Blockchain has received tremendous attention in non-monetary applications including the Internet of Things (IoT) due to its salient features including decentralization, security, auditability, and anonymity. Most conventional blockchains rely on computationally expensive consensus algorithms, have limited throughput, and high transaction delays. In this paper, we propose tree-chain a scalable fast blockchain instantiation that introduces two levels of randomization among the validators: i) transaction level where the validator of each transaction is selected randomly based on the most significant characters of the hash function output (known as consensus code), and ii) blockchain level where validator is randomly allocated to a particular consensus code based on the hash of their public key. Tree-chain introduces parallel chain branches where each validator commits the corresponding transactions in a unique ledger. Implementation results show that tree-chain is runnable on low resource devices and incurs low processing overhead, achieving near real-time transaction settlement.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is transforming our physical world into a complex and dynamic system of connected devices on an unprecedented scale. Connecting everyday physical objects is creating new business models, improving processes and reducing costs and risks. Recently, blockchain technology has received a lot of attention from the community as a possible solution to overcome security issues in IoT. However, traditional blockchains (such as the ones used in Bitcoin and Ethereum) are not well suited to the resource-constrained nature of IoT devices and also with the large volume of informa…
Blockchains are appealing technologies with various applications ranging from banking to networking. IOTA blockchain is one of the most prominent blockchain specifically designed for IoT environments. In this paper we investigate the convergence of IOTA consensus algorithms: Fast Probabilistic Consensus and Cellular Consensus, when run on top of various topologies. Furthermore, we investigate their resilience to various types of adversaries. Our extensive simulations show that both Cellular Consensus and Fast Probabilistic Consensus have poor convergence rates even under low power adversaries …
The blockchain has found numerous applications in many areas with the expectation to significantly enhance their security. The Internet of things (IoT) constitutes a prominent application domain of blockchain, with a number of architectures having been proposed for improving not only security but also properties like transparency and auditability. However, many blockchain solutions suffer from inherent constraints associated with the consensus protocol used. These constraints are mostly inherited by the permissionless setting, e.g. computational power in proof-of-work, and become serious obsta…
With the advent of advanced technology, IoT introduces a vast number of devices connecting with each other and collecting a sheer volume of data. Thus, the demands of IoT security is paramount. Cryptography is being used to secure the networks for authentication, confidentiality, data integrity and access control. However, due to the resource constraint nature of IoT devices, the traditional cryptographic protocols may not be suited in all IoT environments. Researchers, as a result, have been proposing various lightweight cryptographic algorithms and protocols. In this paper, we discuss the st…
Security is one of the main issues in Internet of Things (IoT). Encryption plays a curtail role in making these systems secure. Substitution Box (S-Box) has an effective impact in block encryption methods. Due to the restricted resource capacities of IoT nodes, providing a lightweight S-Box is a challenging problem. This paper presents a key-dependent S-Box using Hyperelliptic curve. The proposed S-Box is analytically evaluated using performance criteria including bijection, nonlinearity, strict avalanche effect, and algebraic degree. The evaluation results endorse that the offered S-Box produ…
The Internet of Things (IoT) is the collection of everyday smart devices which connect to the Cloud, often through Fog nodes, to transmit and receive information. These everyday devices are distinct from traditional computers because they typically have notable constraints on their RAM, flash memory, and computational power. Due to these constraints, we believe that many of the proposed encryption schemes are too heavyweight to be employed in the IoT. In this paper we present a lightweight, flexible encryption scheme that relies on the one-way information loss property of a secure hash functio…
Fingerprint authentication techniques have been employed in various Internet of Things (IoT) applications for access control to protect private data, but raw fingerprint template leakage in unprotected IoT applications may render the authentication system insecure. Cancelable fingerprint templates can effectively prevent privacy breaches and provide strong protection to the original templates. However, to suit resource-constrained IoT devices, oversimplified templates would compromise authentication performance significantly. In addition, the length of existing cancelable fingerprint templates…
