Secure Interaction Design for IoT

PhD Thesis Proposal Defence


Title: "Secure Interaction Design for IoT"

by

Mr. Chenyu HUANG


Abstract:

The market size of Internet of things (IoT) has grown rapidly in recent
years. As a result, plenty of promising IoT applications have attracted
lots of interest from both industry and academic. However, current IoT
devices are suffer from the privacy and security issues due to the
hardware limitations and the increasing sensitive information stored in
them. In this thesis, we focus on the interactions of these IoT devices.
Specifically, we are focus on the following aspects of different
interactions:

1. Secure the User-IoT interaction. This topic denotes the defense system
that allows the legal user to access the IoT devices. Specifically, we are
focus on the authorization problem in wearables, i.e., the user
authentication and the liveness detection to defend against the attacker.
Firstly, we novelly propose a robust gesture-based authentication method
that can be used under different postures for wrist wearables. Our key
idea is to use and only use the gyroscope to capture the signing dynamics,
so that to get rid of the impact from gravity. The results show that our
method can achieve 90.1% balanced accuracy and have stable performance
under different postures. Secondly, we propose a liveness detection system,
BreathLive, that enhances the heart sound-based authentication against
replay attacks. We utilize the inherent correlation between sounds and
chest motion caused by deep breathing. The results show that the system
achieves an equal error rate of 4.0% under replay attack.

2. Attack the User-IoT interaction. This topic includes different methods
to attack the interaction between user and IoT devices. We take a step to
thoroughly explore adversarial attacks on the DNN-powered ECG diagnosis
system. We analyze the properties of ECGs to design effective attacks
schemes under two attacks models respectively. Our results demonstrate the
blind spots of DNN-powered diagnosis systems under adversarial attacks,
which calls attention to adequate countermeasures.

3. Secure the IoT-IoT connection. This topic talks about the defense 
system which protects the network connected between IoT devices. To solve 
the security issues such as point of failure, DDoS, Sybil attack etc in 
IoTs, the blockchain has been widely used in this area recently. However, 
there is a gap between the blockchain and IoT due to the scalability, 
privacy-preserving, limited computation resource, etc. In this thesis, we 
novelly introduce the concept of 'reputation' which explicit characterize 
the heterogeneity among the IoT devices to the blockchain. As a result, 
the benign and high capability validators could contribute more and get 
more reward. We firstly propose, RepChain, a reputation-based secure and 
fast blockchain system via sharding to tackle the scalability problem. We 
present a new double-chain architecture to efficiently and securely 
records the transactions and reputations respectively. We also introduce a 
reputation-based sharding and leader selection scheme to boost the system. 
The large scale evaluation shows it can enhance the throughput and 
security level of a sharding-based blockchain system. Although the 
reputation brings plenty of benefits to the blockchain, it suffers from 
the slowly adaptive attacker which aims at the highly reputation 
validators. Thus, we propose, zkRep, a privacy-preserving scheme for 
reputation-based blockchain. The core idea is to hide both the identity 
and reputation of the validators by periodically changing the identity and 
reputation commitments (i.e., aliases), which makes it difficult for 
slowly adaptive attackers to identify high-reputed validators. The 
experimental results and analysis indicate that zkRep can protect 
reputation-based blockchains against slowly adaptive attacks and only 
induce little overhead.


Date:                   Friday, 21 February 2020

Time:                   2:00pm - 4:00pm

Zoom Meeting:           https://hkust.zoom.us/j/688829524

Committee Members:      Prof. Qian Zhang (Supervisor)
                        Prof. Bo Li (Chairperson)
                        Dr. Qiong Luo
                        Dr. Wei Wang


**** ALL are Welcome ****