TLShps: SDN-Based TLS Handshake Protocol Simplification for IoT

This dissertation proposes a solution to the growing concern about the security of Internet of Things (IoT) devices in home or business environments. Entitled MAIOS (Multi Accountability IoT Oriented Switch), the system offers an SDN (Software Defined Networking) switch architecture, which provides effective segmentation for IoT devices, increasing their protection against cyber threats. The research begins by contextualizing the exponential increase in IoT devices and the security challenges associated with them. MAIOS addresses this issue through a centralized control layer, which allows efficient management of IoT devices and the implementation of dynamic security policies, which can be applied from an SDN control plane application layer. The system was designed considering functional, non-functional requirements and deployment scenarios, either in home or business environments. To increase usability, an intuitive interface was developed for users, facilitating the configuration and monitoring of IoT devices. The solution is based on open source technologies such as pfSense proxy/firewall and Home Assistant to provide functionalities such as firewall, IoT control and real-time traffic monitoring. The effectiveness of MAIOS is evaluated through security and performance tests in simulated environments, which demonstrated its ability to identify and mitigate cyber threats, providing robust security for IoT devices. This dissertation offers a contribution to the field of IoT security, presenting a practical, affordable and effective solution to protect devices in residential and business networks. MAIOS represents an important advance in ensuring digital security in an increasingly connected world.

The Internet of Things (IoTs) is apace growing, billions of IoT devices are connected to the Internet which communicate and exchange data among each other. Applications of IoT can be found in many fields of engineering and sciences such as healthcare, traffic, agriculture, oil and gas industries, and logistics. In logistics, the products which are to be transported may be sensitive and perishable, and require controlled environment. Most of the commercially available logistic containers are not integrated with IoT devices to provide controlled environment parameters inside the container and to transmit data to a remote server. This necessitates the need for designing and fabricating IoT based smart containers. Due to constrained nature of IoT devices, these are prone to different cyber security attacks such as Denial of Service (DoS), Man in Middle (MITM) and Replay. Therefore, designing efficient cyber security framework are required for smart container. The Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) Protocol has emerged as the de facto standard for securing communication in IoT devices. However, it is unable to minimize cyber security attacks such as Denial of Service and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) during the handshake process. The main contribution of this paper is to design a cyber secure framework by implementing novel hybrid DTLS protocol in smart container which can efficiently minimize the effects of cyber attacks during handshake process. The performance of our proposed framework is evaluated in terms of energy efficiency, handshake time, throughput and packet delivery ratio. Moreover, the proposed framework is tested in IoT based smart containers. The proposed framework decreases handshake time more than 9% and saves 11% of energy efficiency for transmission in compare of the standard DTLS, while increases packet delivery ratio and throughput by 83% and 87% respectively.

The Internet of Things (IoT) devices is able to communicate with another IoT devices in heterogeneous environments. They are also able to create a network by their own using wireless capabilities without a centralized approach. This network is called wireless mobile ad hoc network (MANET). The MANET facilitate IoT devices to communicate with each other in an infrastructure less network of the Internet of Things environment. The IoT devices can dynamically join, create connection and exchange information among them. The role of cloud in this framework is to store and process the data by IoT devices. The communication Security has been raised as one of the most critical issues of cloud computing where resolving such an issue would result in a constant growth in the use and popularity of cloud. Our purpose of this study is to create a framework for providing the communication in an integrated framework of Cloud and MANET among IoT devices. Our main contribution links a new study that integrates cloud computing to the MANET and provides communication to the internet of things. This study can be used in the framework of the Internet of Things in future.

Edge computing is proposed to solve the problem of centralized cloud computing caused by a large number of IoT (Internet of Things) devices. The IoT protocols need to be modified according to the edge computing paradigm, where the edge computing devices for analyzing IoT data are distributed to the edge networks. The MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport) protocol, as a data distribution protocol widely adopted in many international IoT standards, is suitable for cloud computing because it uses a centralized broker to effectively collect and transmit data. However, the standard MQTT may suffer from serious traffic congestion problem on the broker, causing long transfer delays if there are massive IoT devices connected to the broker. In addition, the big data exchange between the IoT devices and the broker decreases network capability of the edge networks. The authors in this paper propose a novel MQTT with a multicast mechanism to minimize data transfer delay and network usage for the massive IoT communications. The proposed MQTT reduces data transfer delays by establishing bidirectional SDN (Software Defined Networking) multicast trees between the publishers and the subscribers by means of bypassing the centralized broker. As a result, it can reduce transmission delay by 65% and network usage by 58% compared with the standard MQTT.

