Cyber and physical threats to the internet of everything

After over 40 years of the Internet faithfully serving the needs of the Earth’s human population for information, communication, and entertainment, we have now entered the era of the IoT. Of course, when we refer to the Internet, we also mean the Web and therefore the Web of Things (WoT), where distributed applications benefitting from networking through the Internet are no longer a privilege of humans. Things can also take full advantage of the capabilities, simplicity, and potential of Web technologies and protocols. Following current developments in this field, it is not difficult to see the inevitability of the convergence of the two worlds, of humans and of things, each using the Internet as a primary means of communication. Possibly the most appropriate term to describe this evolution has been proposed by Cisco: the Internet of Everything (IoE), which "brings together people, process, data, and things to make networked connections more relevant and valuable than ever before." In the IoE era, machines are equal to humans as Internet users. In an ecosystem in which everything is connected, and where physical and cyber converge and collaborate, the threats of the two worlds not only coexist, but also converge, creating a still largely unknown environment, in which an attack in cyberspace can propagate and have an adverse effect in physical space and vice versa. So how can we be prepared for and confront this new unknown? How can we study and learn from the ways this has been dealt with in the past? First, it is important to simplify the problem by attempting to identify the components of IoE and the threats and effects an attack can have in each one

Security in the internet of everything era - opening statement

Since Nikola Tesla’s “teleautomation”, it has taken almost 80 years for the general public to experience what culminated into the Internet of Things and another ten to truly accept it. The problem is that in recent years, a vast range of devices and systems were designed to support this new paradigm, but with little regard to security or privacy, despite the profound impact that breaches of either can have to a user’s “real life”

Wear it and share it: Wearables and security

As the amount of data generated by personal devices increases, supported by the trend of making these devices more personal (i.e., wearable, sewable), so too will the risks of personal privacy violation rise. From the technological perspective, it is important to follow privacy-by-design approaches, incorporating both data encryption and data anonymization techniques. From the perspective of enterprises and users, understanding that “wearing means sharing” is a valuable first step

On the Personalization of Personal Networks - Service Provision Based on User Profiles

In this paper, we present a user profile definition scheme featuring context awareness. Though the scheme has been designed to meet the needs of web applications deployed over heterogeneous devices, emphasis is given in the deployment of the profile scheme over Personal Networks (PNs), as the personalization of the deployed applications and services in PN environments is of great importance. The proposed scheme is presented as part of an integrated framework for user profile management that takes into account (and is therefore compliant to) the existing standardization attempts. The overall architecture and description of the profile management framework, taking into account security issues inside Personal Networks, is presented. The paper concludes by showcasing how user profiles have been incorporated in a selected pilot service of the EU IST research project MAGNET Beyond

Digital deception: Cyber fraud and online misinformation

PHISHING, USER ACCOUNT takeovers, and other computing-related threats have made it easy for criminals to deceive people for financial and other gain. It is now considered standard practice for an advanced cyberattack, even a highly technical one, to start in a nontechnical manner: a spearphishing email deceiving an organization’s employees into providing their credentials, a watering hole website infecting their computer, and so on. It is the human that is the initial target, as well as the first line of defense. At the same time, social media has become a dominant, direct, and highly effective form of news generation and sharing at a global scale, in a manner that influences and enhances, but also challenges and often antagonizes, traditional media corporations

Evaluation of a blockchain-enabled resource management mechanism for NGNs

A new era in ICT has begun with the evolution of Next Generation Networks (NGNs) and the development of human-centric applications. Ultra-low latency, high throughput, and high availability are a few of the main characteristics of modern networks. Network Providers (NPs) are responsible for the development and maintenance of network infrastructures ready to support the most demanding applications that should be available not only in urban areas but in every corner of the earth. The NPs must collaborate to offer high-quality services and keep their overall cost low. The collaboration among competitive entities can in principle be regulated by a trusted 3rd party or by a distributed approach/technology which can guarantee integrity, security, and trust. This paper examines the use of blockchain technology for resource management and negotiation among NPs and presents the results of experiments conducted in a dedicated real testbed. The implementation of the resource management mechanism is described in a Smart Contract (SC) and the testbeds use the Raft and the IBFT consensus mechanisms respectively. The goal of this paper is two-fold: to assess its performance in terms of transaction throughput and latency so that we can assess the granularity at which this solution can operate (e.g. support resource re-allocation among NPs on micro-service level or not) and define implementation-specific parameters like the consensus mechanism that is the most suitable for this use case based on performance metrics

Traffic engineering towards the assurance of quality in IP networks: trends and perspectives

The need for establishing bandwidth guaranteed paths in IP networks and the requirement for making optimal use of the available resources becomes more and more crucial due to the significant development of data-intensive multimedia applications. In this paper, we discuss the techniques and the mechanisms for exercising traffic engineering in contemporary IP networks under the prism of exploiting historical monitoring information collected from the operational environment.Keywords: Traffic engineering, history monitoring information, traffic matrix, QoS

An evaluation study of clustering algorithms in the scope of user communities assessment

AbstractIn this paper, we provide the results of ongoing work in Magnet Beyond project, regarding social networking services. We introduce an integrated social networking framework through the definition or the appropriate notions and metrics. This allows one to run an evaluation study of three widely used clustering methods (k-means, hierarchical and spectral clustering) in the scope of social groups assessment and in regard to the cardinality of the profile used to assess users’ preferences. Such an evaluation study is performed in the context of our service requirements (i.e. on the basis of equal-sized group formation and of maximization of interests’ commonalities between users within each social group). The experimental results indicate that spectral clustering, due to the optimization it offers in terms of normalized cut minimization, is applicable within the context of Magnet Beyond socialization services. Regarding profile’s cardinality impact on the system performance, this is shown to be highly dependent on the underlying distribution that characterizes the frequency of user preferences appearance. Our work also incorporates the introduction of a heuristic algorithm that assigns new users that join the service into appropriate social groups, once the service has been initialized and the groups have been assessed using spectral clustering. The results clearly show that our approach is able to adhere to the service requirements as new users join the system, without the need of an iterative spectral clustering application that is computationally demanding