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1. P-HIP: A Lightweight and Privacy-Aware Host Identity Protocol for Internet of Things

   https://doi.org/10.1109/JIOT.2020.3009024  

   Hossain, Mahmud ; Hasan, Ragib ( July 2020 , IEEE Internet of Things Journal)

   null (Ed.)

   The Host Identity Protocol (HIP) has emerged as the most suitable solution to uniquely identify smart devices in the mobile and distributed Internet of Things (IoT) systems, such as smart cities, homes, cars, and healthcare. The HIP provides authentication methods that enable secure communications between HIP peers. However, the authentication methods provided by the HIP cannot be adopted by the IoT devices with limited processing power because of the computation-intensive cryptographic operations involved in hash generation, signature validation, and session key establishment. Moreover, IoT devices cannot utilize the HIP as is to communicate securely in the low power and lossy networks as there is a considerable communication overhead, such as packet fragmentation and reassembly, for exchanging certificates over a lossy link. Additionally, the use of static host identifiers makes IoT devices vulnerable to cyber espionage and user-targeted attacks. In this article, we propose an authentication scheme, P-HIP, that protects the identity privacy of an IoT device by enabling the device to compute and use unique host identifiers from networks to networks and sessions to sessions. To make the HIP suitable for resource-constrained IoT devices, P-HIP provides methods that unburden IoT devices from computation-intensive operations, such as modular exponentiation, involved in authentication and session-key exchange. Additionally, P-HIP minimizes the communication overheads for exchanging certificates in lossy networks. We implement a prototype of P-HIP on Contiki enabled IoT that shows P-HIP can reduce computation costs, communication overheads, and the session-key establishment time when used by low-powered devices in a lossy network. 

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2. Touch-Based Magnetic Communication through Your Hand

   https://doi.org/10.1109/ICIOT.2018.00009  

   Allawadi, Arvind ; Liu, Kaikai ( July 2018 , 2018 IEEE International Congress on Internet of Things (ICIOT))

   Near field communication (NFC), which emerged only a decade ago, has been rapidly adopted in business services including point-of-sale (POS) systems, payments, identification, ticketing, and various other types of services. NFC offers great and varied promise in providing secure and implicit paired communication capability in smartphones. As a short-range wireless communication technology, the level of "secure" is contributed by the short-range nature. Compared with other competitive technologies, NFC achieves physical-level security but sacrifices convenience. For example, NFC cannot achieve device-free or hands-free payment transactions like the service provided by PayPal called PayPal beacon which utilizes Bluetooth-low-energy (BLE) technology. In this paper, we propose a low-cost wearable device that can achieve better physical-level security than NFC provides. This system is compatible with existing NFC-based POS systems and can help users realize a convenient hands-free payment transaction. Specifically, a custom NFC wristband was designed to channel its magnetic field through the human arm. By confining the magnetic field in NFC to the area around the body, we could minimize energy radiation, reduce the possibility of communication sniffing and hijackings, and improve security. To evaluate this approach, we conducted various experiments via different configurations. The results showed that the communication range for the human body channel was greater than that of the air and water channels. In addition, through this study we demonstrated that the human body is a naturally secure channel, and hacking and nearby interference are minimized during such communication. Our system also defines a new way of communication, for example, people can share confidential information with a simple handshake without pulling out and touching, or tapping smartphones. 

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3. PUFchain 3.0: Hardware-Assisted Distributed Ledger for Robust Authentication in Healthcare Cyber–Physical Systems

   https://doi.org/10.3390/s24030938  

   Bathalapalli, Venkata K. ; Mohanty, Saraju P. ; Kougianos, Elias ; Iyer, Vasanth ; Rout, Bibhudutta ( February 2024 , Sensors)

