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Security in Embedded Systems and IoT: Challenges and New Directions

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A special issue of Electronics (ISSN 2079-9292). This special issue belongs to the section "Computer Science & Engineering".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 October 2022) | Viewed by 21375

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Special Issue Editors

Prof. Dr. Juan Antonio López Ramos

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Guest Editor

Department of Mathematics, University of Almería, 04120 Almería, Spain
Interests: information security; cryptography; cryptanalysis
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Dr. Antonio David Escobar Molero

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Guest Editor

Infineon Technologies AG, Am Campeon 1-15, 85579 Neubiberg, Germany
Interests: hardware security; blockchain; AI; decentralized web

Dr. José Antonio Álvarez Bermejo

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Guest Editor

Department of Informatics, University of Almería, 04120 Almería, Spain
Interests: embedded systems; cybersecurity; hardware; digital identity; cryptography; digital forensics; malware analysis; reverse engineering; processor internals
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Security in embedded systems has been until recently treated as a minor problem by the scientific community and was only of interest for applications in big companies or military purposes. However, the paradigm of hardware security has drastically changed with the advent of the Internet of Things and the use of numerous devices and/or sensors that are constantly sending/receiving information, providing continuous connectivity that makes our lives safer and healthier, but mainly more comfortable.

Therefore, the security of the information that is stored or sent by these devices, as well as its reliability or authentication, play a fundamental role in the development of the technique that allows building such systems.

Traditional information security techniques are being applied, but it has been shown that they are not enough to solve the multiple arising problems in the many different situations and new applications, mainly due to the huge increase of group communications. At the same time, new techniques as Blockchain, created for different purposes, are finding here a new field of application, given the absence of standards that solve most situations in traditional communications.

With this Special Issue, we would like to focus on new applications of traditional information security techniques, as well as new developments or ideas that help in the use of electronic systems for connectivity and information exchange.

The scope of this Special Issue includes but is not limited to:

IoT security;
Blockchain and the Internet of Things (IoT);
Secure Firmware Development;
Key management centralized and distributed systems;
Security protocols in embedded communication systems;
Industrial embedded systems security threats and challenges;
Embedded systems;
Real time operating systems vulnerabilities, attacks, and security;
Trusted computing;
Sensors data sanity.

Prof. Juan Antonio López Ramos
Dr. Antonio David Escobar Molero
Dr. José Antonio Álvarez Bermejo
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Electronics is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

IoT security
Blockchain and the Internet of Things (IoT)
Firmware
Key management centralized and distributed systems
Security protocols in embedded communication systems
Industrial embedded systems security threats and challenges
Embedded systems
Real time operating systems vulnerabilities, attacks, and security
Trusted computing
Sensors data sanity

Published Papers (7 papers)

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Research

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19 pages, 470 KiB

Open AccessArticle

seL4 Microkernel for Virtualization Use-Cases: Potential Directions towards a Standard VMM

by Everton de Matos and Markku Ahvenjärvi

Electronics 2022, 11(24), 4201; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics11244201 - 16 Dec 2022

Cited by 3 | Viewed by 3355

Abstract

Virtualization plays an essential role in providing security to computational systems by isolating execution environments. Many software solutions, called hypervisors, have been proposed to provide virtualization capabilities. However, only a few were designed for being deployed at the edge of the network in devices with fewer computation resources when compared with servers in the Cloud. Among the few lightweight software that can play the hypervisor role, seL4 stands out by providing a small Trusted Computing Base and formally verified components, enhancing its security. Despite today being more than a decade with seL4 microkernel technology, its existing userland and tools are still scarce and not very mature. Over the last few years, the main effort has been to increase the maturity of the kernel itself, and not the tools and applications that can be hosted on top. Therefore, it currently lacks proper support for a full-featured userland Virtual Machine Monitor, and the existing one is quite fragmented. This article discusses the potential directions to a standard VMM by presenting our view of design principles and the feature set needed. This article does not intend to define a standard VMM, we intend to instigate this discussion through the seL4 community. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Security in Embedded Systems and IoT: Challenges and New Directions)

