Project description:In recent times, security and privacy at the physical (PHY) layer has been a major issue of several communication technologies which comprise the internet of things (IoT) and mostly, the emerging fifth-generation (5G) cellular network. The most real-world PHY security challenge stems from the fact that the passive eavesdropper's information is unavailable to the genuine source and destination (transmitter/receiver) nodes in the network. Without this information, it is difficult to optimize the broadcasting parameters. Therefore, in this research, we propose an efficient sequential convex estimation optimization (SCEO) algorithm to mitigate this challenge and improve the security of physical layer (PHY) in a three-node wireless communication network. The results of our experiments indicate that by using the SCEO algorithm, an optimal performance and enhanced convergence is achieved in the transmission. However, considering possible security challenges envisaged when a multiple eavesdropper is active in a network, we expanded our research to develop a swift privacy rate optimization algorithm for a multiple-input, multiple-output, multiple-eavesdropper (MIMOME) scenario as it is applicable to security in IoT and 5G technologies. The result of the investigation show that the algorithm executes significantly with minimal complexity when compared with nonoptimal parameters. We further employed the use of rate constraint together with self-interference of the full-duplex transmission at the receiving node, which makes the performance of our technique outstanding when compared with previous studies.
Project description:The Internet of Things (IoT) is a widely hyped concept, with its focus on the connection of smart devices to the Internet rather than on people. IoT for consumers is often called the smart home market, and a large part of that market consists of home security devices. Consumers are often motivated to purchase smart home security devices to prevent burglaries, which they fear may lead to damage to their property or threats to their families. However, they also understand that IoT home security devices may be a threat to the privacy of their personal information. To determine the relative roles of fear and privacy concerns in the decision to purchase IoT home security devices, we conducted a survey of American consumers. We used the Theory of Reasoned Action as the theoretical basis for the study. We found that fear positively affected consumer attitudes toward purchasing smart home security devices, while concerns about privacy negatively affected attitudes. We found that attitudes toward purchase, the opinions of important others, and experience with burglaries all affected intent to purchase. We also found that the relationship between privacy concerns and intent to purchase is completely mediated by attitudes, while fear has both direct and indirect effects on intent.
Project description:The reliance on data donation from citizens as a driver for research, known as citizen science, has accelerated during the Sars-Cov-2 pandemic. An important enabler of this is Internet of Things (IoT) devices, such as mobile phones and wearable devices, that allow continuous data collection and convenient sharing. However, potentially sensitive health data raises privacy and security concerns for citizens, which research institutions and industries must consider. In e-commerce or social network studies of citizen science, a privacy calculus related to user perceptions is commonly developed, capturing the information disclosure intent of the participants. In this study, we develop a privacy calculus model adapted for IoT-based health research using citizen science for user engagement and data collection. Based on an online survey with 85 participants, we make use of the privacy calculus to analyse the respondents' perceptions. The emerging privacy personas are clustered and compared with previous research, resulting in three distinct personas which can be used by designers and technologists who are responsible for developing suitable forms of data collection. These are the 1) Citizen Science Optimist, the 2) Selective Data Donor, and the 3) Health Data Controller. Together with our privacy calculus for citizen science based digital health research, the three privacy personas are the main contributions of this study.
Project description:Text-based passwords are a fundamental and popular means of authentication. Password authentication can be simply implemented because it does not require any equipment, unlike biometric authentication, and it relies only on the users' memory. This reliance on memory is a weakness of passwords, and people therefore usually use easy-to-remember passwords, such as "iloveyou1234". However, these sample passwords are not difficult to crack. The default passwords of IoT also are text-based passwords and are easy to crack. This weakness enables free password cracking tools such as Hashcat and JtR to execute millions of cracking attempts per second. Finally, this weakness creates a security hole in networks by giving hackers access to an IoT device easily. Research has been conducted to better exploit weak passwords to improve password-cracking performance. The Markov model and probabilistic context-free-grammar (PCFG) are representative research results, and PassGAN, which uses generative adversarial networks (GANs), was recently introduced. These advanced password cracking techniques contribute to the development of better password strength checkers. We studied some methods of improving the performance of PassGAN, and developed two approaches for better password cracking: the first was changing the convolutional neural network (CNN)-based improved Wasserstein GAN (IWGAN) cost function to an RNN-based cost function; the second was employing the dual-discriminator GAN structure. In the password cracking performance experiments, our models showed 10%-15% better performance than PassGAN. Through additional performance experiments with PCFG, we identified the cracking performance advantages of PassGAN and our models over PCFG. Finally, we prove that our models enhanced password strength estimation through a comparison with zxcvbn.