   This article presents a novel hardware-assisted distributed ledger-based solution for simultaneous device and data security in smart healthcare. This article presents a novel architecture that integrates PUF, blockchain, and Tangle for Security-by-Design (SbD) of healthcare cyber–physical systems (H-CPSs). Healthcare systems around the world have undergone massive technological transformation and have seen growing adoption with the advancement of Internet-of-Medical Things (IoMT). The technological transformation of healthcare systems to telemedicine, e-health, connected health, and remote health is being made possible with the sophisticated integration of IoMT with machine learning, big data, artificial intelligence (AI), and other technologies. As healthcare systems are becoming more accessible and advanced, security and privacy have become pivotal for the smooth integration and functioning of various systems in H-CPSs. In this work, we present a novel approach that integrates PUF with IOTA Tangle and blockchain and works by storing the PUF keys of a patient’s Body Area Network (BAN) inside blockchain to access, store, and share globally. Each patient has a network of smart wearables and a gateway to obtain the physiological sensor data securely. To facilitate communication among various stakeholders in healthcare systems, IOTA Tangle’s Masked Authentication Messaging (MAM) communication protocol has been used, which securely enables patients to communicate, share, and store data on Tangle. The MAM channel works in the restricted mode in the proposed architecture, which can be accessed using the patient’s gateway PUF key. Furthermore, the successful verification of PUF enables patients to securely send and share physiological sensor data from various wearable and implantable medical devices embedded with PUF. Finally, healthcare system entities like physicians, hospital admin networks, and remote monitoring systems can securely establish communication with patients using MAM and retrieve the patient’s BAN PUF keys from the blockchain securely. Our experimental analysis shows that the proposed approach successfully integrates three security primitives, PUF, blockchain, and Tangle, providing decentralized access control and security in H-CPS with minimal energy requirements, data storage, and response time. 

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4. AEROKEY: Using Ambient Electromagnetic Radiation for Secure and Usable Wireless Device Authentication

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3517254  

   Lee, Kyuin ; Yang, Yucheng ; Prabhune, Omkar ; Chithra, Aishwarya Lekshmi ; West, Jack ; Fawaz, Kassem ; Klingensmith, Neil ; Banerjee, Suman ; Kim, Younghyun ( March 2022 , Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies)

   Wireless connectivity is becoming common in increasingly diverse personal devices, enabling various interoperation- and Internet-based applications and services. More and more interconnected devices are simultaneously operated by a single user with short-lived connections, making usable device authentication methods imperative to ensure both high security and seamless user experience. Unfortunately, current authentication methods that heavily require human involvement, in addition to form factor and mobility constraints, make this balance hard to achieve, often forcing users to choose between security and convenience. In this work, we present a novel over-the-air device authentication scheme named AEROKEY that achieves both high security and high usability. With virtually no hardware overhead, AEROKEY leverages ubiquitously observable ambient electromagnetic radiation to autonomously generate spatiotemporally unique secret that can be derived only by devices that are closely located to each other. Devices can make use of this unique secret to form the basis of a symmetric key, making the authentication procedure more practical, secure and usable with no active human involvement. We propose and implement essential techniques to overcome challenges in realizing AEROKEY on low-cost microcontroller units, such as poor time synchronization, lack of precision analog front-end, and inconsistent sampling rates. Our real-world experiments demonstrate reliable authentication as well as its robustness against various realistic adversaries with low equal-error rates of 3.4% or less and usable authentication time of as low as 24 s. 

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5. SIA: Secure Intermittent Architecture for Off-the-Shelf Resource-Constrained Microcontrollers

   Dinu, Daniel ; Krishnan, Archanaa ; Schaumont, Patrick ( May 2019 , IEEE International Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust (HOST))

   Recent advancements in energy-harvesting techniques provide an alternative to batteries for resource constrained IoT devices and lead to a new computing paradigm, the intermittent computing model. In this model, a software module continues its execution from where it left off when an energy shortage occurred. Enforcing security of an intermittent software module is challenging because its power-off state has to be protected from a malicious adversary in addition to its power-on state, while the security mechanisms put in place must have a low overhead on the performance, resource consumption, and cost of a device. In this paper, we propose SIA (Secure Intermittent Architecture), a security architecture for resource-constrained IoT devices. SIA leverages low-cost security features available in commercial off-the-shelf microcontrollers to protect both the power-on and power-off state of an intermittent software module. Therefore, SIA enables a host of secure intermittent computing applications such as self-attestation, remote attestation, and secure communication. Moreover, our architecture provides confidentiality and integrity guarantees to an intermittent computing module at no cost compared to previous approaches in the literature that impose significant overheads. The salient characteristic of SIA is that it does not require any hardware modifications, and hence, it can be directly applied to existing IoT devices. We implemented and evaluated SIA on a resource-constrained IoT device based on an MSP430 processor. Besides being secure, SIA is simple and efficient. We confirm the feasibility of SIA for resource-constrained IoT devices with experimental results of several intermittent computing applications. Our prototype implementation outperforms by two to three orders of magnitude the secure intermittent computing solution of Suslowicz et al. presented at IGSC 2018. 

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