Security Implications of Fog Computing on the Internet of Things

Recently, the use of IoT devices and sensors has been rapidly increased which also caused data generation (information and logs), bandwidth usage, and related phenomena to be increased. To our best knowledge, a standard definition for the integration of fog computing with IoT is emerging now. This integration will bring many opportunities for the researchers, especially while building cyber-security related solutions. In this study, we surveyed about the integration of fog computing with IoT and its implications. Our goal was to find out and emphasize problems, specifically security related problems that arise with the employment of fog computing by IoT. According to our findings, although this integration seems to be non-trivial and complicated, it has more benefits than the implications.Comment: 5 pages, conference paper, to appear in Proceedings of the ICCE 2019, IEEE 37th International Conference on Consumer Electronics (ICCE), Jan 11- 13, 2019, Las Vegas, NV, US

Industrial networks and IIoT: Now and future trends

Connectivity is the one word summary for Industry 4.0 revolution. The importance of Internet of Things (IoT) and Industrial IoT (IIoT) have been increased dramatically with the rise of industrialization and industry 4.0. As new opportunities bring their own challenges, with the massive interconnected devices of the IIoT, cyber security of those networks and privacy of their users have become an important aspect. Specifically, intrusion detection for industrial networks (IIoT) has great importance. For instance, it is a key factor in improving the safe operation of the smart grid systems yet protecting the privacy of the consumers at the same time. In the same manner, data streaming is a valid option when the analysis is to be pushed from the cloud to the fog for industrial networks to provide agile response, since it brings the advantage of fast action on intrusion detection and also can buy time for intrusion mitigation. In order to dive deep in industrial networks, basic ground needs to be settled. Hence, this chapter serves in this manner, by presenting basic and emerging technologies along with ideas and discussions: First, an introduction of semiconductor evolution is provided along with the up-to-date hi-tech wired/wireless communication solutions for industrial networks. This is followed by a thorough representation of future trends in industrial environments. More importantly, enabling technologies for industrial networks is also presented. Finally, the chapter is concluded with a summary of the presentations along with future projections of IIoT networks

Security of the Internet of Things: Vulnerabilities, Attacks and Countermeasures

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) constitute one of the most promising third-millennium technologies and have wide range of applications in our surrounding environment. The reason behind the vast adoption of WSNs in various applications is that they have tremendously appealing features, e.g., low production cost, low installation cost, unattended network operation, autonomous and longtime operation. WSNs have started to merge with the Internet of Things (IoT) through the introduction of Internet access capability in sensor nodes and sensing ability in Internet-connected devices. Thereby, the IoT is providing access to huge amount of data, collected by the WSNs, over the Internet. Hence, the security of IoT should start with foremost securing WSNs ahead of the other components. However, owing to the absence of a physical line-of-defense, i.e., there is no dedicated infrastructure such as gateways to watch and observe the flowing information in the network, security of WSNs along with IoT is of a big concern to the scientific community. More specifically, for the application areas in which CIA (confidentiality, integrity, availability) has prime importance, WSNs and emerging IoT technology might constitute an open avenue for the attackers. Besides, recent integration and collaboration of WSNs with IoT will open new challenges and problems in terms of security. Hence, this would be a nightmare for the individuals using these systems as well as the security administrators who are managing those networks. Therefore, a detailed review of security attacks towards WSNs and IoT, along with the techniques for prevention, detection, and mitigation of those attacks are provided in this paper. In this text, attacks are categorized and treated into mainly two parts, most or all types of attacks towards WSNs and IoT are investigated under that umbrella: “Passive Attacks” and “Active Attacks”. Understanding these attacks and their associated defense mechanisms will help paving a secure path towards the proliferation and public acceptance of IoT technology

MAKE-IT—A Lightweight Mutual Authentication and Key Exchange Protocol for Industrial Internet of Things

