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  1. In modern healthcare, smart medical devices are used to ensure better and informed patient care. Such devices have the capability to connect to and communicate with the hospital's network or a mobile application over wi-fi or Bluetooth, allowing doctors to remotely configure them, exchange data, or update the firmware. For example, Cardiovascular Implantable Electronic Devices (CIED), more commonly known as Pacemakers, are increasingly becoming smarter, connected to the cloud or healthcare information systems, and capable of being programmed remotely. Healthcare providers can upload new configurations to such devices to change the treatment. Such configurations are often exchanged, reused, and/or modified to match the patient's specific health scenario. Such capabilities, unfortunately, come at a price. Malicious entities can provide a faulty configuration to such devices, leading to the patient's death. Any update to the state or configuration of such devices must be thoroughly vetted before applying them to the device. In case of any adverse events, we must also be able to trace the lineage and propagation of the faulty configuration to determine the cause and liability issues. In a highly distributed environment such as today's hospitals, ensuring the integrity of configurations and security policies is difficult and often requires a complex setup. As configurations propagate, traditional access control and authentication of the healthcare provider applying the configuration is not enough to prevent installation of malicious configurations. In this paper, we argue that a provenance-based approach can provide an effective solution towards hardening the security of such medical devices. In this approach, devices would maintain a verifiable provenance chain that would allow assessing not just the current state, but also the past history of the configuration of the device. Also, any configuration update would be accompanied by its own secure provenance chain, allowing verification of the origin and lineage of the configuration. The ability to protect and verify the provenance of devices and configurations would lead to better patient care, prevent malfunction of the device due to malicious configurations, and allow after-the-fact investigation of device configuration issues. In this paper, we advocate the benefits of such an approach and sketch the requirements, implementation challenges, and deployment strategies for such a provenance-based system. 
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  2. Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are envisioned to enhance safety and efficiency on the road, increase productivity, and positively impact the urban transportation system. Due to recent developments in autonomous driving (AD) technology, AVs have started moving on the road. However, this promising technology has many unique security challenges that have the potential to cause traffic accidents. Though some researchers have exploited and addressed specific security issues in AD, there is a lack of a systematic approach to designing security solutions using a comprehensive threat model. A threat model analyzes and identifies potential threats and vulnerabilities. It also identifies the attacker model and proposes mitigation strategies based on known security solutions. As an emerging cyber-physical system, the AD system requires a well-designed threat model to understand the security threats and design solutions. This paper explores security issues in the AD system and analyzes the threat model using the STRIDE threat modeling process. We posit that our threat model-based analysis will help improve AVs' security and guide researchers toward developing secure AVs. 
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  3. Connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs) have fostered the development of intelligent transportation systems that support critical safety information sharing with minimum latency and making driving decisions autonomously. However, the CAV environment is vulnerable to different external and internal attacks. Authorized but malicious entities which provide wrong information impose challenges in preventing internal attacks. An essential requirement for thwarting internal attacks is to identify the trustworthiness of the vehicles. This paper exploits interaction provenance to propose a trust management framework for CAVs that considers both in-vehicle and vehicular network security incidents, supports flexible security policies and ensures privacy. The framework contains an interaction provenance recording and trust management protocol that extracts events from interaction provenance and calculates trustworthiness using fuzzy policies based on the events. Simulation results show that the framework is effective and can be integrated with the CAV stack with minimal computation and communication overhead. 
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  4. Connected vehicles (CVs) have facilitated the development of intelligent transportation system that supports critical safety information sharing with minimum latency. However, CVs are vulnerable to different external and internal attacks. Though cryptographic techniques can mitigate external attacks, preventing internal attacks imposes challenges due to authorized but malicious entities. Thwarting internal attacks require identifying the trustworthiness of the participating vehicles. This paper proposes a trust management framework for CVs using interaction provenance that ensures privacy, considers both in-vehicle and vehicular network security incidents, and supports flexible security policies. For this purpose, we present an interaction provenance recording and trust management protocol. Different events are extracted from interaction provenance, and trustworthiness is calculated using fuzzy policies based on the events. 