Project description:In recent years, the growing and widespread usage of Internet of Things (IoT) systems has led to the emergence of customized structures dependent on these systems. Industrial IoT (IIoT) is a subset of IoT in terms of applications and usage areas. IIoT presents many participants in various domains, such as healthcare, transportation, agriculture, and manufacturing. Besides the daily life benefits, IIoT technology provides major contributions via the Industrial Control System (ICS) and intelligent systems. The convergence of IoT and IIoT systems brings some integration and interoperability problems. In IIoT systems, devices interact with each other using information technologies (IT) and network space. However, these common usages and interoperability led to some security risks. To avoid security risks and vulnerabilities, different systems and protocols have been designed and published. Various public databases and programs identify and provide some of the security threats to make it easier for system administrators' missions. However, effective and long-term security detection mechanisms are needed. In the literature, there are numerous approaches to detecting security threats in IoT-based systems. This article presents two major contributions: First, a graph-based threat detection approach for IoT-based network systems is proposed. Threat path detection is one of the most critical steps in the security of IoT-based systems. To represent vulnerabilities, a directed acyclic graph (DAG) structure is constructed using threat weights. General threats are identified using Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE). The proposed threat pathfinding algorithm uses the depth first search (DFS) idea and discovers threat paths from the root to all leaf nodes. Therefore, all possible threat paths are detected in the threat graph. Second, threat path-reducing algorithms are proposed considering the total threat weight, hop length, and hot spot thresholds. In terms of available threat pathfinding and hot spot detecting procedures, the proposed reducing algorithms provide better running times. Therefore, all possible threat paths are founded and reduced by the constructed IoT-based DAG structure. Finally, simulation results are compared, and remarkable complexity performances are obtained.
Project description:As Internet of Things (IoT) applications continue to proliferate, traditional cloud computing is increasingly unable to meet the low-latency demands of these applications. The IoT fog architecture solves this limitation by introducing fog servers in the fog layer that are closer to the IoT devices. However, this architecture lacks authentication mechanisms for information sources, security verification for information transmission, and reasonable allocation of fog nodes. To ensure the secure transmission of end-to-end information in the IoT fog architecture, an attribute identification based security control and forwarding method for IoT fog data (AISCF) is proposed. AISCF applies attribute signatures to the IoT fog architecture and uses software defined network (SDN) to control and forward fog layer data flows. Firstly, IoT devices add attribute identifiers to the data they send based on attribute features. The ingress switch then performs fine-grained access control on the data based on these attribute identifiers. Secondly, SDN uses attribute features as flow table matching items to achieve fine-grained control and forwarding of fog layer data flows based on attribute identifiers. Lastly, the egress switch dynamically samples data flows and verifies the attribute signatures of the sampled data packets at the controller end. Experimental validation has demonstrated that AISCF can effectively detect attacks such as data tampering and forged matching items. Moreover, AISCF imposes minimal overhead on network throughput, CPU utilization and packet forwarding latency, and has practicality in IoT fog architecture.