With the emergence of 5G, Internet of Things (IoT) has become a center of attraction for almost all industries due to its wide range of applications from various domains. The explosive growth of industrial control processes and the industrial IoT, imposes unprecedented vulnerability to cyber threats in critical infrastructure through the interconnected systems. This new security threats could be minimized by lightweight cryptography, a sub-branch of cryptography, especially derived for resource-constrained devices such as RFID tags, smart cards, wireless sensors, etc. More than four dozens of …
The Internet of Things (IoT) is giving a boost to a plethora of new opportunities for the robust and sustainable deployment of cyber physical systems. The cornerstone of any IoT system is the sensing devices. These sensing devices have considerable resource constraints, including insufficient battery capacity, CPU capability, and physical security. Because of such resource constraints, designing lightweight cryptographic protocols is an opportunity. Remote User Authentication ensures that two parties establish a secure and durable session key. This study presents a lightweight and safe authent…
The success of blockchain as the underlying technology for cryptocurrencies has opened up possibilities for its use in other application domains as well. The main advantages of blockchain for its potential use in other domains are its inherent security mechanisms and immunity to different attacks. A blockchain relies on a consensus method for agreeing on any new data. Most of the consensus methods which are currently used for the blockchain of different cryptocurrencies require high computational power and thus are not apt for resource-constrained systems. In this article, we discuss and surve…
Currently, special attention is being paid to scenarios where the interconnection of devices with heterogeneous computational and communication capabilities it is required. It is essential to integrate security services during the stages of design and deployment of these networks since many of these scenarios provide critical services such as medical health, payment systems, military affairs, access control, e-banking, etc. This work analyses several cryptographic primitives related to entity authentication providing robust solutions according to device capabilities.
BlockChain (BC) has attracted tremendous attention due to its immutable nature and the associated security and privacy benefits. BC has the potential to overcome security and privacy challenges of Internet of Things (IoT). However, BC is computationally expensive, has limited scalability and incurs significant bandwidth overheads and delays which are not suited to the IoT context. We propose a tiered Lightweight Scalable BC (LSB) that is optimized for IoT requirements. We explore LSB in a smart home setting as a representative example for broader IoT applications. Low resource devices in a sma…
In this paper, we show that a recently published lightweight adaptation of a Fingerprint matching algorithm called the Minutia Cylinder-Code may not be secure as intruders may be able to illegitimately yet successfully authenticate themselves to the system under consideration. We also show that the lightweight adaptation has other privacy related vulnerabilities that make it unsuitable for use in Biometrics. We make it clear that we are neither investigating nor commenting on the security of the original Minutia Cylinder-Code algorithm by itself, rather we highlight the vulnerabilities of the …
The rise of IoT has made possible the development of %increasingly personalized services, like industrial services that often deal with massive amounts of data. However, as IoT grows, its threats are even greater. The false data injection (FDI) attack stands out as being one of the most harmful to data networks like IoT. The majority of current systems to handle this attack do not take into account the data validation, especially on the data clustering service. This work introduces CONFINIT, an intrusion detection system against FDI attacks on the data dissemination service into dense IoT. It …
With the advent of large-scale heterogeneous networks comes the problem of unified network control resulting in security lapses that could have otherwise avoided. A mechanism is needed to detect and deflect intruders to safeguard resource constraint edge devices and networks as well. In this paper we demonstrate the use of an optimized pattern recognition algorithm to detect such attacks. Furthermore, we propose an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) methodology and design architecture for Internet of Things that makes the use of this search algorithm to thwart various security breaches. Numerica…
The rapid development of IoT networks has led to a research trend in designing effective security features for them. Due to the power-constrained nature of IoT devices, the security features should remain as lightweight as possible. Currently, most of the IoT network traffic is unencrypted. The leakage of smart devices' unencrypted data can come with the significant cost of a privacy breach. To have a secure channel with encrypted traffic, two endpoints in a network have to authenticate each other and calculate a short-term key. They can then communicate through an authenticated and secure cha…
