Hon Cheung

A contextual-adaptive Location Disclosure Agent for general devices in the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) has the potential to transform our daily lives and societies. This is, at least in part, due to its massively distributed and ubiquitous nature. To realize the benefits of the IoT, security and privacy issues associated with the use of the IoT need to be identified and addressed properly. In this paper, our focus is on protecting the privacy of the users of location-based services in the IoT. To achieve this protection, we propose a context-aware adaptive approach for general devices in the IoT, where the general devices are used by users in accessing the location-based services. The proposed approach is based on developing and utilizing an agent to manage location privacy in the context of requested network-based services. The results of an experiment conducted to show the effectiveness and efficiency of this approach are also reported.

THE INTERNET OF THINGS: NEW INTEROPERABILITY , MANAGEMENT AND SECURITY CHALLENGES

The Internet of Things (IoT) brings connectivity to about every objects found in the physical space. It extends connectivity to everyday objects. From connected fridges, cars and cities, the IoT creates opportunities in numerous domains. However, this increase in connectivity creates many prominent challenges. This paper provides a survey of some of the major issues challenging the widespread adoption of the IoT. Particularly, it focuses on the interoperability, management, security and privacy issues in the IoT. It is concluded that there is a need to develop a multifaceted technology approach to IoT security, management, and privacy.

A Smart Home Application Based on the Internet of Things Management Platform

The Internet of Things is an emerging research area promising many interesting solutions to various problems encountered in various domains. The ever-expanding networks of sensors, actuators and smart devices on the Internet of Things, will raise interesting challenges for service and network management. This paper explores these challenges and expands on an already proposed management platform for the Internet of Things. The platform offers a management solution for things, specifically constrained things that suffer from limited computation and power resources. Also, this work introduces and demonstrates some of the monitoring and control management capabilities provided by the proposed platform. The results of a smart home experiment conducted to show the advantages of this platform are also reported.

A review of mobile location privacy in the Internet of Things

The goal of Internet of Things (IoT) research is to extend computing and connectivity to anything, anyone, anywhere and anytime. While there are apparent benefits in using IoT systems, the convergence of technologies has begun to challenge the privacy of users. Powered by location based services, these systems have the potential to enable a systematic mass surveillance and to impinge on the personal privacy of users, especially their location privacy. This paper overviews some of the existing location privacy issues found on mobile devices. Particular attention is paid to the current access permission mechanism used on the Android, iPhone and Windows Mobile platforms. It is anticipated that the current privacy issues in mobile platforms are more likely to be inherited if not magnified in the IoT.

A semantic obfuscation technique for the Internet of Things

Although some people might willingly reveal their location information in order to obtain location-based services, few would be comfortable having their locations collected and profiled by the billions of things envisioned in the Internet of Things (IoT), at all time and in all situations. The diffusion of wireless communication networks and the technical advancements of location positioning techniques, power things of the IoT with the capabilities of automatically sensing, communicating, and processing the information about a persons location, with a high degree of spatial and temporal precision. In this work, we address the location privacy issue by introducing the Semantic Obfuscation technique (S-Obfuscation). This technique, compared to classical geometric-based obfuscation techniques, relies on geographic knowledge to produce obfuscated locations that are harder to be detected as fake or obfuscated by an adversary. The obfuscation process is supported by our novel use of ontological classification of locations based on a geographical knowledge.

Emerging Wireless Technologies in the Internet of Things : A Comparative Study

The Internet of Things (IoT) incorporates multiple long-range, short-range, and personal area wireless networks and technologies into the designs of IoT applications. This enables numerous business opportunities in fields as diverse as e-health, smart cities, smart homes, among many others. This research analyses some of the major evolving and enabling wireless technologies in the IoT. Particularly, it focuses on ZigBee, 6LoWPAN, Bluetooth Low Energy, LoRa, and the different versions of Wi-Fi including the recent IEEE 802.11ah protocol. The studies evaluate the capabilities and behaviours of these technologies regarding various metrics including the data range and rate, network size, RF Channels and Bandwidth, and power consumption. It is concluded that there is a need to develop a multifaceted technology approach to enable interoperable and secure communications in the IoT.