The Internet of Things (IoT) has had a considerable influence on our daily lives by enabling enhanced connection of devices, systems, and services that extends beyond machine-to-machine interactions and encompasses a wide range of protocols, domains, and applications. However, despite privacy concerns shown by IoT users, little has been done to reduce and protect individual information exposure. It is extremely difficult to mitigate IoT devices from reidentification threats which is why it is still a major challenge for IoT users to securely protect their information. The trust controls how we regulate privacy in our IoT platforms in the same way that it governs personal relationships. As IoT devices become increasingly linked, more data is shared across individuals, businesses, governments, and ecosystems. Technologies, sensors, machines, data, and cloud connections all rely largely on trust relationships that have been formed. With the rapid growth of additional types of IoT devices that are being introduced, it, therefore, expands privacy concerns and is difficult to develop trust with an IoT system or device without the option to regulate information privacy settings. Privacy has always been a barrier for many devices as they race for the early adoption of IoT technologies. Several Internet of Things devices or systems will continue to pose privacy threats. As a result, the main objective of this study was to examine the individual understanding of privacy and to promote information privacy protection awareness not only to IoT users but also to organizations that use IoT devices or platforms to run their day-to-day business operations. Furthermore, the objective extends to compare user knowledge and concerns about IoT privacy, as well as to identify any common attitudes and variances. However, in terms of enhancing individuals’ knowledge, an artifact was developed to educate and enhance information privacy awareness among IoT users. A pre- and postquestionnaire was generated to test and validate user knowledge regarding information privacy protection in IoT. The study was conducted using a quantitative research method. Findings indicate that IoT users’ awareness of information privacy protection turned out to be average, suggesting a need for education and awareness. Several participants stated that information privacy protection awareness is required within the community to educate, raise awareness, eliminate human error, and enable individuals to be conscious of their privacy when surfing the Internet.

The Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol is one of the most extended protocols on the Internet of Things (IoT). However, this protocol does not implement a strong security scheme by default, which does not allow a secure authentication mechanism between participants in the communication. Furthermore, we cannot trust the confidentiality and integrity of data. Lightweight IoT devices send more and more sensible data in areas of Smart Building, Smart City, Smart House, Smart Car, Connected Car, Health Care, Smart Retail, Industrial IoT (IIoT), etc. This makes the security challenges in the protocols used in the IoT particularly important. The standard of MQTT protocol strongly recommends implement it over Transport Layer Security (TLS) instead of plain TCP. Nonetheless, this option is not possible in most lightweight devices that make up the IoT ecosystem. Quite often, the constrained resources of IoT devices prevent the use of secure asymmetric cryptography algorithms implemented by themselves. In this article, we propose making a security schema in MQTT protocol using Cryptographic Smart Cards, for both challenges, the authentication schema and the trusted data confidentiality and data integrity. We carry out this security schema without modifying the standard protocol messages. And finally, we present a time results experiment using an example implementation model with JavaCard library.

Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging technology that consists of tiny sensors embedded with IoT devices used in e-Health, smart cities and assisted living. IoT devices are equipped with constrained power, memory, and computing capabilities, which creates new security challenges. By integrating sensors and wireless technologies, this cutting-edge technology automates numerous routine tasks in different domains. The main goal of advancing IoT in the existing healthcare system is to automate the monitoring of hospitals and patients’ health by spreading goodwill toward the IoT vision. IoT has gained popularity on practically all platforms that are available. This paper presents a remote patient health monitoring and diagnosis system that uses Message Queuing Telemetry Transport protocol (MQTT) and Internet of Things (IoT) devices with one time pad cryptography. The proposed plan offers end-to-end data secrecy for an IoT system using MQTT that enables e-health and mobility. Patients’ movements inside nursing homes and healthcare facilities are also managed safely without the need for periodic reconfigurations. Prior to communicating through the MQTT protocol, this secure crypto scheme encrypts the message on both the publisher and subscriber ends. According to the results, the proposed scheme is more efficient than delegation-based architecture in terms of security and lightweight communication. The proposed system established communication between patients and medical experts using IoT technologies to alleviate the hospital strain caused by congestion in medical treatment and enable an expressway of medical responses. According to our results the proposed scheme has low computational overhead compared to other solutions that use conventional encryption to guarantee robust protection against most of the IoT security attacks.

