Synergistic user ↔ context analytics

Various flavours of a new research field on (socio-)physical or personal analytics have emerged, with the goal of deriving semanticallyrich insights from people’s low-level physical sensing combined with their (online) social interactions. In this paper, we argue for more comprehensive data sources, including environmental and application-specific data, to better capture the interactions between users and their context, in addition to those among users. We provide some example use cases and present our ongoing work towards a synergistic analytics platform: a testbed based on mobile crowdsensing and IoT, a data model for representing the different sources of data and their connections, and a prediction engine for analyzing the data and producing insights

Towards secure distance bounding

Abstract. Relay attacks (and, more generally, man-in-the-middle attacks) are a serious threat against many access control and payment schemes. In this work, we present distance-bounding protocols, how these can deter relay attacks, and the security models formalizing these protocols. We show several pitfalls making existing protocols insecure (or at least, vulnerable, in some cases). Then, we introduce the SKI protocol which enjoys resistance to all popular attack-models and features provable security. As far as we know, this is the first protocol with such all-encompassing security guarantees. 1 Why Distance-Bounding? It is well known that a chess beginner can win against a chess grand-master easily by defeating two grand-masters concurrently, taking different colors in both games, and relaying the move of one master to the other. This is a pure relay attack where two masters play against each other while each of them thinks he is playing against a beginner. In real life, relay attacks find applications in access control. For instance, a car wit

Classifying RFID attacks and defenses

RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) systems are one of the most pervasive computing technologies with technical potential and profitable opportunities in a diverse area of applications. Among their advantages is included their low cost and their broad applicability. However, they also present a number of inherent vulnerabilities. This paper develops a structural methodology for risks that RFID networks face by developing a classification of RFID attacks, presenting their important features, and discussing possible countermeasures. The goal of the paper is to categorize the existing weaknesses of RFID communication so that a better understanding of RFID attacks can be achieved and subsequently more efficient and effective algorithms, techniques and procedures to combat these attacks may be developed.Information and Communication TechnologyElectrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Scienc