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1. Integrated Node Authentication and Key Distribution Method for Body Area Network

   https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCNC.2019.8685559  

   Li, Zhouzhou; Fang, Hua; Wang, Honggang (February 2019, 2019 International Conference on Computing, Networking and Communications (ICNC))

   null (Ed.)

   Node Authentication and Key Distribution are two tightly correlated security tasks for a secure Body Area Networks (BAN) system. Handling them separately may cause many practical issues. Based on the recent advances on node authentication and (shared) key distribution (including key generation), we propose a new integrated method to securely and efficiently conduct the two tasks. We build a system model with the consideration of passive and active attacks and solve some security risks. One of performance metric, key generation rate is significantly improved in our method. We implement and verify the proposed methods on two test beds. The experimental result demonstrates the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposal. 

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2. Networkless Wireless Sensing for Bridge Structural Health Monitor

   Afonso, B.; Liu, H.; Yu, Z. (September 2022, IEEE/MIT Undergraduate Research Technology Conference (URTC))

   The recent report by American Society of Civil Engineers gave the nation's bridges an unimpressive C grade. Across the country, more than 617,000 highway bridges: 46,154 structurally deficient and 42% 50+ years old. Continuous bridge assessment is essential to protect public safety. Federal Highway Administration requires all highway bridges inspected once every 24 months. However, any drastic change on bridges within 24 months will be left undetected. Nonetheless, bridge inspection is time-consuming and labor-intensive. Civil engineers have been using bridge health monitoring (BHM) systems with wired and/or wireless sensors to measure structural response (e.g., displacement, strain, acceleration) of a bridge. The response measurements are then converted to the information related to structural health for assessment. State-of-the-art BHM technology deploys sensor networks to facilitate data connection. Installing cables is expensive and subject to extreme weather. Wireless solutions face challenges such as energy consumption. Sensors are battery-powered. Another not well-publicized problem is security threats inherited in wireless networks. Our approach to wireless BHM is to utilize sensors networkless by collecting data with a drone. Similar to a mail carrier who goes around and picks up the mail, a drone collects data from sensors throughout the bridge. A drone eliminates restrictions for civil engineers on node placement since the drone replaces sink nodes. Networkless makes BHM less prone to attacks such as Jamming and DoS. To secure access, we deploy a Needham-Schroeder authentication protocol for the drone to collect data from sensor nodes securely. Networkless sensing for BHM benefits energy efficiency. It saves battery life as the sensor nodes remain asleep until scheduled transmission or woken up by a drone. It reduces design complexity and operation energy. The system also assures security since there is no vulnerable network to be attacked. 

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3. ShadowAuth: Backward-Compatible Automatic CAN Authentication for Legacy ECUs

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3488932.3523263  

   Kim, Sungwoo; Yeo, Gisu; Kim, Taegyu; Rhee, Junghwan "John"; Jeon, Yuseok; Bianchi, Antonio; Xu, Dongyan; Tian, Dave (May 2022, Asia CCS'22)

   Controller Area Network (CAN) is the de-facto standard in-vehicle network system. Despite its wide adoption by automobile manufacturers, the lack of security design makes it vulnerable to attacks. For instance, broadcasting packets without authentication allows the impersonation of electronic control units (ECUs). Prior mitigations, such as message authentication or intrusion detection systems, fail to address the compatibility requirement with legacy ECUs, stealthy and sporadic malicious messaging, or guaranteed attack detection. We propose a novel authentication system called ShadowAuth that overcomes the aforementioned challenges by offering backward-compatible packet authentication to ECUs without requiring ECU firmware source code. Specifically, our authentication scheme provides transparent CAN packet authentication without modifying existing CAN packet definitions (e.g., J1939) via automatic ECU firmware instrumentation technique to locate CAN packet transmission code, and instrument authentication code based on the CAN packet behavioral transmission patterns. ShadowAuth enables vehicles to detect state-of-the-art CAN attacks, such as bus-off and packet injection, responsively within 60ms without false positives. ShadowAuth provides a sound and deployable solution for real-world ECUs. 

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4. Deep Learning Dataset Generation for Physical Layer Authentication in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN)

   Dentremont, Christopher; Liu, Hong (May 2024, 2024 International Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing (IWCMC))

   Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) uses wireless sensor network (WSN) to monitor a civil construction’s conditions remotely and constantly for its sustainable usage. Security in WSN for SHM is essential to safeguard critical transportation infrastructure such as bridges. While WSN offers cost-effective solutions for Bridge SHM, its wireless nature expands attack surfaces, making security a significant concern. Despite progress in addressing security issues in WSN for Bridge SHM, challenges persist in device authentication due to the unique placement of sensor nodes and their resource constraints, particularly in energy conservation requirements to extend the system’s lifetime. To overcome these limitations, this paper proposes an innovative authentication scheme with deep learning at the physical layer. Our approach steers away from conventional device authentication methods: no challenge-response protocol with heavy communication overhead and no cryptography of intensive computation. Instead, we use radio frequency (RF) fingerprinting to authenticate sensor nodes. Deep learning is chosen for its ability to discover patterns in large datasets without manual feature engineering. We model our scheme on IEEE 802.11ah, Wi-Fi HaLow of long-range communication and low-power consumption for machine-to-machine (M2M) applications. Simulations and experiments using universal software radio peripheral (USRP) demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. By integrating security into Cyber-Physical System/the Internet-of-Things (CPS/IoT) design of WSN for Bridge SHM, our work contributes to critical infrastructure protection. 

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5. WearRF-CLA: Continuous Location Authentication with Wrist Wearables and UHF RFID

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3488932.3517426  

   Li, Ang; Li, Jiawei; Han, Dianqi; Zhang, Yan; Li, Tao; Zhang, Yanchao (May 2022, 2022 ACM on Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security)

   Continuous location authentication (CLA) seeks to continuously and automatically verify the physical presence of legitimate users in a protected indoor area. CLA can play an important role in contexts where access to electrical or physical resources must be limited to physically present legitimate users. In this paper, we present WearRF-CLA, a novel CLA scheme built upon increasingly popular wrist wearables and UHF RFID systems. WearRF-CLA explores the observation that human daily routines in a protected indoor area comprise a sequence of human-states (e.g., walking and sitting) that follow predictable state transitions. Each legitimate WearRF-CLA user registers his/her RFID tag and also wrist wearable during system enrollment. After the user enters a protected area, WearRF-CLA continuously collects and processes the gyroscope data of the wrist wearable and the phase data of the RFID tag signals to verify three factors to determine the user's physical presence/absence without explicit user involvement: (1) the tag ID as in a traditional RFID authentication system, (2) the validity of the human-state chain, and (3) the continuous coexistence of the paired wrist wearable and RFID tag with the user. The user passes CLA if and only if all three factors can be validated. Extensive user experiments on commodity smartwatches and UHF RFID devices confirm the very high security and low authentication latency of WearRF-CLA. 

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