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1. End-to-End IoT Security Middleware for Cloud-Fog Communication

   https://doi.org/10.1109/CSCloud.2017.62  

   Mukherjee, Bidyut; Neupane, Roshan Lal; Calyam, Prasad (June 2017, 2017 IEEE 4th International Conference on Cyber Security and Cloud Computing (CSCloud))

   IoT (Internet of Things) devices such as sensors have been actively used in 'fogs' to provide critical data during e.g., disaster response scenarios or in-home healthcare. Since IoT devices typically operate in resource-constrained computing environments at the network-edge, data transfer performance to the cloud as well as end-to-end security have to be robust and customizable. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a middleware featuring "intermittent" and "flexible" end-to-end security for cloud-fog communications. Intermittent security copes with unreliable network connections, and flexibility is achieved through security configurations that are tailored to application needs. Our experiment results show how our middleware that leverages static pre-shared keys forms a promising solution for delivering light-weight, fast and resource-aware security for a variety of IoT-based applications. 

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2. Connecting the Dots: Tracing Data Endpoints in IoT Devices

   https://doi.org/10.56553/popets-2024-0090  

   Jakaria, Md; Huang, Danny Yuxing; Das, Anupam (July 2024, Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies)

   Smart home devices are constantly exchanging data with a variety of remote endpoints. This data encompasses diverse information, from device operation and status to sensitive user information like behavioral usage patterns. However, there is a lack of transparency regarding where such data goes and with whom it is potentially shared. This paper investigates the diverse endpoints that smart home Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices contact to better understand and reason about the IoT backend infrastructure, thereby providing insights into potential data privacy risks. We analyze data from 5,413 users and 25,123 IoT devices using the IoT Inspector, an open-source application allowing users to monitor traffic from smart home devices on their networks. First, we develop semi-automated techniques to map remote endpoints to organizations and their business types to shed light on their potential relationships with IoT end products. We discover that IoT devices contact more third or support-party domains than first-party domains. We also see that the distribution of contacted endpoints varies based on the user's location and across vendors manufacturing similar functional devices, where some devices are more exposed to third parties than others. Our analysis also reveals the major organizations providing backend support for IoT smart devices and provides insights into the temporal evolution of cross-border data-sharing practices. 

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3. Smart Transportation Delay and Resiliency Testbed based on Information Flow of Things Middleware

   https://doi.org/10.1109/SMARTCOMP.2019.00022  

   Talusan, Jose Paolo; Tiausas, Francis; Yasumoto, Keiichi; Wilbur, Michael; Pettet, Geoffrey; Dubey, Abhishek; Bhattacharjee, Shameek. (June 2019, 2019 IEEE International Conference on Smart Computing (SMARTCOMP))

   Edge and Fog computing paradigms are used to process big data generated by the increasing number of IoT devices. These paradigms have enabled cities to become smarter in various aspects via real-time data-driven applications. While these have addressed some flaws of cloud computing some challenges remain particularly in terms of privacy and security. We create a testbed based on a distributed processing platform called the Information flow of Things (IFoT) middleware. We briefly describe a decentralized traffic speed query and routing service implemented on this framework testbed. We configure the testbed to test counter measure systems that aim to address the security challenges faced by prior paradigms. Using this testbed, we investigate a novel decentralized anomaly detection approach for time-sensitive distributed smart transportation systems 

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4. PMsec 2.0: A Security-By-Design Solution for Doctor’s Dilemma Problem in Smart Healthcare

   https://doi.org/10.1109/OCIT59427.2023.10430808  

   Bathalapalli, Venkata K.; Mohanty, Saraju P.; Kougianos, Elias; Iyer, Vasanth; Rout, Bibhudutta (December 2023, Proceedings of the OITS International Conference on Information Technology (OCIT))

   The rapid adoption of Internet-of-Medical-Things (IoMT) has revolutionized e-health systems, particularly in remote patient monitoring. With the growing adoption of Internet-of-Medical-Things (IoMT) in delivering technologically advanced health services, the security of Medtronic devices is pivotal as the security and privacy of data from these devices are directly related to patient safety. PUF has been the most widely adopted hardware security primitive which has been successfully integrated with various Internet-of-Things (IoT) based applications, particularly in smart healthcare for facilitating device security. To facilitate security and access control to IoMT devices, this work proposes a novel cybersecurity solution using PUF for facilitating global access to IoMT devices. The proposed framework presents an approach that enables the patient’s body area network devices supported by PUF to be securely accessible and controllable globally. The proposed cybersecurity solution has been experimentally validated using state-of-the-art SRAM PUF, a delay based PUF, and a trusted platform module (TPM) primitive. 

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5. A Large-Scale Measurement Study of the PROXY Protocol and its Security Implications

   Pletinckx, Stijn; Kruegel, Christopher; Vigna, Giovanni (February 2025, 2025 Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium)

   Reverse proxy servers play a critical role in optimizing Internet services, offering benefits ranging from load balancing to Denial of Service (DoS) protection. A known shortcoming of such proxies is that the backend server becomes oblivious to the IP address of the client who initiated the connection since all requests are forwarded by the proxy server. For HTTP, this issue is trivially solved by the X-Forwarded-For header, which allows the proxy server to pass to the backend server the IP address of the client that originated the request. Unfortunately, no such equivalent exists for many other protocols. To solve this issue, HAProxy created the PROXY protocol, which communicates client information from a proxy server to a backend server at a lower level in the network stack (Layer 4), making it protocol agnostic. In this work, we are the first to study the use of the PROXY protocol at Internet scale and investigate the security impact of its misconfigurations. We launched a measurement study on the full IPv4 address range and found that, over HTTP, more than 170,000 hosts accept PROXY protocol data from arbitrary sources. We demonstrate how to abuse this protocol to bypass onpath proxies (and their protections) and leak sensitive information from backend infrastructures. We discovered over 10,000 servers that are vulnerable to an access bypass, triggered by injecting a (spoofed) PROXY protocol header. Using this technique, we obtained access to over 500 internal servers providing control over IoT monitoring platforms and smart home automation devices, allowing us to, for example, regulate remote controlled window blinds or control security cameras and alarm systems. Beyond HTTP, we demonstrate how the PROXY protocol can be used to turn over 350 SMTP servers into open relays, enabling an attacker to send arbitrary emails from any email address. In sum, our study exposes how PROXY protocol misconfigurations lead to severe security issues that affect multiple protocols prominently used in the wild. 

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