ALBERT

Description: The fast growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) and its diverse applications increase the risk of cyberattacks, one type of which is malware attacks. Due to the IoT devices’ different capabilities and the dynamic and ever-evolving environment, applying complex security measures is challenging, and applying only basic security standards is risky. Artificial Immune Systems (AIS) are intrusion-detecting algorithms inspired by the human body’s adaptive immune system techniques. Most of these algorithms imitate the human’s body B-cell and T-cell defensive mechanisms. They are lightweight, adaptive, and able to detect malware attacks without prior knowledge. In this work, we review the recent advances in employing AIS for the improved detection of malware in IoT networks. We present a critical analysis that highlights the limitations of the state-of-the-art in AIS research and offer insights into promising new research directions.

Description: A wide-scale outdoor remote deployment involves a large number of low-cost nodes that are powered by green energy, such as solar. We deal with such a system for landslide monitoring where the tiny nodes with ultra-low memory as little as 2 KB are directly connected to the Internet using cellular networks, thereby constituting Cellular IoT’s (C-IoT). This makes them vulnerable to a wide range of Denial of Service (DoS) attacks during their collaborative communications. Further, due to memory constraints, the nodes are not able to run resource-hungry security algorithms. Existing IoT protocols also cannot offer resiliency to DoS attacks for these memory-constrained devices. This paper proposes the Voice Response Internet of Things (VRITHI), which addresses the above issues by using the voice channel between the nodes. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first solution in the IoT domain where both the voice and data channels are being used for collaborative communications. Evaluation results demonstrate that VRITHI is able to reduce external DoS attacks from 82–65% to less than 28% and improves real-time communications in such a memory-constrained environment. In addition, it also contributes to green IoT energy saving by more than 50% in comparison with other IoT protocols.

Description: Machine learning (ML) techniques learn a system by observing it. Events and occurrences in the network define what is expected of the network’s operation. It is for this reason that ML techniques are used in the computer network security field to detect unauthorized intervention. In the event of suspicious activity, the result of the ML analysis deviates from the definition of expected normal network activity and the suspicious activity becomes apparent. Support vector machines (SVM) are ML techniques that have been used to profile normal network activity and classify it as normal or abnormal. They are trained to configure an optimal hyperplane that classifies unknown input vectors’ values based on their positioning on the plane. We propose to use SVM models to detect malicious behavior within low-power, low-rate and short range networks, such as those used in the Internet of Things (IoT). We evaluated two SVM approaches, the C-SVM and the OC-SVM, where the former requires two classes of vector values (one for the normal and one for the abnormal activity) and the latter observes only normal behavior activity. Both approaches were used as part of an intrusion detection system (IDS) that monitors and detects abnormal activity within the smart node device. Actual network traffic with specific network-layer attacks implemented by us was used to create and evaluate the SVM detection models. It is shown that the C-SVM achieves up to 100% classification accuracy when evaluated with unknown data taken from the same network topology it was trained with and 81% accuracy when operating in an unknown topology. The OC-SVM that is created using benign activity achieves at most 58% accuracy.

Description: Machine Learning techniques have proven effective in Side Channel Analysis (SCA), enabling multiple improvements over the already-established profiling process of Template Attacks. Focusing on the need to mitigate their impact on embedded devices, a design model and strategy is proposed that can effectively be used as a backbone for introducing SCA countermeasures on Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) scalar multipliers. The proposed design strategy is based on the decomposition of the round calculations of the Montgomery Power Ladder (MPL) algorithm and the Scalar Multiplication (SM) algorithm into the underlined finite field operations, and their restructuring into parallel-processed operation sets. Having as a basis the proposed design strategy, we showcase how advanced SCA countermeasures can be easily introduced, focusing on randomizing the projective coordinates of the MPL round’s ECC point results. To evaluate the design approach and its SCA countermeasures, several simple ML-based SCAs are performed, and an attack roadmap is provided. The proposed roadmap assumes attackers that do not have access to a huge number of leakage traces, and that have limited resources with which to mount Deep Learning attacks. The trained models’ performance reveals a high level of resistance against ML-based SCAs when including SCA countermeasures in the proposed design strategy.

Description: If we say that a writer is the soul of a novel and a director is the soul of a movie, then the soul of a journal should be its Editor-in-Chief (EiC) [...]

Description: Wireless, sensor and actuator technologies are often central to sensing or communication critical systems [...]

