Showing papers by "Elias Kougianos published in 2019"

PMsec: Physical Unclonable Function-Based Robust and Lightweight Authentication in the Internet of Medical Things

Abstract: Various commercial off-the-shelf components are available for the development of communication-enabled consumer electronics devices. This opens new doors to attackers who can take advantage of various vulnerabilities to attack the entire network and compromise the integrity of the system and the environment. If a malicious device enters the environment and the attacker gains access to the server or transmits malicious data to the server or cloud, the entire network can be jeopardized. To avoid such cases, this paper presents a device authentication scheme which uses physical unclonable functions (PUFs) and is suitable for the Internet-of-Medical-Things (IoMT). The main advantage of this authentication scheme is that no data related to the IoMT devices are stored in server memory. The time taken to authenticate the devices completely was 1.2 s to 1.5 s. A hybrid oscillator arbiter physical unclonable function was used for validation of the proposed authentication scheme. From the PUF module used during experimental validation, the number of keys that could be potentially used for the authentication protocol from each design is approximately 240. The proposed authentication scheme increases the robustness of the design while being lightweight to be deployed in various designs and supports scalability.

Proof-of-Authentication for Scalable Blockchain in Resource-Constrained Distributed Systems

Abstract: Resource -constrained distributed systems such as the Internet of Things (IoT), edge computing and fog computing are deployed for real-time monitoring and evaluation. Current security solutions are problematic when there is a centralized controlling entity. The blockchain provides decentralized security architectures using proof-of-work (PoW). Proof-of-work is an expensive process for IoT and edge computing due to the deployment of resource-constrained devices. This paper presents a novel consensus algorithm called Proof-of-Authentication (PoAh) to replace Proof-of-Work and introduce authentication in such environments to make the blockchain application-specific. This paper implemented the Proof-of-Authentication system to evaluate its sustainability and applicability for the IoT and edge computing. The evaluation process is conducted in both simulation and real-time testbeds to evaluate performance. Finally, the process of Proof-of-Authentication and its integration with blockchain in resource-constrained distributed systems is discussed. Our proposed PoAh, while running in limited computer resources (e.g. single-board computing devices like the Raspberry Pi) has a latency in the order of 3 secs.