With the rapid growth of new technological paradigms such as the Internet of Things (IoT), it opens new doors for many applications in the modern era for the betterment of human life. One of the recent applications of the IoT is the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) which helps to see unprecedented growth of connected vehicles on the roads. The IoV is gaining attention due to enhancing traffic safety and providing low route information. One of the most important and major requirements of the IoV is preserving security and privacy under strict latency. Moreover, vehicles are required to be authenticated frequently and fast considering limited bandwidth, high mobility, and density of the vehicles. To address the security vulnerabilities and data integrity, an ultralight authentication scheme has been proposed in this article. Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) and XOR function are used to authenticate both server and vehicle in two message flow which makes the proposed scheme ultralight, and less computation is required. The proposed Easy-Sec can authenticate vehicles maintaining low latency and resisting known security threats. Furthermore, the proposed Easy-Sec needs low overhead so that it does not increase the burden of the IoV network. Computational ( around 4 ms) and Communication (32 bytes) overhead shows the feasibility, efficiency, and also security features are depicted using formal analysis, Burrows, Abadi, and Needham (BAN) logic, and informal analysis to show the robustness of the proposed mechanisms against security threats.
This work considers mitigation of information leakage between communication and sensing operations in joint communication and sensing systems. Specifically, a discrete memoryless state-dependent broadcast channel model is studied in which (i) the presence of feedback enables a transmitter to simultaneously achieve reliable communication and channel state estimation; (ii) one of the receivers is treated as an eavesdropper whose state should be estimated but which should remain oblivious to a part of the transmitted information. The model abstracts the challenges behind security for joint communication and sensing if one views the channel state as a characteristic of the receiver, e.g., its location. For independent identically distributed (i.i.d.) states, perfect output feedback, and when part of the transmitted message should be kept secret, a partial characterization of the secrecy-distortion region is developed. The characterization is exact when the broadcast channel is either physically-degraded or reversely-physically-degraded. The characterization is also extended to the situation in which the entire transmitted message should be kept secret. The benefits of a joint approach compared to separation-based secure communication and state-sensing methods are illustrated with a binary joint communication and sensing model.
Strong physical unclonable functions (PUFs) provide a low-cost authentication primitive for resource constrained devices. However, most strong PUF architectures can be modeled through learning algorithms with a limited number of CRPs. In this paper, we introduce the concept of non-monotonic response quantization for strong PUFs. Responses depend not only on which path is faster, but also on the distance between the arriving signals. Our experiments show that the resulting PUF has increased security against learning attacks. To demonstrate, we designed and implemented a non-monotonically quantized ring-oscillator based PUF in 65 nm technology. Measurement results show nearly ideal uniformity and uniqueness, with bit error rate of 13.4% over the temperature range from 0 C to 50 C.
Many types of ventricular and atrial cardiac arrhythmias have been discovered in clinical practice in the past 100 years, and these arrhythmias are a major contributor to sudden cardiac death. Ventricular tachycardia, ventricular fibrillation, and paroxysmal atrial fibrillation are the most commonly-occurring and dangerous arrhythmias, therefore early detection is crucial to prevent any further complications and reduce fatalities. Implantable devices such as pacemakers are commonly used in patients at high risk of sudden cardiac death. While great advances have been made in medical technology, there remain significant challenges in effective management of common arrhythmias. This thesis proposes novel arrhythmia detection and prediction methods to differentiate cardiac arrhythmias from non-life-threatening cardiac events, to increase the likelihood of detecting events that may lead to mortality, as well as reduce the incidence of unnecessary therapeutic intervention. The methods are based on detailed analysis of Heart Rate Variability (HRV) information. The results of the work show good performance of the proposed methods and support the potential for their deployment in resource-constrained devices for ventricular and atrial arrhythmia prediction, such as implantable pacemakers and defibrillators.
Current guidelines from the World Health Organization indicate that the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, which results in the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19), is transmitted through respiratory droplets or by contact. Contact transmission occurs when contaminated hands touch the mucous membrane of the mouth, nose, or eyes so hands hygiene is extremely important to prevent the spread of the SARSCoV-2 as well as of other pathogens. The vast proliferation of wearable devices, such as smartwatches, containing acceleration, rotation, magnetic field sensors, etc., together with the modern technologies of artificial intelligence, such as machine learning and more recently deep-learning, allow the development of accurate applications for recognition and classification of human activities such as: walking, climbing stairs, running, clapping, sitting, sleeping, etc. In this work, we evaluate the feasibility of a machine learning based system which, starting from inertial signals collected from wearable devices such as current smartwatches, recognizes when a subject is washing or rubbing its hands. Preliminary results, obtained over two different datasets, show a classification accuracy of about 95% and of about 94% for respectively deep and standard learning techniques.
The automotive market is increasingly profitable for cyberattacks with the constant shift toward fully interconnected vehicles. Electronic Control Units (ECUs) installed on cars often operate in a critical and hostile environment. Hence, both carmakers and governments have decided to support a series of initiatives to mitigate risks and threats belonging to the automotive domain. The Controller Area Network (CAN) is the primary communication protocol in the automotive field, and the integrity of the communication over this network is assured through Message Authentication Codes (MAC). However, limitations in throughput and frame size limit the application of this technique to specific versions of the CAN protocol, leaving several vehicles still unprotected. This paper presents CAN Multiplexed MAC (CAN-MM), a new approach exploiting frequency modulation to multiplex MAC data with standard CAN communication. CAN-MM allows transmitting MAC payloads maintaining full-back compatibility with all versions of the standard CAN protocol. Moreover, multiplexing allows sending DATA and MAC simultaneously.