Continuous development of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has opened up enormous opportunities for the engineers to enhance the efficiency of the machines. Despite the development, many industry administrators still fear to use Internet for operating their machines due to untrusted nature of the communication channel. The utilization of internet for managing industrial operations can be widespread adopted if the authentication of the entities are performed and trust is ensured. The traditional schemes with their inherent security issues and other complexities, cannot be directly deployed to resource constrained network devices. Therefore, we have proposed a strong mutual authentication and secret key exchange protocol to address the vulnerabilities of the existing schemes. We have used various cryptography operations such as hashing, ciphering, and so forth, for providing secure mutual authentication and secret key exchange between different entities to restrict unauthorized access. Performance and security analysis clearly demonstrates that the proposed work is energy efficient (computation and communication inexpensive) and more robust against the attacks in comparison to the traditional scheme

Enhancing Cyber Security of LoRaWAN Gateways under Adversarial Attacks

The Internet of Things (IoT) has disrupted the IT landscape drastically, and Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) is one specification that enables these IoT devices to have access to the Internet. Former security analyses have suggested that the gateways in LoRaWAN in their current state are susceptible to a wide variety of malicious attacks, which can be notoriously difficult to mitigate since gateways are seen as obedient relays by design. These attacks, if not addressed, can cause malfunctions and loss of efficiency in the network traffic. As a solution to this unique problem, this paper presents a novel certificate authentication technique that enhances the cyber security of gateways in the LoRaWAN network. The proposed technique considers a public key infrastructure (PKI) solution that considers a two-tier certificate authority (CA) setup, such as a root-CA and intermediate-CA. This solution is promising, as the simulation results validate that about 66.67% of the packets that are arriving from an illegitimate gateway (GW) are discarded in our implemented secure and reliable solution

Decision Support Systems and Industrial IoT in Smart Grid, Factories, and Cities

Internet of things (IoT) is an emerging research field that is rapidly becoming an important part of our everyday lives including home automation, smart buildings, smart things, and more. This is due to cheap, efficient, and wirelessly-enabled circuit boards that are enabling the functions of remote sensing/actuating, decentralization, autonomy, and other essential functions. Moreover, with the advancements in embedded artificial intelligence, these devices are becoming more self-aware and autonomous, hence making decisions themselves. Current research is devoted to the understanding of how decision support systems are integrated into industrial IoT. Decision Support Systems and Industrial IoT in Smart Grid, Factories, and Cities presents the internet of things and its place during the technological revolution, which is taking place now to bring us a better, sustainable, automated, and safer world. This book also covers the challenges being faced such as relations and implications of IoT with existing communication and networking technologies; applications like practical use-case scenarios from the real world including smart cities, buildings, and grids; and topics such as cyber security, user privacy, data ownership, and information handling related to IoT networks. Additionally, this book focuses on the future applications, trends, and potential benefits of this new discipline. This book is essential for electrical engineers, computer engineers, researchers in IoT, security, and smart cities, along with practitioners, researchers, academicians, and students interested in all aspects of industrial IoT and its applications