Seeing is not always believing: Insights on IoT manufacturing from firmware composition analysis and vendor survey

With the advancement in science and technology, the demand for electronic Internet of Things (IoT) devices has increased to store and process digital data. With the advancement in IoT technology, we are more reliant on IoT devices to perform our regular tasks. IoT Forensics deals with the investigation of IoT devices such as smartphones, tablets, smart watches, or any device which is connected to the Internet. The data on these devices can still be retrieved via IoT forensics even if they are destroyed, resold, or misplaced. Before discarding any IoT device, we must consider how to secure the data stored on them. We are then going to discuss the several types of personal data that could be retrieved from discarded IoT devices. Finally, we are going to discuss the protection measures for the safe disposal of IoT devices.

Lightweight devices are widely used in the Internet of Things (IoT), Due to the limited computation and communication resources, lightweight devices can only conduct simple actions and will thereby hinder the intelligent cooperation of the devices in IoT. Such situation will last long since currently it is hard to replace all lightweight devices with intelligent ones. To address this issue and improve the integrated intelligence of IoT, we propose an augmented digital twin empowered intelligence for lightweight devices in IoT. The augmented digital twin, or shorten as augmented twin (AT), is a virtual entity built for a given lightweight device, which can be constructed on some resource-rich devices such as a gateway or an edge server. Based on the resources in its carrier, AT can not only clone all functions of the lightweight device, but also extend some intelligent analysis and cooperation abilities for this device. We first propose the architecture of AT for lightweight device in IoT. Then, to achieve the most effective AT carrier selection of the lightweight device, we formulate an optimization problem and present a self-initialized genetic algorithm to solve this problem. Simulations are conducted to evaluate the cost in constructing the ATs of the lightweight devices, as well as the performance promotion when AT is used in an IoT network. Compared to the benchmark schemes, AT can decrease the scheduling latency and energy consumption by 60.38% and 32.16% respectively than normal digital twin with reasonable constructing cost.

ABSTRACTIn recent years, the emerging development of Internet of things (IoT) has created new opportunities for IoT service provider, device manufacturer and customer (end user). In agriculture, employing IoT can help reducing manpower as well as standardizing agricultural processes, thus increasing the benefit for customer who does agricultural business. Beside the opportunities, there are also issues while doing maintenance for an agricultural IoT system. One of them is how to automate the process to detect faults of IoT devices in a large deployment area. While previous studies focus on investigating algorithms as well as theoretical model to detect faults for specific IoT devices, automatically expanding of IoT management process for detecting faults of sensor/actuator has not been investigated yet. To achieve this, we should be able to deal with the relationship between IoT device manufacturer, service provider and customer. In this study, we conceptualize the knowledge of IoT devices, management process and fault detection requirement. To realize this model, we introduce a runtime system to expand the IoT management process for detecting sensor/actuator faults which is able to provide the above features. We do several experiments to show the effectiveness and usefulness of the proposed solution.

In-network middleboxes are vital for the Internet-of-Things (IoT) system security, but the widely adopted transport layer security (TLS) protocol blinds application-level middleboxes due to the encryption of traffic data. To resolve this problem, many solutions have been proposed to date. Among them, SplitTLS is widely adopted in the industry by proxy manufacturers. It requires TLS client to install customized root certificates and incurs additional security flaws, e.g., disabling server authentication and using weak cipher suites. Another approach is to customize the TLS protocol where middleboxes are enabled via either performing handshake directly with TLS endpoints or receiving session key materials in an out-of-band manner. Overall, current solutions would either jeopardize the original TLS handshake procedure or incur additional overheads on the endpoints. In this article, we design a new middlebox-enhanced TLS (ME-TLS), which enables endpoints to introduce authenticated middleboxes into a TLS session while control middleboxes' access permission and processing order of traffic data. Particularly, in our proposed ME-TLS, the handshake structure of TLS keeps unchanged and middleboxes work in a passive manner. That is, middleboxes in the ME-TLS could recover session key materials by monitoring handshake messages passively instead of interacting with endpoints; secondary secure channels for key transmission are also not needed in our ME-TLS. We implement our ME-TLS based on the TLS 1.3 protocol and evaluate its performances. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposal is practical and deployable for real-world IoT scenarios.

