review of security and privacy in smart home healthcare schemes adopting IoT & blockchain: problems, challenges and solutions

Protecting private data in smart homes, a popular Internet-of-Things (IoT) application, remains a significant data security and privacy challenge due to the large-scale development and distributed nature of IoT networks. Recently, smart healthcare has leveraged smart home systems, thereby compounding security concerns in terms of the confidentiality of sensitive and private data and by extension the privacy of the data owner. However, PoA-based Blockchain DLT has emerged as a promising solution for protecting private data from indiscriminate use and thereby preserving the privacy of individuals residing in IoT-enabled smart homes. This review elicits some concerns, issues, and problems that have hindered the adoption of blockchain and IoT (BCoT) in some domains and suggests requisite solutions using the aging-in-place scenario. Implementation issues with BCoT were examined as well as the combined challenges BCoT can pose when utilised for security gains. The study discusses recent findings, opportunities, and barriers, and provide recommendations that could facilitate the continuous growth of blockchain application in healthcare. Lastly, the study then explored the potential of using a PoA-based permission blockchain with an applicable consent-based privacy model for decision-making in the information disclosure process, including the use of publisher-subscriber contracts for fine-grained access control to ensure secure data processing and sharing, as well as ethical trust in personal information disclosure, as a solution direction. The proposed authorisation framework could guarantee data ownership, conditional access management, scalable and tamper-proof data storage, and a more resilient system against threat models such as interception and insider attacks

Adaptive trust and reputation system as a security service in group communications

Group communications has been facilitating many emerging applications which require packet delivery from one or more sender(s) to multiple receivers. Owing to the multicasting and broadcasting nature, group communications are susceptible to various kinds of attacks. Though a number of proposals have been reported to secure group communications, provisioning security in group communications remains a critical and challenging issue. This work first presents a survey on recent advances in security requirements and services in group communications in wireless and wired networks, and discusses challenges in designing secure group communications in these networks. Effective security services to secure group communications are then proposed. This dissertation also introduces the taxonomy of security services, which can be applied to secure group communications, and evaluates existing secure group communications schemes. This dissertation work analyzes a number of vulnerabilities against trust and reputation systems, and proposes a threat model to predict attack behaviors. This work also considers scenarios in which multiple attacking agents actively and collaboratively attack the whole network as well as a specific individual node. The behaviors may be related to both performance issues and security issues. Finally, this work extensively examines and substantiates the security of the proposed trust and reputation system. This work next discusses the proposed trust and reputation system for an anonymous network, referred to as the Adaptive Trust-based Anonymous Network (ATAN). The distributed and decentralized network management in ATAN does not require a central authority so that ATAN alleviates the problem of a single point of failure. In ATAN, the trust and reputation system aims to enhance anonymity by establishing a trust and reputation relationship between the source and the forwarding members. The trust and reputation relationship of any two nodes is adaptive to new information learned by these two nodes or recommended from other trust nodes. Therefore, packets are anonymously routed from the \u27trusted\u27 source to the destination through \u27trusted\u27 intermediate nodes, thereby improving anonymity of communications. In the performance analysis, the ratio of the ATAN header and data payload is around 0.1, which is relatively small. This dissertation offers analysis on security services on group communications. It illustrates that these security services are needed to incorporate with each other such that group communications can be secure. Furthermore, the adaptive trust and reputation system is proposed to integrate the concept of trust and reputation into communications. Although deploying the trust and reputation system incurs some overheads in terms of storage spaces, bandwidth and computation cycles, it shows a very promising performance that enhance users\u27 confidence in using group communications, and concludes that the trust and reputation system should be deployed as another layer of security services to protect group communications against malicious adversaries and attacks

Towards Tactile Internet in Beyond 5G Era: Recent Advances, Current Issues and Future Directions

Tactile Internet (TI) is envisioned to create a paradigm shift from the content-oriented communications to steer/control-based communications by enabling real-time transmission of haptic information (i.e., touch, actuation, motion, vibration, surface texture) over Internet in addition to the conventional audiovisual and data traffics. This emerging TI technology, also considered as the next evolution phase of Internet of Things (IoT), is expected to create numerous opportunities for technology markets in a wide variety of applications ranging from teleoperation systems and Augmented/Virtual Reality (AR/VR) to automotive safety and eHealthcare towards addressing the complex problems of human society. However, the realization of TI over wireless media in the upcoming Fifth Generation (5G) and beyond networks creates various non-conventional communication challenges and stringent requirements in terms of ultra-low latency, ultra-high reliability, high data-rate connectivity, resource allocation, multiple access and quality-latency-rate tradeoff. To this end, this paper aims to provide a holistic view on wireless TI along with a thorough review of the existing state-of-the-art, to identify and analyze the involved technical issues, to highlight potential solutions and to propose future research directions. First, starting with the vision of TI and recent advances and a review of related survey/overview articles, we present a generalized framework for wireless TI in the Beyond 5G Era including a TI architecture, the main technical requirements, the key application areas and potential enabling technologies. Subsequently, we provide a comprehensive review of the existing TI works by broadly categorizing them into three main paradigms; namely, haptic communications, wireless AR/VR, and autonomous, intelligent and cooperative mobility systems. Next, potential enabling technologies across physical/Medium Access Control (MAC) and network layers are identified and discussed in detail. Also, security and privacy issues of TI applications are discussed along with some promising enablers. Finally, we present some open research challenges and recommend promising future research directions