Prevention and Detection of Intrusions in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) continue to grow as one of the most exciting and challenging research areas of engineering. They are characterized by severely constrained computational and energy resources and also restricted by the ad-hoc network operational environment. They pose unique challenges, due to limited power supplies, low transmission bandwidth, small memory sizes and limited energy. Therefore, security techniques used in traditional networks cannot be directly adopted. So, new ideas and approaches are needed, in order to increase the overall security of the network. Security applications in such resource constrained WSNs with minimum overhead provides significant challenges, and is the main focus of this dissertation. There is no one size fits all solution in defending WSNs against intrusions and attacks. Therefore, intrusions and attacks against WSNs should be carefully examined to reveal specific vulnerabilities associated with them, before beginning the design of any kind of intrusion prevention and detection systems. By following this rationale, the dissertation starts with providing information regarding the WSNs, types of attacks towards WSNs, and the methods on how to prevent and detect them. Then, in order to secure WSNs, a security provisioning plan is provided. In general, the following processes may be involved in securing WSNs: Intrusion Prevention, Intrusion Detection, and Intrusion Mitigation. This dissertation presents solutions (algorithms and schemes) to the first two lines of defenses of the security provisioning plan, namely, Intrusion Prevention and Intrusion Detection. As a first line of defense in securing WSNs, this dissertation presents our proposed algorithm ( Two-Level User Authentication scheme) as an Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) for WSNs. The algorithm uses two-level authentication between a sensor node and a user. It is designed for heterogeneous WSNs, meaning that the network consists of two components: regular nodes and more powerful cluster heads. The proposed scheme is evaluated both analytically and also in a simulation environment, by comparing it to the current state-of-the-art schemes in the literature. A comprehensive and systematic survey of the state-of-the-art in Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) that are proposed for Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks (MANETs) and WSNs is presented. Firstly, detailed information about IDSs is provided. This is followed by the analysis and comparison of each scheme along with their advantages and disadvantages from the perspective of security. Finally, guidelines on IDSs that are potentially applicable to WSNs are provided. Overall, this work would be very helpful to the researchers in developing their own IDSs for their WSNs. Clustering (of the nodes) is very important for WSNs not only in data aggregation, but also in increasing the overall performance of the network, especially in terms of total life-time. Besides, with the help of clustering, complex intrusion prevention and detection algorithms can be implemented. Therefore, background on the clustering algorithms is provided and then a clustering algorithm for WSNs is proposed, that is both power and connectivity aware. The proposed algorithm provides higher energy efficiency and increases the life-time of the network. In evaluating the proposed clustering algorithm (in a simulation environment by comparing its\u27 performance to the previously proposed algorithm, namely Kachirski et al.\u27s algorithm), it is demonstrated that the proposed algorithm improves energy efficiency in WSNs. Finally, an IDS framework based on multi-level clustering for hierarchical WSNs is proposed. It is based upon (the nodes use our proposed clustering algorithm while forming their clusters) the clustering algorithm that is proposed in this dissertation. The framework provides two types of intrusion detection approaches, namely Downwards-IDS (D-IDS) to detect the abnormal behavior (intrusion) of the subordinate (member) nodes and Upwards-IDS (U-IDS) to detect the abnormal behavior of the cluster heads. By using analytical calculations, the optimum parameters for the D-IDS (number of maximum hops) and U-IDS (monitoring group size) of the framework are evaluated and presented. Overall, this dissertation research contributes to the first two lines of defenses towards the security of WSNs, namely, IPS and IDS. Furthermore, the final contribution of this dissertation is towards the topology formation of the WSNs (especially for the hierarchical WSNs), namely, clustering; which would be very useful in implementation of the IPS and IDS systems that are presented in this dissertation

Security of the Internet of Things: Vulnerabilities, Attacks and Countermeasures

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) constitute one of the most promising third-millennium technologies and have wide range of applications in our surrounding environment. The reason behind the vast adoption of WSNs in various applications is that they have tremendously appealing features, e.g., low production cost, low installation cost, unattended network operation, autonomous and longtime operation. WSNs have started to merge with the Internet of Things (IoT) through the introduction of Internet access capability in sensor nodes and sensing ability in Internet-connected devices. Thereby, the IoT is providing access to huge amount of data, collected by the WSNs, over the Internet. Hence, the security of IoT should start with foremost securing WSNs ahead of the other components. However, owing to the absence of a physical line-of-defense, i.e. there is no dedicated infrastructure such as gateways to watch and observe the flowing information in the network, security of WSNs along with IoT is of a big concern to the scientific community. More specifically, for the application areas in which CIA (confidentiality, integrity, availability) has prime importance, WSNs and emerging IoT technology might constitute an open avenue for the attackers. Besides, recent integration and collaboration of WSNs with IoT will open new challenges and problems in terms of security. Hence, this would be a nightmare for the individuals using these systems as well as the security administrators who are managing those networks. Therefore, a detailed review of security attacks towards WSNs and IoT, along with the techniques for prevention, detection, and mitigation of those attacks are provided in this paper. In this text, attacks are categorized and treated into mainly two parts, most or all types of attacks towards WSNs and IoT are investigated under that umbrella: “Passive Attacks” and “Active Attacks”. Understanding these attacks and their associated defense mechanisms will help paving a secur..