Supporting convolutional neural network (CNN) inference on resource-constrained IoT devices in a timely manner has been an outstanding challenge for emerging smart systems. To mitigate the burden on IoT devices, the prevailing solution is to offload the CNN inference task, which is usually composed of billions of operations, to public cloud. However, the "offloading-to-cloud" solution may cause privacy breach while moving sensitive data to cloud. For privacy protection, the research community has resorted to advanced cryptographic primitives and approximation techniques to support CNN inferenc…
The Internet of Things (IoT) is increasingly intertwined with critical industrial processes, yet contemporary IoT devices offer limited security features, creating a large new attack surface. Remote attestation is a well-known technique to detect cyber threats by remotely verifying the internal state of a networked embedded device through a trusted entity. Multi-device attestation has received little attention although current single-device approaches show limited scalability in IoT applications. Though recent work has yielded some proposals for scalable attestation, several aspects remain une…
In today's connected world, resource constrained devices are deployed for sensing and decision making applications, ranging from smart cities to environmental monitoring. Those recourse constrained devices are connected to create real-time distributed networks popularly known as the Internet of Things (IoT), fog computing and edge computing. The blockchain is gaining a lot of interest in these domains to secure the system by ignoring centralized dependencies, where proof-of-work (PoW) plays a vital role to make the whole security solution decentralized. Due to the resource limitations of the d…
The growing pervasiveness of Internet of Things (IoT) expands the attack surface by connecting more and more attractive attack targets, i.e. embedded devices, to the Internet. One key component in securing these devices is software integrity checking, which typically attained with Remote Attestation (RA). RA is realized as an interactive protocol, whereby a trusted party, verifier, verifies the software integrity of a potentially compromised remote device, prover. In the vast majority of IoT applications, smart devices operate in swarms, thus triggering the need for efficient swarm attestation…
Existing audio-only hearing-aids are known to perform poorly in noisy situations where overwhelming noise is present. Next-generation audio-visual (lip-reading driven) hearing-aids stand as a major enabler to realise more intelligible audio. However, high data rate, low latency, low computational complexity, and privacy are some of the major bottlenecks to the successful deployment of such advanced hearing aids. To address these challenges, we envision an integration of 5G Cloud-Radio Access Network, Internet of Things (IoT), and strong privacy algorithms to fully benefit from the possibilitie…
The blockchain is a distributed technology which allows establishing trust among unreliable users who interact and perform transactions with each other. While blockchain technology has been mainly used for crypto-currency, it has emerged as an enabling technology for establishing trust in the realm of the Internet of Things (IoT). Nevertheless, a naive usage of the blockchain for IoT leads to high delays and extensive computational power. In this paper, we propose a blockchain architecture dedicated to being used in a supply chain which comprises different distributed IoT entities. We propose …
Smart Medical IoT Security Vulnerabilities: Real-Time MITM Attack Analysis, Lightweight Encryption Implementation, and Practitioner Perceptions in Underdeveloped Nigerian Healthcare Systems
Considering the world's IoT development and market, it is necessary to guarantee the security of the developed IoT applications as well as the privacy of their end users. In this sense, Federated Identity Management (FIdM) systems can be of great help as they improve user authentication and privacy. In this paper, we claim that traditional FIdM are mostly cumbersome and then ill-suited for IoT. As a solution to this problem, we come up with a federated identity authentication protocol exclusively tailored to IoT. Federated Lightweight Authentication of Things (FLAT), our solution, replaces wei…
Kyushu University（九州大学）；Indian Institute of Technology Delhi（德里印度理工学院）；Royal Holloway University of London（伦敦大学皇家霍洛威学院）
The Internet of Things (IoT) is an extension of the traditional Internet, which allows a very large number of smart devices, such as home appliances, network cameras, sensors and controllers to connect to one another to share information and improve user experiences. Current IoT devices are typically micro-computers for domain-specific computations rather than traditional functionspecific embedded devices. Therefore, many existing attacks, targeted at traditional computers connected to the Internet, may also be directed at IoT devices. For example, DDoS attacks have become very common in IoT e…
The internet of things refers to the network of devices connected to the internet and can communicate with each other. The term things is to refer non-conventional devices that are usually not connected to the internet. The network of such devices or things is growing at an enormous rate. The security and privacy of the data flowing through these things is a major concern. The devices are low powered and the conventional encryption algorithms are not suitable to be employed on these devices. In this correspondence a survey of the contemporary lightweight encryption algorithms suitable for use …