The automotive market is profitable for cyberattacks with the constant shift toward interconnected vehicles. Electronic Control Units (ECUs) installed on cars often operate in a critical and hostile environment. Hence, both carmakers and governments have supported initiatives to mitigate risks and threats belonging to the automotive domain. The Local Interconnect Network (LIN) is one of the most used communication protocols in the automotive field. Today's LIN buses have just a few light security mechanisms to assure integrity through Message Authentication Codes (MAC). However, several limitations with strong constraints make applying those techniques to LIN networks challenging, leaving several vehicles still unprotected. This paper presents LIN Multiplexed MAC (LINMM), a new approach for exploiting signal modulation to multiplex MAC data with standard LIN communication. LINMM allows for transmitting MAC payloads, maintaining fullback compatibility with all versions of the standard LIN protocol.
Creating and maintaining the Metaverse requires enormous resources that have never been seen before, especially computing resources for intensive data processing to support the extended reality, enormous storage resources, and massive networking resources for maintaining ultra high-speed and low-latency connections. Therefore, this work aims to propose a novel framework, namely MetaSlicing, that can provide a highly effective and comprehensive solution in managing and allocating different types of resources for Metaverse applications. In particular, by observing that Metaverse applications may have common functions, we first propose grouping applications into clusters, called MetaInstances. In a MetaInstance, common functions can be shared among applications. As such, the same resources can be used by multiple applications simultaneously, thereby enhancing resource utilization dramatically. To address the real-time characteristic and resource demand's dynamic and uncertainty in the Metaverse, we develop an effective framework based on the semi-Markov decision process and propose an intelligent admission control algorithm that can maximize resource utilization and enhance the Quality-of-Service for end-users. Extensive simulation results show that our proposed solution outperforms the Greedy-based policy by up to 80% and 47% in terms of long-term revenue for Metaverse providers and request acceptance probability, respectively.
The electricity market has a vital role to play in the decarbonisation of the energy system. However, the electricity market is made up of many different variables and data inputs. These variables and data inputs behave in sometimes unpredictable ways which can not be predicted a-priori. It has therefore been suggested that agent-based simulations are used to better understand the dynamics of the electricity market. Agent-based models provide the opportunity to integrate machine learning and artificial intelligence to add intelligence, make better forecasts and control the power market in better and more efficient ways. In this systematic literature review, we review 55 papers published between 2016 and 2021 which focus on machine learning applied to agent-based electricity market models. We find that research clusters around popular topics, such as bidding strategies. However, there exists a long-tail of different research applications that could benefit from the high intensity research from the more investigated applications.
A multitude of explainability methods and associated fidelity performance metrics have been proposed to help better understand how modern AI systems make decisions. However, much of the current work has remained theoretical -- without much consideration for the human end-user. In particular, it is not yet known (1) how useful current explainability methods are in practice for more real-world scenarios and (2) how well associated performance metrics accurately predict how much knowledge individual explanations contribute to a human end-user trying to understand the inner-workings of the system. To fill this gap, we conducted psychophysics experiments at scale to evaluate the ability of human participants to leverage representative attribution methods for understanding the behavior of different image classifiers representing three real-world scenarios: identifying bias in an AI system, characterizing the visual strategy it uses for tasks that are too difficult for an untrained non-expert human observer as well as understanding its failure cases. Our results demonstrate that the degree to which individual attribution methods help human participants better understand an AI system varied widely across these scenarios. This suggests a critical need for the field to move past quantitative improvements of current attribution methods towards the development of complementary approaches that provide qualitatively different sources of information to human end-users.
This paper presents an approach to provide strong assurance of the secure execution of distributed event-driven applications on shared infrastructures, while relying on a small Trusted Computing Base. We build upon and extend security primitives provided by Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) to guarantee authenticity and integrity properties of applications, and to secure control of input and output devices. More specifically, we guarantee that if an output is produced by the application, it was allowed to be produced by the application's source code based on an authentic trace of inputs. We present an integrated open-source framework to develop, deploy, and use such applications across heterogeneous TEEs. Beyond authenticity and integrity, our framework optionally provides confidentiality and a notion of availability, and facilitates software development at a high level of abstraction over the platform-specific TEE layer. We support event-driven programming to develop distributed enclave applications in Rust and C for heterogeneous TEE, including Intel SGX, ARM TrustZone and Sancus. In this article we discuss the workings of our approach, the extensions we made to the Sancus processor, and the integration of our development model with commercial TEEs. Our evaluation of security and performance aspects show that TEEs, together with our programming model, form a basis for powerful security architectures for dependable systems in domains such as Industrial Control Systems and the Internet of Things, illustrating our framework's unique suitability for a broad range of use cases which combine cloud processing, mobile and edge devices, and lightweight sensing and actuation.