Project description:The Internet of Things (IoT) technology is widely used and has been improved in research. However, due to the extensiveness of IoT technology, the heterogeneity and diversity of the device structure, the number of attacks against IoT has increased dramatically, so we need a method that can effectively and actively determine safety. Considering the diversity of the terminal structure of IoT, a security method for the IoT terminal based on structural balance, method objectivity, and reliability is currently a challenging task. This paper introduces the idea of rate of change in mathematics into trust analysis, and forms three attribute sets based on trust interval and rate of change: discrete interval, change range, and change frequency. By calculating the above attributes of the entity's trust value, the entity's trust situation is obtained, and an overall assessment of the terminal entity's trust situation is made from the three levels of completeness, accuracy and objectivity. Under the premise of reducing encryption and other means, the above method can evaluate the trust state of the IoT terminal from the perspective of the data, and this evaluation method can provide a basis for the judgment of the IoT terminal more objectively and accurately.
Project description:Enforcement of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH) has gotten stricter and penalties have become more severe in response to a significant increase in computer-related information breaches in recent years. With health information said to be worth twice as much as other forms of information on the underground market, making preservation of privacy and security an integral part of health technology development, rather than an afterthought, not only mitigates risks but also helps to ensure HIPAA and HITECH compliance. This paper provides a guide, based on the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) audit protocol, for creating and maintaining an audit checklist for multi-user health kiosks. Implementation of selected audit elements for a multi-user health kiosk designed for use by community-residing older adults illustrates how the guide can be applied.
Project description:The adoption and integration of the Internet of Things (IoT) have become essential for the advancement of many industries, unlocking purposeful connections between objects. However, the surge in IoT adoption and integration has also made it a prime target for malicious attacks. Consequently, ensuring the security of IoT systems and ecosystems has emerged as a crucial research area. Notably, advancements in addressing these security threats include the implementation of intrusion detection systems (IDS), garnering considerable attention within the research community. In this study, and in aim to enhance network anomaly detection, we present a novel intrusion detection approach: the Deep Neural Decision Forest-based IDS (DNDF-IDS). The DNDF-IDS incorporates an improved decision forest model coupled with neural networks to achieve heightened accuracy (ACC). Employing four distinct feature selection methods separately, namely principal component analysis (PCA), LASSO regression (LR), SelectKBest, and Random Forest Feature Importance (RFFI), our objective is to streamline training and prediction processes, enhance overall performance, and identify the most correlated features. Evaluation of our model on three diverse datasets (NSL-KDD, CICIDS2017, and UNSW-NB15) reveals impressive ACC values ranging from 94.09% to 98.84%, depending on the dataset and the feature selection method. Notably, our model achieves a remarkable prediction time of 0.1 ms per record. Comparative analyses with other recent random forest and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) based models indicate that our DNDF-IDS performs similarly or even outperforms them in certain instances, particularly when utilizing the top 10 features. One key advantage of our novel model lies in its ability to make accurate predictions with only a few features, showcasing an efficient utilization of computational resources.
Project description:IntroductionApplying and leveraging artificial intelligence within the healthcare domain has emerged as a fundamental pursuit to advance health. Data-driven models rooted in deep learning have become powerful tools for use in healthcare informatics. Nevertheless, healthcare data are highly sensitive and must be safeguarded, particularly information related to sexually transmissible infections (STIs) and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).MethodsWe employed federated learning (FL) in combination with homomorphic encryption (HE) for STI/HIV prediction to train deep learning models on decentralized data while upholding rigorous privacy. The dataset included 168,459 data entries collected from eight countries between 2013 and 2018. The data for each country was split into two groups, with 70% allocated for training and 30% for testing. Our strategy was based on two-step aggregation to enhance model performance and leverage the area under the curve (AUC) and accuracy metrics and involved a secondary aggregation at the local level before utilizing the global model for each client. We introduced a dropout approach as an effective client-side solution to mitigate computational costs.ResultsModel performance was progressively enhanced from an AUC of 0.78 and an accuracy of 74.4% using the local model to an AUC of 0.94 and an accuracy of 90.7% using the more advanced model.ConclusionOur proposed model for STI/HIV risk prediction surpasses those achieved by local models and those constructed from centralized data sources, highlighting the potential of our approach to improve healthcare outcomes while safeguarding sensitive patient information.