Panayotis Kikiras

Semantically enriched navigation for indoor environments

Location-based mobile services have been in use, and studied, for a long time. With the proliferation of wireless networking technologies, users are mostly interested in advanced services that render the surrounding environment (i.e., the building) highly intelligent and significantly facilitate their activities. In this paper our focus is on indoor navigation, one of the most important location services. Existing approaches for indoor navigation are driven by geometric information and neglect important aspects, such as the semantics of space and user capabilities and context. The derived applications are not intelligent enough to catalytically contribute to the pervasive computing vision. In this paper, a novel navigation mechanism is introduced. Such navigation scheme is enriched with user profiles and the adoption of an ontological framework. These enhancements introduce a series of technical challenges that are extensively discussed throughout the paper.

A human-centered semantic navigation system for indoor environments

In this paper we discuss the very important issue of indoor location services. Location services have been in use, and studied, for a long time in mobile networks. With the proliferation of wireless networking technologies, users are mostly interested in advanced services that render the surrounding environment (i.e., the building) highly intelligent and significantly facilitate user activities (pervasive computing paradigm). Our focus is on navigation, one of the most important location services. Existing approaches for indoor navigation are driven by geometric information and neglect important aspects like the semantics of points/areas and user preferences. The derived applications are not intelligent enough to catalytically contribute to the pervasive computing vision. In this paper, a novel navigation mechanism is introduced. Such navigation scheme is enriched with user profiles and the adoption of an ontological framework. These enhancements introduce a series of technical challenges that are extensively discussed throughout the paper.

On the Security and Privacy of Internet of Things Architectures and Systems

The Internet of Things (IoT) brings together a multitude of technologies, with a vision of creating an interconnected world. This will benefit both corporations as well as the end-users. However, a plethora of security and privacy challenges need to be addressed for the IoT to be fully realized. In this paper, we identify and discuss the properties that constitute the uniqueness of the IoT in terms of the upcoming security and privacy challenges. Furthermore, we construct requirements induced by the aforementioned properties. We survey the four most dominant IoT architectures and analyze their security and privacy components with respect to the requirements. Our analysis shows a mediocre coverage of security and privacy requirements. Finally, through our survey we identify a number of research gaps that constitute the steps ahead for future research.

A view on privacy & trust in IoT

Internet of Things (IoT) technology is rapidly gaining popularity, not only in industrial and commercial environments, but also in our personal life by means of smart devices at home. Such devices often interconnect with cloud services that promise easy usage and global access. However, managing the balance between trust in the service provider and need for privacy of individuals becomes a major challenge considering automatic exchange of manifold personal information. In this paper, we propose a formal model that establishes a relation between information, privacy, as well as trust, and that automatically maps between these terms while maintaining user control.

A honeypot-driven cyber incident monitor: lessons learned and steps ahead

In recent years, the amount and the sophistication of cyber attacks has increased significantly. This creates a plethora of challenges from a security perspective. First, for the efficient monitoring of a network, the generated alerts need to be presented and summarized in a meaningful manner. Second, additional analytics are required to identify sophisticated and correlated attacks. In particular, the detection of correlated attacks requires collaboration between different monitoring points. Cyber incident monitors are platforms utilized for supporting the tasks of network administrators and provide an initial step towards coping with the aforementioned challenges. In this paper, we present our cyber incident monitor TraCINg. TraCINg obtains alert data from honeypot sensors distributed across all over the world. The main contribution of this paper is a thoughtful discussion of the lessons learned, both from a design rational perspective as well as from the analysis of data gathered during a five month deployment period. Furthermore, we show that even with a relatively small number of deployed sensors, it is possible to detect correlated attacks that target multiple sensors.

Wireless Sensor Networking, Automation Technologies and Machine to Machine Developments on the Path to the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) has been heralded as the next major development to be realized throughout the Internet portfolio of technologies. IoT is understood to bring along multiple technological challenges. These should not be considered in isolation, since IoT is characterized by the introduction of machine to machine applications with no or minimal human involvement, and the high pervasiveness of the technological artefacts realizing it. The technological developments shaping the IoT vision are manifesting in multiple economic sectors, including computing, telecommunications, construction and logistics---to name a few. Among the various technological developments supporting the IoT, wireless networking, embedded computing and scalable computation through virtualization are considered the key driving forces for transforming the IoT vision into reality. Herein we present the IoT vision and elaborate on key technological developments in these pivotal thematic areas. We conclude the paper with insights drawn from this survey of technological developments and sketch out directions for future research.

AnonPubSub: Anonymous publish-subscribe overlays

Publish-subscribe is an increasingly popular messaging pattern for distributed systems, supporting scalable and extensible programming, and optimal spatial, temporal, and control-flow decoupling of distributed components. Publish-subscribe middleware and methods were extended towards supporting security, in particular confidentiality, and increased availability, yet a few prior works addressed anonymity of participants. Anonymity of senders and receivers may however be crucial, e.g., for supporting freedom of expression in regimes where political repression and censorship prevail. In this article, we review basic security and privacy requirements and introduce a new attacker model based on statistical disclosure, used to challenge anonymity. We elaborate on design options for privacy-preserving publish-subscribe systems and present a novel system that leverages peer-to-peer networking concepts; this novel approach protects subscriber anonymity by means of Probabilistic Forwarding (PF) and through a novel so-called Shell Game (SG) algorithm. We verify our solution against the requirements and provide a simulation-based analysis of the effectiveness of our approaches in light of our attacker model. The results show that the SG algorithm efficiently protects subscriber anonymity, and that anonymity sets can be adjusted via PF.

Enabling the usage of sensor networks with service-oriented architectures

Closing the gap between device-oriented sensor networks and data-oriented applications is a serious challenge. We present a novel platform which enables the seamless integration of sensor networks with a Service-Oriented Architecture approach. The platform hides the device-specific details from the applications and transforms data into a device-independent format. Thereby the system provides a mechanism to create a variety of end-user applications on top of the platform, which are independent from the device-specific details. We present an in-depth description of the architecture of our platform, and a full implementation and evaluation of it in a residential energy management setting.

Privacy in Smart Metering Ecosystems

While smart metering is a key technology for reaching a sustainable consumption of resources, smart buildings are on their way to provide ubiquitous home automation. These technologies combine to frame a smart metering ecosystem with corresponding services and business models introducing new security challenges including privacy protection. This paper outlines a novel approach to provide customers of smart metering ecosystems with full control over their data in all areas of data collection, processing and exchange. The approach keeps the privilege model simple enough for regular users to understand how to configure their desired level of privacy. More concrete, we provide a simple, easy to use privacy dashboard that translates user input into XACML policies based on privilege modeling for this scenario. Generated XACML policies are evaluated upon receiving access requests to sensor data or actuators. Using the proposed model greatly improves user understanding and implementation of privacy rights related to smart metering ecosystems.

Architectural Blueprints of a Unified Sensing Platform for the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is understood as a major embodiment of the convergence between device-oriented sensor networks and data-oriented applications that is facilitated through the Internet portfolio of technologies. From an architecture perspective, the wide range of operational parameters entailed by multiple application domains myriads of combinations of sensors and applications is the most significant challenge brought on by the IoT vision. To this end, the design blueprint of a platform that enables the seamless integration of multiple dissimilar devices and their efficient use by independently contributed applications is an essential architecture concern. Herein we address this concern by introducing a Unified Sensing Platform (USP) designed to accommodate an open set of sensor types and to expose their functional capabilities to applications in an efficient, reusable and context-aware way.