With the advancement of 5G mobile telecommunication, various IoT (Internet of Things) devices communicate massive amounts of data by being connected to wireless networks. Since this wireless communication is vulnerable to hackers via data leakage during communication, the transmitted data should be encrypted through block ciphers to protect the data during communication. In addition, in order to encrypt the massive amounts of data securely, it is essential to apply one of secure mode of operation. Among them, CTR (CounTeR) mode is the most widely used in industrial applications. However, these IoT devices have limited resources of computing and memory compared to typical computers, so that it is challenging to process cryptographic algorithms that have computation-intensive tasks in IoT devices at high speed. Thus, it is required that cryptographic algorithms are optimized in IoT devices. In other words, optimizing cryptographic operations on these IoT devices is not only basic but also an essential effort in order to build secure IoT-based service systems. For efficient encryption on IoT devices, even though several ARX (Add-Rotate-XOR)-based ciphers have been proposed, it still necessary to improve the performance of encryption for smooth and secure IoT services. In this article, we propose the first parallel implementations of CTR mode of ARX-based ciphers: LEA (Lightweight Encryption Algorithm), HIGHT (high security and light weight), and revised CHAM on the ARMv8 platform, a popular microcontroller in various IoT applications. For the parallel implementation, we propose an efficient data parallelism technique and register scheduling, which maximizes the usage of vector registers. Through proposed techniques, we process the maximum amount of encryption simultaneously by utilizing all vector registers. Namely, in the case of HIGHT and revised CHAM-64/128 (resp. LEA, revised CHAM-128/128, and CHAM-128/256), we can execute 48 (resp. 24) encryptions simultaneously. In addition, we optimize the process of CTR mode by pre-computing and using the intermediate value of some initial rounds by utilizing the property that the nonce part of CTR mode input is fixed during encryptions. Through the pre-computation table, CTR mode is optimized up until round 4 in LEA, round 5 in HIGHT, and round 7 in revised CHAM. With the proposed parallel processing technique, our software provides 3.09%, 5.26%, and 9.52% of improved performance in LEA, HIGHT, and revised CHAM-64/128, respectively, compared to the existing parallel works in ARM-based MCU. Furthermore, with the proposed CTR mode optimization technique, our software provides the most improved performance with 8.76%, 8.62%, and 15.87% in LEA-CTR, HIGHT-CTR, and revised CHAM-CTR, respectively. This work is the fastest implementation of CTR mode on ARMv8 architecture to the best of our knowledge.

To facilitate uploading of sensing data with a tremendous and still growing number of devices in Internet of Things (IoT), is one of the most pressing tasks today. It is not sensible to equip each IoT device with cellular or other wide range access technologies, thus the network access management and sensing data fusion are necessary to solve the paradox of spectrum drain and endless user experience. In this framework, we considered a practical scenario where exist heterogeneous IoT devices with energy harvesting and limited short range access technologies, e.g. WiFi, BLE4.0, and their data can be uploaded through an access point (AP) in given area. The AP needs to schedule the data uploading of heterogeneous IoT devices, and conservatively satisfy the quality of experience (QoE) requirements, e.g. delay, sensing interval, data rate. First, we modeled the energy harvesting and sensing data of IoT devices by Markov chain and probability transfer matrix, and derived the expression of urgency function which can clearly distinguish the urgency of data transmission among devices. Secondly, an auction-based IoT devices data uploading mechanism is proposed, which satisfies the expected economic robustness with low communication overhead. Finally, we performed extensive simulations to verify the proposed data uploading scheme and algorithm. The simulation results indicate that the proposed scheme works well.

The number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices has increased recently and will increase further in the future. IoT devices are vulnerable, so vendors update and distribute firmware. At the time of firmware distribution, a huge number of IoT devices may connect to the firmware server and excessive network traffic may occur. Consequently, a method using a peer-to-peer file sharing system and a blockchain has been proposed. One study proposed an update scheme considering incentives for distributors to help with updating. However, this method requires the IoT devices, which have limited processing power, to decrypt encrypted files, and the distribution nodes to pay the transaction cost. This paper proposes a firmware distribution method that provides incentives for distributors to help with distribution to reduce the gas costs, using a smart contract and access control based on update records. The additional computations performed by IoT devices and distributors key management were reduced compared to those in previous studies by using access control instead of encryption. Further, the proposed approach was implemented and evaluated using a Raspberry Pi and laptop. The evaluation demonstrated that the gas cost per update was successfully lowered compared to the costs in previous studies.