Publications

IoT devices penetrate different aspects of our life including critical services, such as health monitoring, public safety, and autonomous driving. Such safety-critical IoT systems often consist of a large number of devices and need to withstand a vast range of known Denial-of-Service (DoS) network attacks to ensure a reliable operation while offering low-latency information dissemination. As the first solution to jointly achieve these goals, we propose LIDOR, a secure and lightweight multihop communication protocol designed to withstand all known variants of packet dropping attacks. Specifically, LIDOR relies on an end-to-end feedback mechanism to detect and react on unreliable links and draws solely on efficient symmetric-key cryptographic mechanisms to protect packets in transit. We show the overhead of LIDOR analytically and provide the proof of convergence for LIDOR which makes LIDOR resilient even to strong and hard-to-detect wormhole-supported grayhole attacks. In addition, we evaluate the performance via testbed experiments. The results indicate that LIDOR improves the reliability under DoS attacks by up to 91% and reduces network overhead by 32% compared to a state-of-the-art benchmark scheme.

Multi-hop Device-to-Device (D2D) communication has emerged as a key enabler for public safety applications in 5G networks. A failure of these applications would be catastrophic since they control vital human-in-the-loop services. As a result, it is of utmost importance to identify and mitigate security risks prior to commercial deployment. To this end, we devise SEMUD, the first secure multi-hop D2D solution for 5G mobile networks. It enables robust and secure communication even in the absence of supporting infrastructure. We design SEMUD to be compliant with 3GPP Proximity-based Services, the standard to implement D2D communications. We implement SEMUD in the ns-3 simulator and our testbed. Via extensive simulation, we assert its resilience against strong adversaries and attacks. Furthermore, we show the energy efficiency and achievable throughput of our proposal on real devices.