Pawani Porambage

The Quest for Privacy in the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is the current evolutionary paradigm of networking and the key driving force toward a smart world. Although privacy in the IoT is highly regarded to ensure the protection of users and personal information from the perspective of individual or cooperative users, its insufficiently studied. As members of the always-connected paradigm of the massive IoT world, people can scarcely control the disclosure of their personal information. The biggest challenge is to allow users to experience the best utilization of IoT-based products and services with the fewest privacy threats and failures. This article provides a holistic view of the challenges of and issues related to preserving IoT privacy, as well as the existing solutions. Privacy by design (PbD) is identified as the key solution for many IoT privacy issues. The article also discusses hot topics in IoT privacy and future research directions.

PAuthKey: A Pervasive Authentication Protocol and Key Establishment Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks in Distributed IoT Applications

Wireless sensor Networks (WSNs) deployed in distributed Internet of Things (IoT) applications should be integrated into the Internet. According to the distributed architecture, sensor nodes measure data, process, exchange information, and perform collaboratively with other sensor nodes and end-users, which can be internal or external to the network. In order to maintain the trustworthy connectivity and the accessibility of distributed IoT, it is important to establish secure links for end-to-end communication with a strong pervasive authentication mechanism. However, due to the resource constraints and heterogeneous characteristics of the devices, traditional authentication and key management schemes are not effective for such applications. This paper proposes a pervasive lightweight authentication and keying mechanism for WSNs in distributed IoT applications, in which the sensor nodes can establish secured links with peer sensor nodes and end-users. The established authentication scheme PAuthKey is based on implicit certificates and it provides application level end-to-end security. A comprehensive description for the scenario based behavior of the protocol is presented. With the performance evaluation and the security analysis, it is justified that the proposed scheme is viable to deploy in the resource constrained WSNs.

Two-phase authentication protocol for wireless sensor networks in distributed IoT applications

In the centralized Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) architecture there exists a central entity, which acquires, processes and provides information from sensor nodes. Conversely, in the WSN applications in distributed Internet of Things (IoT) architecture, sensor nodes sense data, process, exchange information and perform collaboratively with other sensor nodes and endusers. In order to maintain the trustworthy connectivity and the accessibility of distributed IoT, it is important to establish secure links for end-to-end communication with proper authentication. The authors propose an implicit certificate-based authentication mechanism for WSNs in distributed IoT applications. The developed two-phase authentication protocol allows the sensor nodes and the end-users to authenticate each other and initiate secure connections. The proposed protocol supports the resource scarcity of the sensor nodes, heterogeneity and scalability of the network. The performance and security analysis justify that the proposed scheme is viable to deploy in resource constrained WSNs.

Group Key Establishment for Enabling Secure Multicast Communication in Wireless Sensor Networks Deployed for IoT Applications

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are a prominent fundamental technology of the Internet of Things (IoTs). Rather than device-to-device communications, group communications in the form of broadcasting and multicasting incur efficient message deliveries among resource-constrained sensor nodes in the IoT-enabled WSNs. Secure and efficient key management is in many cases used to protect the authenticity, integrity, and confidentiality of multicast messages. This paper develops two group key establishment protocols for secure multicast communications among the resource-constrained devices in IoT. Major deployment conditions and requirements of each protocol are described in terms of the specific IoT application scenarios. Furthermore, the applicability of the two protocols is analyzed and justified by a comprehensive analysis of the performance, scalability, and security of the protocols proposed.

Certificate-Based Pairwise Key Establishment Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

In order to guarantee the privacy and safety of data transactions in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), secure key transportation and unique node identification have become major concerns. WSNs are deployed in a wide range of applications with a high demand for secure communications. When designing a secure key management protocol for WSNs, special attention should be given to the resource constraints of the devices and the scalability of the network. In this paper, we exploit public-key nature protocols to define a hybrid key establishment algorithm for symmetric key cryptography. We propose an Elliptic Curve Cryptography based implicit certificate scheme and show how to utilize the certificates for deriving pair-wise link keys in a WSN. By a performance and security analysis, we justify that the proposed scheme is well fitting with the functional and architectural features of WSNs. Both experimental results and theoretical analysis show that the proposed key establishment protocol is viable to deploy in a real-time WSN application.