Design and financial aspects of the end-of-life management of telecommunications products

As a result of legislation the electronics industry faces product takeback and recycling. It is therefore important to understand the environmental burden caused by discarded consumer electronics and also how to better manage raw materials. The thesis begins with a review of current environmental issues from the viewpoint of the electronics industry. This shows that there are many complex interactions to be considered within any environmental framework particularly those between legislation, technology and business. Consideration of the drivers indicates that work should focus on the design understanding required to allow product life extension as well as current strategies addressing the reprocessing of used products. The body of the thesis therefore has two themes, both of which use telecommunications products, telephones, as their exemplar. The first theme, the design issues related to the end-of-life management is explored via a benchmarking study of eight telephones from European (UK and Germany) and Far Eastern suppliers (China and Malaysia). This study allowed the generation of design rules for such products. The work also examined the impact of design changes to improve end-of-life practices on manufacturing costs in Europe and the Pacific Rim to indicate the constraints of labour and investment costs. The second theme links the business and technological issues faced in the endof- life (EOL) management of electronic products. The EOL options considered are: resale, remanufacturing, recycling, disposal and to a limited extent, upgrading. Building on the technological understanding generated in the first theme accurate economic models are derived, based on commercial data, for exemplar telephone products that reflect the activities within each option. The potential revenue from each option indicates preferred design strategies and the models can therefore help resolve some of the uncertainties faced by decision makers. The thesis closes by identifying that the design rules and financial models are particularly appropriate for mature products such as the telephones used as exemplars, further research is therefore necessary to extend the existing work to high added value products

Autonomy, Efficiency, Privacy and Traceability in Blockchain-enabled IoT Data Marketplace

Personal data generated from IoT devices is a new economic asset that individuals can trade to generate revenue on the emerging data marketplaces. Blockchain technology can disrupt the data marketplace and make trading more democratic, trustworthy, transparent and secure. Nevertheless, the adoption of blockchain to create an IoT data marketplace requires consideration of autonomy and efficiency, privacy, and traceability. Conventional centralized approaches are built around a trusted third party that conducts and controls all management operations such as managing contracts, pricing, billing, reputation mechanisms etc, raising concern that providers lose control over their data. To tackle this issue, an efficient, autonomous and fully-functional marketplace system is needed, with no trusted third party involved in operational tasks. Moreover, an inefficient allocation of buyers’ demands on battery-operated IoT devices poses a challenge for providers to serve multiple buyers’ demands simultaneously in real-time without disrupting their SLAs (service level agreements). Furthermore, a poor privacy decision to make personal data accessible to unknown or arbitrary buyers may have adverse consequences and privacy violations for providers. Lastly, a buyer could buy data from one marketplace and without the knowledge of the provider, resell bought data to users registered in other marketplaces. This may either lead to monetary loss or privacy violation for the provider. To address such issues, a data ownership traceability mechanism is essential that can track the change in ownership of data due to its trading within and across marketplace systems. However, data ownership traceability is hard because of ownership ambiguity, undisclosed reselling, and dispersal of ownership across multiple marketplaces. This thesis makes the following novel contributions. First, we propose an autonomous and efficient IoT data marketplace, MartChain, offering key mechanisms for a marketplace leveraging smart contracts to record agreement details, participant ratings, and data prices in blockchain without involving any mediator. Second, MartChain is underpinned by an Energy-aware Demand Selection and Allocation (EDSA) mechanism for optimally selecting and allocating buyers' demands on provider’s IoT devices while satisfying the battery, quality and allocation constraints. EDSA maximizes the revenue of the provider while meeting the buyers’ requirements and ensuring the completion of the selected demands without any interruptions. The proof-of-concept implementation on the Ethereum blockchain shows that our approach is viable and benefits the provider and buyer by creating an autonomous and efficient real-time data trading model. Next, we propose KYBChain, a Know-Your-Buyer in the privacy-aware decentralized IoT data marketplace that performs a multi-faceted assessment of various characteristics of buyers and evaluates their privacy rating. Privacy rating empowers providers to make privacy-aware informed decisions about data sharing. Quantitative analysis to evaluate the utility of privacy rating demonstrates that the use of privacy rating by the providers results in a decrease of data leakage risk and generated revenue, correlating with the classical risk-utility trade-off. Evaluation results of KYBChain on Ethereum reveal that the overheads in terms of gas consumption, throughput and latency introduced by our privacy rating mechanism compared to a marketplace that does not incorporate a privacy rating system are insignificant relative to its privacy gains. Finally, we propose TrailChain which generates a trusted trade trail for tracking the data ownership spanning multiple decentralized marketplaces. Our solution includes mechanisms for detecting any unauthorized data reselling to prevent privacy violations and a fair resell payment sharing scheme to distribute payment among data owners for authorized reselling. We performed qualitative and quantitative evaluations to demonstrate the effectiveness of TrailChain in tracking data ownership using four private Ethereum networks. Qualitative security analysis demonstrates that TrailChain is resilient against several malicious activities and security attacks. Simulations show that our method detects undisclosed reselling within the same marketplace and across different marketplaces. Besides, it also identifies whether the provider has authorized the reselling and fairly distributes the revenue among the data owners at marginal overhead