| 1. |
- He, Zhitao
(author)
-
Enabling Scalable Security in Internet of Things
- 2023
-
Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The popular notion of Internet of Things (IoT) implies two salient features: 1. a diversity of small things, i.e., constrained devices; 2. their seamless integration with the Internet. Pioneering work in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have laid a solid technological foundation for autonomous, low power wireless communication among battery-powered, microcontroller-based devices. On the other hand, as devices are being connected to the Internet in large numbers, industry experts and regulators have associated IoT with enormous security risk. Sensitive personal information, highly complex business workflows, and critical infrastructure for public safety are at stake. In this dissertation, we first explore the scalability of IoT. Approaching from the particular angle of radio interference, we study unstable and faulty network behavior when links between low power radios are disrupted. Our low cost and practical interference generation tools fill a gap between protocol design and test. We then underline the threat of novel attacks at the physical layer, which lead to denial of service and battery draining of low power radios. Launched from low cost hardware, the attacks we devise are power-efficient and hard to detect; and they reach longer ranges than jamming. Finally, we take a step closer to realization of secure and large-scale IoT deployment by enabling certificate enrollment, a key component in a public key infrastructure, for small devices. We show that automated enrollment of device certificates becomes feasible when a memory and power efficient IoT protocol stack is leveraged. Spanning between the physical layer and the application layer, our work has enriched the knowledge domain of IoT and advanced the technological frontier of scalable and secure IoT deployment.
|
|
| 2. |
- Eriksson, Joakim
(author)
-
Scalable and Interoperable Low-Power Internet of Things Networks
- 2023
-
Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Internet of Things (IoT) is the concept of connecting devices to the Internet. IoT devices can be anything from small temperature sensors to self-driving cars. The devices are typically resource-constrained, connected wirelessly, and often battery-powered. In this thesis, we address energy efficiency and the tools required for estimating power consumption, interoperability between different implementations of IoT protocols, and scalability of the IoT networks in mesh configurations. The contributions are made in the five included research papers addressing these challenges. Firstly, we present and evaluate network-wide energy estimation support in our simulation tool COOJA/MSPSim. Due to the timing accuracy of the simulation and emulation, we get energy consumption estimates very close to hardware-based estimates. The second contribution evaluates the capabilities of simulation tools for interoperability testing. We show that it is possible to set up simulations of networks with multiple implementations of the same open standards (6LoWPAN/RPL) and that it is possible to get results beyond pure interoperability, including power consumption and network quality. Finally, we show that, by carefully managing neighbor updates, it is possible to scale IoT networks even when the IoT devices' memory limitations severely constrain the size of the neighbor table.The experimental systems research that resulted in this thesis also provided significant contributions to the open-source ecosystem around Contiki, an operating system for resource-constrained IoT devices. This software, Contiki and COOJA/MSPSim, has been a cornerstone in our capability to perform sound systems research and has been widely used by other research groups in resource-constrained IoT research in academia and many companies for developing commercial IoT devices.
|
|