Description: One of the most frequent technical factors affecting Virtual Reality (VR) performance and causing motion sickness is system latency. In this paper, we adopted predictive algorithms (i.e., Dead Reckoning, Kalman Filtering, and Deep Learning algorithms) to reduce the system latency. Cubic, quadratic, and linear functions are used to predict and curve fitting for the Dead Reckoning and Kalman Filtering algorithms. We propose a time series-based LSTM (long short-term memory), Bidirectional LSTM, and Convolutional LSTM to predict the head and body motion and reduce the motion to photon latency in VR devices. The error between the predicted data and the actual data is compared for statistical methods and deep learning techniques. The Kalman Filtering method is suitable for predicting since it is quicker to predict; however, the error is relatively high. However, the error property is good for the Dead Reckoning algorithm, even though the curve fitting is not satisfactory compared to Kalman Filtering. To overcome this poor performance, we adopted deep-learning-based LSTM for prediction. The LSTM showed improved performance when compared to the Dead Reckoning and Kalman Filtering algorithm. The simulation results suggest that the deep learning techniques outperformed the statistical methods in terms of error comparison. Overall, Convolutional LSTM outperformed the other deep learning techniques (much better than LSTM and Bidirectional LSTM) in terms of error.

Description: Energy-efficient wireless connectivity plays an important role in scaling both battery-less and battery-powered Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. The power consumption in these devices is dominated by the wireless transceivers which limit the battery’s lifetime. Different strategies have been proposed to tackle these issues both in physical and network layers. The ultimate goal is to lower the power consumption without sacrificing other important metrics like latency, transmission range and robust operation under the presence of interference. Joint efforts in designing energy-efficient wireless protocols and low-power radio architectures result in achieving sub-100 μW operation. One technique to lower power is back-channel (BC) communication which allows ultra-low power (ULP) receivers to communicate efficiently with commonly used wireless standards like Bluetooth Low-Energy (BLE) while utilizing the already-deployed infrastructure. In this paper, we present a review of BLE back-channel communication and its forms. Additionally, a comprehensive survey of ULP radio design trends and techniques in both Bluetooth transmitters and receivers is presented.

Description: Mobile agents have the potential to offer benefits, as they are able to either independently or cooperatively move throughout networks and collect/aggregate sensory data samples. They are programmed to autonomously move and visit sensory data stations through optimal paths, which are established according to the application requirements. However, mobile agent routing protocols still suffer heavy computation/communication overheads, lack of route planning accuracy and long-delay mobile agent migrations. For this, mobile agent route planning protocols aim to find the best-fitted paths for completing missions (e.g., data collection) with minimised delay, maximised performance and minimised transmitted traffic. This article proposes a mobile agent route planning protocol for sensory data collection called MINDS. The key goal of this MINDS is to reduce network traffic, maximise data robustness and minimise delay at the same time. This protocol utilises the Hamming distance technique to partition a sensor network into a number of data-centric clusters. In turn, a named data networking approach is used to form the cluster-heads as a data-centric, tree-based communication infrastructure. The mobile agents utilise a modified version of the Depth-First Search algorithm to move through the tree infrastructure according to a hop-count-aware fashion. As the simulation results show, MINDS reduces path length, reduces network traffic and increases data robustness as compared with two conventional benchmarks (ZMA and TBID) in dense and large wireless sensor networks.

Description: Nowadays, networks use many different paths to exchange data. However, our research will construct a reliable path in the networks among a huge number of nodes for use in tele-surgery using medical applications such as healthcare tracking applications, including tele-surgery which lead to optimizing medical quality of service (m-QoS) during the COVID-19 situation. Many people could not travel due to the current issues, for fear of spreading the covid-19 virus. Therefore, our paper will provide a very trusted and reliable method of communication between a doctor and his patient so that the latter can do his operation even from a far distance. The communication between the doctor and his/her patient will be monitored by our proposed algorithm to make sure that the data will be received without delay. We test how we can invest buffer space that can be used efficiently to reduce delays between source and destination, avoiding loss of high-priority data packets. The results are presented in three stages. First, we show how to obtain the greatest possible reduction in rate variability when the surgeon begins an operation using live streaming. Second, the proposed algorithm reduces congestion on the determined path used for the online surgery. Third, we have evaluated the affection of optimal smoothing algorithm on the network parameters such as peak-to-mean ratio and delay to optimize m-QoS. We propose a new Smart-Rout Control algorithm (s-RCA) for creating a virtual smart path between source and destination to transfer the required data traffic between them, considering the number of hops and link delay. This provides a reliable connection that can be used in healthcare surgery to guarantee that all instructions are received without any delay, to be executed instantly. This idea can improve m-QoS in distance surgery, with trusted paths. The new s-RCA can be adapted with an existing routing protocol to track the primary path and monitor emergency packets received in node buffers, for direct forwarding via the demand path, with extended features.