Side-channel attacks are an unpredictable risk factor in cryptography. Therefore, continuous observations of physical leakages are essential to minimise vulnerabilities associated with cryptographic functions. Lightweight cryptography is a novel approach in progress towards internet-of-things (IoT) security. Thus, it would provide sufficient data and privacy protection in such a constrained ecosystem. IoT devices are resource-limited in terms of data rates (in kbps), power maintainability (battery) as well as hardware and software footprints (physical size, internal memory, RAM/ROM). Due to th…
The Internet of Things (IoT), in spite of its innumerable advantages, brings many challenges namely issues about users' privacy preservation and constraints about lightweight cryptography. Lightweight cryptography is of capital importance since IoT devices are qualified to be resource-constrained. To address these challenges, several Attribute-Based Credentials (ABC) schemes have been designed including I2PA, U-prove, and Idemix. Even though these schemes have very strong cryptographic bases, their performance in resource-constrained devices is a question that deserves special attention. This …
Indian Institute of Information Technology（印度信息技术学院）；THM University of Applied Sciences（THM应用科学大学）
In the recent years, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on Internet of Things (IoT) devices have become one of the prime concerns to Internet users around the world. One of the sources of the attacks on IoT ecosystems are botnets. Intruders force IoT devices to become unavailable for its legitimate users by sending large number of messages within a short interval. This study proposes NFDLM, a lightweight and optimised Artificial Neural Network (ANN) based Distributed Denial of Services (DDoS) attack detection framework with mutual correlation as feature selection method which produce…
Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming more frequently used in more applications as the number of connected devices is in a rapid increase. More connected devices result in bigger challenges in terms of scalability, maintainability and most importantly security especially when it comes to 5G networks. The security aspect of IoT devices is an infant field, which is why it is our focus in this paper. Multiple IoT device manufacturers do not consider securing the devices they produce for different reasons like cost reduction or to avoid using energy-harvesting components. Such potentially malicious…
The future generation networks: Internet of things (IoT), in combination with the advanced computer vision techniques poses new challenges for securing videos for end-users. The visual devices generally have constrained resources in respects to their low computation power, small memory with limited power supply. Therefore, to facilitate the video security in smart environment, lightweight security schemes are required instead of inefficient existing traditional cryptography algorithms. This research paper provides the solution to overcome such problems. A novel lightweight cipher algorithm is …
The Internet of Things, also known as the IoT, refers to the billions of devices around the world that are now connected to the Internet, collecting and sharing data. The amount of data collected through IoT sensors must be completely securely controlled. To protect the information collected by IoT sensors, a lightweight method called Discover the Flooding Attack-RPL (DFA-RPL) has been proposed. The proposed DFA-RPL method identifies intrusive nodes in several steps to exclude them from continuing routing operations. Thus, in the DFA-RPL method, it first builds a cluster and selects the most a…
The extensive networking of devices and the large amount of data generated from the Internet of Things (IoT) has brought security issues to the attention of the researcher. Java is the most common platform for embedded applications such as IoT, Wireless Sensors Networks (WSN), Near Field Communications (NFC) and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID). The object programming languages such as Java, SWIFT, PHP and C++ use garbage collection after any object run which creates security loophole for attacks such as Next Memory Address Occupation (NMAO), memory replay, Learning Tasks Behaviors (LTB).…
The growing interest in Internet of Things (IoT) and Industrial IoT (IIoT) poses the challenge of finding robust solutions for the certification and notarization of data produced and collected by embedded devices. The blockchain and distributed ledger technologies represent a promising solution to address these issues, but rise other questions, for example regarding their practical feasibility. In fact, IoT devices have limited resources and, consequently, may not be able to easily perform all the operations required to participate in a blockchain. In this paper we propose a minimal architectu…
In the modern digital world, a user of a smart system remains surrounded with as well as observed by a number of tiny IoT devices round the clock almost everywhere. Unfortunately, the ability of these devices to sense and share various physical parameters, although play a key role in these smart systems but also causes the threat of breach of the privacy of the users. Existing solutions for privacy-preserving computation for decentralized systems either use too complex cryptographic techniques or exploit an extremely high degree of message passing and hence, are not suitable for the resource-c…