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18 pages, 4242 KiB

Open AccessArticle

DA-Transfer: A Transfer Method for Malicious Network Traffic Classification with Small Sample Problem

by Ruonan Wang, Jinlong Fei, Min Zhao, Rongkai Zhang, Maohua Guo, Xue Li and Zan Qi

Electronics 2022, 11(21), 3577; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics11213577 - 01 Nov 2022

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1247

Abstract

Deep learning is successful in providing adequate classification results in the field of traffic classification due to its ability to characterize features. However, malicious traffic captures insufficient data and identity tags, which makes it difficult to reach the data volume required to drive deep learning. The problem of classifying small-sample malicious traffic has gradually become a research hotspot. This paper proposes a small-sample malicious traffic classification method based on deep transfer learning. The proposed DA-Transfer method significantly improves the accuracy and efficiency of the small-sample malicious traffic classification model by integrating both data and model transfer adaptive modules. The data adaptation module promotes the consistency of the distribution between the source and target datasets, which improves the classification performance by adaptive training of the prior model. In addition, the model transfer adaptive module recommends the transfer network structure parameters, which effectively improves the network training efficiency. Experiments show that the average classification accuracy of the DA-Transfer method reaches 93.01% on a small-sample dataset with less than 200 packets per class. The training efficiency of the DA-Transfer model is improved by 20.02% compared to traditional transfer methods. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Security in Embedded Systems and IoT: Challenges and New Directions)

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21 pages, 5142 KiB

Open AccessArticle

A Secure and Efficient Method to Protect Communications and Energy Consumption in IoT Wireless Sensor Networks

by Safwan Mawlood Hussein, Juan Antonio López Ramos and Abubakar Muhammad Ashir

Electronics 2022, 11(17), 2721; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics11172721 - 30 Aug 2022

Cited by 13 | Viewed by 1659

Abstract

The rapid growth of technology has resulted in the deployment of a large number of interconnected devices, resulting in a wide range of new societal services. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are a promising technology which is faced with the challenges of operating a large number of sensor nodes, information gathering, data transmission, and providing a means to act in different scenarios such as monitoring, surveillance, forest fire detection, and many others from the civil to military spectrum. The deployment scenario, the nature of the sensor-equipped nodes, and their communication methods make this architecture extremely vulnerable to attacks, tampering, and manipulation than conventional networks. Therefore, an optimal solution to ensure security in such networks which captures the major constraints of the network in terms of energy utilization, secured data transmission, bandwidth, and memory fingerprint to process data is required. This work proposes a fast, reliable, and secure method of key distribution and management that can be used to ensure the integrity of wireless sensor networks’ communications. Moreover, with regards to efficient energy utilization, an improvement of the Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH) algorithm (a cluster routing protocol that is mainly used in WSN) has been proposed to enhance the networks’ energy efficiency, simplicity, and load-balancing features. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a combination of a distributed key exchange and management methods based on elliptic curve cryptography to ensure security of node communication and an improved routing protocol based on the LEACH protocol to demonstrate better performance in parameters such as network lifespan, dead nodes, and energy consumption. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Security in Embedded Systems and IoT: Challenges and New Directions)

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19 pages, 2642 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Trusted and Secure Blockchain-Based Architecture for Internet-of-Medical-Things

by Aniruddha Bhattacharjya, Kamil Kozdrój, Grzegorz Bazydło and Remigiusz Wisniewski

Electronics 2022, 11(16), 2560; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics11162560 - 16 Aug 2022