Enhancing data privacy and access anonymity in cloud computing

There is a growing interest in cloud computing due to its various benefits such as the efficient utilization of computing resources. However, privacy and security concerns are among the main obstacles facing the widespread adoption of this new technology. For instance, it is more desirable for many potential organizations and users that privacy protections and access authorizations on their data stored in the cloud remain under their control and only authorized entities can have access to the data even for the cloud server. In this paper, we propose a method that enables cloud clients more control of data security requirements on their data stored in the cloud. The data is protected by a client before it is sent to the cloud in a secure manner that only authorized users can access it. To provide a complete protection from unauthorized access, even the cloud provider is prevented from revealing the data content and access control policies. The client or data owner has complete control on what methods to use to protect the data and on who can have access on the data. The proposed method is based on a combination of cryptography techniques, including the Chines Remainder Theorem, symmetric and asymmetric encryptions. The proposed method combines access control and key sharing in one mechanism. In addition, the proposed method allows a client to use a unique key to encrypt the data and attaches it securely to its encrypted data. Only authorized users can have access to the key in order to decrypt the encrypted data. The data has all the security requirements independently attached to it including the integrity proof. The proposed method is efficient and has its computational overheard minimized. With all the security requirements and metadata stored with the data itself, the proposed method is also flexible and suitable for protecting clients’ data in the cloud computing environment.

Selecting the Sensing Method in Cognitive Radio and Future Networks: A QoS-Aware Fuzzy Scheme

Scarcity of the radio frequency spectrum available for use by the vast number of wireless devices is already a challenge faced by ubiquitous communication networks, including the Internet of Things. The Cognitive Radio (CR) technology provides promising solutions to address part of such challenges. CR is based on allowing the so-called holes, the spectrums that remain unoccupied by their licensed users, to be utilized by others. To detect these holes, several spectrum sensing methods have been proposed by researchers. Each of these methods has its advantages and shortcomings for a given CR operation scenario. In particular, sensing methods can greatly affect the QoS levels of applications for various users of CR networks. In this paper, the effects of various spectrum sensing parameters and functions on the QoS levels of applications running on CR devices are reported. Based on those, the authors propose a QoS-aware fuzzy scheme for selecting the proper sensing method, from the catalog of available ones. We show that the proposed scheme mitigates the degrading impacts of the sensing operations on the QoS levels of a diverse range of CR-based applications.

A Middleware for the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) connects everyday objects including a vast array of sensors, actuators, and smart devices, referred to as things to the Internet, in an intelligent and pervasive fashion. This connectivity gives rise to the possibility of using the tracking capabilities of things to impinge on the location privacy of users. Most of the existing management and location privacy protection solutions do not consider the low-cost and low-power requirements of things, or, they do not account for the heterogeneity, scalability, or autonomy of communications supported in the IoT. Moreover, these traditional solutions do not consider the case where a user wishes to control the granularity of the disclosed information based on the context of their use (e.g. based on the time or the current location of the user). To fill this gap, a middleware, referred to as the Internet of Things Management Platform (IoT-MP) is proposed in this paper.

Managing the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) offers many interesting solutions to problems encountered in a range of application areas. The potentially huge number and the diversity of things that may be part of such an infrastructure can pose prominent issues for their systemic management. This paper explores such issues and proposes a management platform that partially addresses them. More specifically, our proposed IoT Management Platform (IoT-MP) takes into account the fact that things, in general, have limited power, computation, and communication resources available to them. The proposed platform supports fundamental management functions, including those needed for proper operation, monitoring and communications. After introducing the architecture and the major components of the platform, we show the advantages of our proposed approach through some simulation studies.