Redesigning Computer Hardware Software Interfaces for IoT Security

Dear Colleagues,

Insecure hardware–software interfaces at various levels in modern networks are no longer minor inconveniences like data loss or delays. They now pose significant risks to safety, finances, and local and global ecosystems, as networks with sensing and computing have become ubiquitous and control large flows of energy. These include everything from baby monitors to water and power supplies, financial markets, and autonomous vehicles.

As an analogy, a secure system is like a locked chamber with a combination lock that takes many trials to open. If the lock has an alarm and resets itself periodically, or is dynamic, it is harder to break into the room. Networks are more complex because many players may be involved in performing or defending against coordinated attacks on multiple targets using sophisticated software and hardware tools. Thus, these problems resemble multiplayer stochastic games characterized by information asymmetry and deception. Attackers, network administrators, coders, and users are all considered players.

The purpose of this call for papers is to promote interdisciplinary creativity by integrating various fields, such as computing, operating systems, compilers, circuits, sensors, signal processing, algorithms, control systems, and games, with the goal of developing solutions to address this urgent problem.

To sustain the growth of the Internet of Things while protecting property rights and individual privacy, this issue calls for contributions that provide rigorous evidence of performance robustness, including service continuity, network throughput, data reliability, and the fidelity of networked sensors in the presence of malicious attacks at any network layer. How do you ensure that someone does not hack into a baby monitor to scare the baby, crash autonomous vehicles, disrupt financial markets, compromise water supply, or damage the power grid?

This Special Issue particularly encourages submissions involving the following aspects:

1. Guarantees of robust autonomous performance without continual software updates or administrator intervention.
2. Quantifying the worst-case attacking strategy, such as signal power in Watts, computing power in FLOPS, and the number of attackers that can successfully degrade performance as is known for CDMA or DWDM networks, GPS, or public key cryptography.
3. The ability to adapt against learning opponents, such as users of GaNs, or to deny information from such adversaries.

We welcome contributions related to operating systems that track all legitimate tasks, custom circuits, and software that operate within a network, as well as hardware designs and algorithms of different kinds addressing signal processing, control, game-theoretic problems, or novel hardware-software combinations. The guarantees of robustness can be experimental, provided through mathematical analysis of clearly established models, or exhaustive simulation with reliable mathematical models.

Software has many vulnerabilities due to factors such as being written for backward compatibility, the use of open-source materials, dependence on compilers dating back to the 1950s, attackers’ ability to hide in memory or OS functions, and so on. Additionally, networked sensors can be spoofed, as their signal power is much weaker compared to the power available to a physical-layer attacker. Thus, we hope this issue further stimulates research into fundamental software and hardware solutions.

Dr. Kartik B. Ariyur
Guest Editor

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• stochastic multiplayer games
• information asymmetry
• denial
• deception
• robustness