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  5. Connected Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) have achieved significant improvements in recent years. The CAVs can share sensor data to improve autonomous driving performance and enhance road safety. CAV architecture depends on roadside edge servers for latency-sensitive applications. The roadside edge servers are equipped with high-performance embedded edge computing devices that perform calculations with low power requirements. As the number of vehicles varies over different times of the day and vehicles can request for different CAV applications, the computation requirements for roadside edge computing platform can also vary. Hence, a framework for dynamic deployment of edge computing platforms can ensure CAV applications’ performance and proper usage of the devices. In this paper, we propose R-CAV – a framework for drone-based roadside edge server deployment that provides roadside units (RSUs) based on the computation requirement. Our proof of concept implementation for object detection algorithm using Nvidia Jetson nano demonstrates the proposed framework's feasibility. We posit that the framework will enhance the intelligent transport system vision by ensuring CAV applications’ quality of service. 
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  6. null (Ed.)
    Autonomous vehicles (AVs) rely on on-board sensors and computation capabilities to drive on the road with limited or no human intervention. However, autonomous driving decisions can go wrong for numerous reasons, leading to accidents on the road. The AVs lack a proper forensics investigation framework, which is essential for various reasons such as resolving insurance disputes, investigating attacks, compliance with autonomous driving safety guidelines, etc. To design robust and safe AVs, identifying the actual reason behind any incident involving the AV is crucial. Hence, it is essential to collect meaningful logs from different autonomous driving modules and store them in a secure and tamper-proof way. In this paper, we propose AVGuard, a forensic investigation framework that collects and stores the autonomous driving logs. The framework can generate and verify proofs to ensure the integrity of collected logs while preventing collusion attacks among multiple dishonest parties. The stored logs can be used later by investigators to identify the exact incident. Our proof-of-concept implementation shows that the framework can be integrated with autonomous driving modules efficiently without any significant overheads. 
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  7. null (Ed.)
    The Internet of Things (IoT) devices exchange certificates and authorization tokens over the IEEE 802.15.4 radio medium that supports a Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU) of 127 bytes. However, these credentials are significantly larger than the MTU and are therefore sent in a large number of fragments. As IoT devices are resource-constrained and battery-powered, there are considerable computations and communication overheads for fragment processing both on sender and receiver devices, which limit their ability to serve real-time requests. Moreover, the fragment processing operations increase energy consumption by CPUs and radio-transceivers, which results in shorter battery life. In this article, we propose CATComp -a compression-aware authorization protocol for Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) and Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) that enables IoT devices to exchange smallsized certificates and capability tokens over the IEEE 802.15.4 media. CATComp introduces additional messages in the CoAP and DTLS handshakes that allow communicating devices to negotiate a compression method, which devices use to reduce the credentials’ sizes before sending them over an IEEE 802.15.4 link. The decrease in the size of the security materials minimizes the total number of packet fragments, communication overheads for fragment delivery, fragment processing delays, and energy consumption. As such, devices can respond to requests faster and have longer battery life. We implement a prototype of CATComp on Contiki-enabled RE-Mote IoT devices and provide a performance analysis of CATComp. The experimental results show that communication latency and energy consumption are reduced when CATComp is integrated with CoAP and DTLS. 
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  8. 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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  9. null (Ed.)
    The widespread adoption of the Internet of Things (IoT) devices has increased its popularity and usage in diverse dimensions, including smart city, home, healthcare, and vehicles. The pervasiveness of the number of IoT devices that operate in low power and lossy network leads to performance issues. An excessive amount of IoT devices that operate with a fixed number of gateways reduce the quality of service (QoS) due to the increased latency of routing messages between the source and destination sensors. In this paper, we propose an IoT Gateway as a Service (IGaaS) that enables on-demand provisioning of IoT Gateways to maintain and improve QoS in an IoT system with a significant number of sensors. The IGaaS allows both the stationary and mobile gateways to be provisioned on-demand. The mobile devices, such as smartphones and drones, provide gateway services in exchange for incentives. The IGaaS supports both the upscale and downscale of IoT gateways depending on various metrics and requirements. The experimental results show that the IGaaS improves the QoS in terms of latency and power consumption. 
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