Sachin D. Babar has successfully defended his PhD thesis titled "Security Framework and Jamming Detection of Internet of Things" on Wednesday February 25, 2015.

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) consists of billions of people, things and services having the potential to interact with each other and their environment. This highly interconnected global network structure presents new types of challenges from a security, trust and privacy perspective. Hence, security for IoT will be a critical concern that must be addressed in order to enable several current and future applications. The resource constrained devices such as cell phones, PDAs, RFIDs, sensor nodes etc. are the part of IoT. Design process for securing these resource constrained devices is guided by factors like small form factor, good performance, low energy consumption, and robustness to attacks. These design constraints forces us to think of integrating the security features right in to the hardware and software parts of the devices which is also called as embedded security. The research concentrates on embedded security in perspective of software approaches. The IoT system become prone to different security attack, out of all that system is more prone to jamming attack. The goal of research is to design the embedded security framework for IoT and to model the jamming attack and design the defensive technique for Wireless Sensor Network (WSN)-based IoT.

The research gives a detailed survey and analysis of embedded security especially in the area of IoT and proposes the security model and threat taxonomy for IoT. The research also highlights the need to provide in-built security in the device itself to provide a flexible infrastructure for dynamic prevention, detection, diagnosis, isolation, and countermeasures against successful breaches. The research proposes the embedded security framework as a feature of software/hardware co-design methodology. >

The research modelled the different kinds of jamming attack using sequential and activity modelling, and proposed the different countermeasures to save from jamming attack. The research also proposed the new kind of jamming attack for cluster-based network and suggested the solution for it. The research proposes the game-theory- based countermeasure for detecting different kind of jamming attacks in the network.

The research also contributes in key-management algorithm by proposing cluster-based key management algorithm. The research proposes the optimized key management technique for cluster-based WSN by considering mobility of the nodes and cluster head (CH).

In short, this thesis addresses many important topics of embedded security with special focus on jamming attack detection and defense mechanism and also on novel key management for mobile cluster-based WSN. The frameworks, methods and techniques proposed in this thesis are, for the most part, applicable to the IoT networks and ubiquitous computing.

Assessment Committee:
Professor Josef Noll, University of Oslo, Norway
Professor Milica Pejanovic-Djurisic, University of Montenegro, Montenegro
Associate Professor Zheng-Hua Tan, Aalborg University, Denmark

Supervisor:
Associate Professor Neeli Prasad

Moderator:
Associate Professor Albena D. Mihovska