IoT technology has been developing rapidly, while at the same time, notorious
IoT malware such as Mirai is a severe and inherent threat. We believe it is
essential to consider systems that enable us to remotely control infected
devices in order to prevent or limit malicious behaviors of infected devices.
In this paper, we design a promising candidate for such remote-control systems,
called IoT-REX (REmote-Control System for IoT devices). IoT-REX allows a
systems manager to designate an arbitrary subset of all IoT devices in the
system and every device can confirm whether or not the device itself was
designated; if so, the device executes a command given from the systems
manager. Towards realizing IoT-REX, we introduce a novel cryptographic
primitive called centralized multi-designated verifier signatures (CMDVS).
Although CMDVS works under a restricted condition compared to conventional
MDVS, it is sufficient for realizing IoT-REX. We provide an efficient CMDVS
construction from any approximate membership query structures and digital
signatures, yielding compact communication sizes and efficient verification
procedures for IoT-REX. We then discuss the feasibility of IoT-REX through
cryptographic implementation of the CMDVS construction on a Raspberry Pi. Our
promising results demonstrate that the CMDVS construction can compress
communication size to about 30% and thus its resulting IoT-REX becomes three
times faster than a trivial construction over typical low-power wide area
networks with an IoT device. It is expected that IoT-REX can control 12,000
devices within a second.Comment: Updated as a whole. 26 page