Secure end-to-end communication for constrained devices in IoT-enabled Ambient Assisted Living systems

The Internet of Things (IoT) technologies interconnect broad ranges of network devices irrespective of their resource capabilities and local networks. In order to upgrade the standard of life of elderly people, Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) systems are also widely deployed in the context of IoT applications. To preserve user security and privacy in AAL systems, it is significant to ensure secure communication link establishment among the medical devices and the remote hosts or servers that are interested in accessing the critical health data. However, due to the limited resources available in such constrained devices, it is challenging to exploit expensive cryptographic operations in the conventional security protocols. Therefore, in this paper we propose a novel proxy-based authentication and key establishment protocol, which is lightweight and suitable to safeguard sensitive data generated by resource-constrained devices in IoT-enabled AAL systems.

Proxy-based end-to-end key establishment protocol for the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) drives the world towards an always connected paradigm by interconnecting wide ranges of network devices irrespective of their resource capabilities and local networks. This would inevitably enhance the requirements of constructing dynamic and secure end-to-end (E2E)connections among the heterogenous network devices with imbalanced resource profiles and less or no previous knowledge about each other. The device constraints and the dynamic link creations make it challenging to use pre-shared keys for every secure E2E communication scenario in IoT. We propose a proxy-based key establishment protocol for the IoT, which enables any two unknown high resource constrained devices to initiate secure E2E communication. The high constrained devices should be legitimate and maintain secured connections with the neighbouring less constrained devices in the local networks, in which they are deployed. The less constrained devices are performing as the proxies and collaboratively advocate the expensive cryptographic operations during the session key computation. Finally, we demonstrate the applicability of our solution in constrained IoT devices by providing performance and security analysis.

Energy Consumption Analysis of High Quality Multi-Tier Wireless Multimedia Sensor Network

Video surveillance is one of the promising applications of the Internet of Things paradigm. We see heterogeneous deployment of sensor platforms in a multi-tier network architecture as a key enabler for energy optimization of battery powered high-quality video surveillance applications. In this paper, we propose a heterogeneous wireless multimedia sensor network (WMSN) prototype composed of constrained low-power scalar sensor nodes and single board computers (SBCs). Whereas constrained nodes are used for preliminary motion detection, more capable SBCs are used as camera nodes. The camera nodes stream full HD (1080 pixels) video to a remote laptop during occurrence of an event (when motion is detected). We also present a simple power model and simulation results of battery life of the motes for variable event interval and event duration.

Secure and Efficient Reactive Video Surveillance for Patient Monitoring

Video surveillance is widely deployed for many kinds of monitoring applications in healthcare and assisted living systems. Security and privacy are two promising factors that align the quality and validity of video surveillance systems with the caliber of patient monitoring applications. In this paper, we propose a symmetric key-based security framework for the reactive video surveillance of patients based on the inputs coming from data measured by a wireless body area network attached to the human body. Only authenticated patients are able to activate the video cameras, whereas the patient and authorized people can consult the video data. User and location privacy are at each moment guaranteed for the patient. A tradeoff between security and quality of service is defined in order to ensure that the surveillance system gets activated even in emergency situations. In addition, the solution includes resistance against tampering with the device on the patient’s side.

Group key establishment for secure multicasting in IoT-enabled Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is a fundamental technology of the Internet of Things (IoT). Group communications in the form of broadcasting and multicasting incur efficient message deliveries among resource-constrained sensors in IoT-enabled WSNs. Secure and efficient key management is significant to protect the authenticity, integrity, and confidentiality of multicast messages. This paper develops two group key establishment protocols for secure multicast communications among resource-constrained devices in IoT. The applicability of the two protocols are analyzed and justified by performance and security analysis.