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The Internet of Things is spreading significantly in every sector, including the household, a variety of industries, healthcare, and emergency services, with the goal of assisting all of those infrastructures by providing intelligent means of service delivery. An Internet of Vulnerabilities (IoV) has emerged as a result of the pervasiveness of the Internet of Things (IoT), which has led to a rise in the use of applications and devices connected to the IoT in our day-to-day lives. The manufacture of IoT devices are growing at a rapid pace, but security and privacy concerns are not being taken into consideration. These intelligent Internet of Things devices are especially vulnerable to a variety of attacks, both on the hardware and software levels, which leaves them exposed to the possibility of use cases. This master’s thesis provides a comprehensive overview of the Internet of Things (IoT) with regard to security and privacy in the area of applications, security architecture frameworks, a taxonomy of various cyberattacks based on various architecture models, such as three-layer, four-layer, and five-layer. The fundamental purpose of this thesis is to provide recommendations for alternate mitigation strategies and corrective actions by using a holistic rather than a layer-by-layer approach. We discussed the most effective solutions to the problems of privacy and safety that are associated with the Internet of Things (IoT) and presented them in the form of research questions. In addition to that, we investigated a number of further possible directions for the development of this research.
It is generally agreed that the development and deployment of an important amount of IoT devices throughout the world has revolutionized our lives in a way that we can rely on these devices to complete certain tasks that may have not been possible just years ago which also brought a new level of convenience and value to our lives.
This technology is allowing us in a smart home environment to remotely control doors, windows, and fridges, purchase online, stream music easily with the use of voice assistants such as Amazon Echo Alexa, also close a garage door from anywhere in the world to cite some examples as this technology has added value to several domains ranging from household environments, cites, industries by exchanging and transferring data between these devices and customers. Many of these devices’ sensors, collect and share information in real-time which enables us to make important business decisions.
However, these devices pose some risks and also some security and privacy challenges that need to be addressed to reach their full potential or be considered to be secure. That is why, comprehensive risk analysis techniques are essential to enhance the security posture of IoT devices as they can help evaluate the robustness and reliability towards potential susceptibility to risks, and vulnerabilities that IoT devices in a smart home setting might possess.
This approach relies on the basis of ISO/IEC 27005 methodology and risk matrix method to highlight the level of risks, impact, and likelihood that an IoT device in smart home settings can have, map the related vulnerability, threats and risks and propose the necessary mitigation strategies or countermeasures that can be taken to secure a device and therefore satisfying some security principles. Around 30 risks were identified on Amazon Echo and the related IoT system using the methodology. A detailed list of countermeasures is proposed as a result of the risk analysis. These results, in turn, can be used to elevate the security posture of the device.
The evolution of cellular networks from its first generation (1G) to its fourth generation (4G) was driven by the demand of user-centric downlink capacity also technically called Mobile Broad-Band (MBB). With its fifth generation (5G), Machine Type Communication (MTC) has been added into the target use cases and the upcoming generation of cellular networks is expected to support them. However, such support requires improvements in the existing technologies in terms of latency, reliability, energy efficiency, data rate, scalability, and capacity.
Originally, MTC was designed for low-bandwidth high-latency applications such as, environmental sensing, smart dustbin, etc. Nowadays there is an additional demand around applications with low-latency requirements. Among other well-known challenges for recent cellular networks such as data rate energy efficiency, reliability etc., latency is also not suitable for mission-critical applications such as real-time control of machines, autonomous driving, tactile Internet etc. Therefore, in the currently deployed cellular networks, there is a necessity to reduce the latency and increase the reliability offered by the networks to support use cases such as, cooperative autonomous driving or factory automation, that are grouped under the denomination Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communication (URLLC).
This thesis is primarily concerned with the latency into the Universal Terrestrial Radio Access Network (UTRAN) of cellular networks. The overall work is divided into five parts. The first part presents the state of the art for cellular networks. The second part contains a detailed overview of URLLC use cases and the requirements that must be fulfilled by the cellular networks to support them. The work in this thesis is done as part of a collaboration project between IRIMAS lab in Université de Haute-Alsace, France and Institute for Reliable Embedded Systems and Communication Electronics (ivESK) in Offenburg University of Applied Sciences, Germany. The selected use cases of URLLC are part of the research interests of both partner institutes. The third part presents a detailed study and evaluation of user- and control-plane latency mechanisms in current generation of cellular networks. The evaluation and analysis of these latencies, performed with the open-source ns-3 simulator, were conducted by exploring a broad range of parameters that include among others, traffic models, channel access parameters, realistic propagation models, and a broad set of cellular network protocol stack parameters. These simulations were performed with low-power, low-cost, and wide-range devices, commonly called IoT devices, and standardized for cellular networks. These devices use either LTE-M or Narrowband-IoT (NB-IoT) technologies that are designed for connected things. They differ mainly by the provided bandwidth and other additional characteristics such as coding scheme, device complexity, and so on.
The fourth part of this thesis shows a study, an implementation, and an evaluation of latency reduction techniques that target the different layers of the currently used Long Term Evolution (LTE) network protocol stack. These techniques based on Transmission Time Interval (TTI) reduction and Semi-Persistent Scheduling (SPS) methods are implemented into the ns-3 simulator and are evaluated through realistic simulations performed for a variety of low-latency use cases focused on industry automation and vehicular networking. For testing the proposed latency reduction techniques in cellular networks, since ns-3 does not support NB-IoT in its current release, an NB-IoT extension for LTE module was developed. This makes it possible to explore deployment limitations and issues.
In the last part of this thesis, a flexible deployment framework called Hybrid Scheduling and Flexible TTI for the proposed latency reduction techniques is presented, implemented and evaluated through realistic simulations. With help of the simulation evaluation, it is shown that the improved LTE network proposed and implemented in the simulator can support low-latency applications with low cost, higher range, and narrow bandwidth devices. The work in this thesis points out the potential improvement techniques, their deployment issues and paves the way towards the support for URLLC applications with upcoming cellular networks.
The Internet of Things (IoT), ubiquitous computing and ubiquitous connectivity, Cyber Physical Systems (CPS), ambient intelligence, Machine-to-Machine communication (M2M) or Car-to-Car (C2C)-communication, smart metering, smart grid, telematics, telecare, telehealth – there are many buzzwords around current developments related to the Internet.
This contribution gives an overview on such IoT-applications, as they are already used today to improve the availability of information, increase efficiency, push system limits and extend the value chain. At a closer look, the economic and technical development can be separated into different phases. It is interesting that we are currently at the threshold to a new phase, with decentralized and cooperative communication and control nodes as cornerstones. Thus, embedded systems and their connectivity are in the middle of the scene.
This recent development is described along with some example projects from the author’s team which are used in industrial automation, energy supply and distribution (home automation and smart metering), traffic engineering (cooperative driver assistance systems), and in telehealth and telecare.