Cited by 15 | Viewed by 1928

Abstract

The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) global market has grown and developed significantly in recent years, and the number of IoMT devices is increasing every year. IoMT systems are now very popular and have become part of our everyday life. However, such systems should be properly protected to preventing unauthorized access to the devices. One of the most popular security methods that additionally relies on real-time communication is Blockchain. Moreover, such a technique can be supported by the Trusted Third Party (TTP), which guarantees data immutability and transparency. The research and industrial community has predicted the proliferation of Blockchain-based IoMT (BIoMT), for providing security, privacy, and effective insurance processing. A connected environment comprises some of the unique features of the IoMT in the form of sensors and devices that capture and measure, recognize and classify, assess risk, notify, make conclusions, and take action. Distributed communication is also unique due to the combination of the fact that the Blockchain cannot be tampered with and the Peer-to-Peer (P2P) technique, especially compared to the traditional cloud-based techniques where the reliance of IoMT systems on the centralized cloud makes it somewhat vulnerable. This paper proposes a Blockchain-based technique oriented on IoMT applications with a focus on maintaining Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability (the CIA triad) of data communication in the system. The proposed solution is oriented toward trusted and secure real-time communication. The presented method is illustrated by an example of a cloud-based hospital application. Finally, the security aspects of the proposed approach are studied and analyzed in detail. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Security in Embedded Systems and IoT: Challenges and New Directions)

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22 pages, 487 KiB

Open AccessFeature PaperArticle

Embedded LUKS (E-LUKS): A Hardware Solution to IoT Security

by German Cano-Quiveu, Paulino Ruiz-de-clavijo-Vazquez, Manuel J. Bellido, Jorge Juan-Chico, Julian Viejo-Cortes, David Guerrero-Martos and Enrique Ostua-Aranguena

Electronics 2021, 10(23), 3036; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics10233036 - 05 Dec 2021

Cited by 5 | Viewed by 2728

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) security is one of the most important issues developers have to face. Data tampering must be prevented in IoT devices and some or all of the confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity of sensible data files must be assured in most practical IoT applications, especially when data are stored in removable devices such as microSD cards, which is very common. Software solutions are usually applied, but their effectiveness is limited due to the reduced resources available in IoT systems. This paper introduces a hardware-based security framework for IoT devices (Embedded LUKS) similar to the Linux Unified Key Setup (LUKS) solution used in Linux systems to encrypt data partitions. Embedded LUKS (E-LUKS) extends the LUKS capabilities by adding integrity and authentication methods, in addition to the confidentiality already provided by LUKS. E-LUKS uses state-of-the-art encryption and hash algorithms such as PRESENT and SPONGENT. Both are recognized as adequate solutions for IoT devices being PRESENT incorporated in the ISO/IEC 29192-2:2019 for lightweight block ciphers. E-LUKS has been implemented in modern XC7Z020 FPGA chips, resulting in a smaller hardware footprint compared to previous LUKS hardware implementations, a footprint of about a 10% of these LUKS implementations, making E-LUKS a great alternative to provide Full Disk Encryption (FDE) alongside authentication to a wide range of IoT devices. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Security in Embedded Systems and IoT: Challenges and New Directions)

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13 pages, 2113 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Secure Cyber Defense: An Analysis of Network Intrusion-Based Dataset CCD-IDSv1 with Machine Learning and Deep Learning Models

by Niraj Thapa, Zhipeng Liu, Addison Shaver, Albert Esterline, Balakrishna Gokaraju and Kaushik Roy

Electronics 2021, 10(15), 1747; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics10151747 - 21 Jul 2021

Cited by 8 | Viewed by 2479

Abstract

Anomaly detection and multi-attack classification are major concerns for cyber defense. Several publicly available datasets have been used extensively for the evaluation of Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs). However, most of the publicly available datasets may not contain attack scenarios based on evolving threats. The development of a robust network intrusion dataset is vital for network threat analysis and mitigation. Proactive IDSs are required to tackle ever-growing threats in cyberspace. Machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) models have been deployed recently to detect the various types of cyber-attacks. However, current IDSs struggle to attain both a high detection rate and a low false alarm rate. To address these issues, we first develop a Center for Cyber Defense (CCD)-IDSv1 labeled flow-based dataset in an OpenStack environment. Five different attacks with normal usage imitating real-life usage are implemented. The number of network features is increased to overcome the shortcomings of the previous network flow-based datasets such as CIDDS and CIC-IDS2017. Secondly, this paper presents a comparative analysis on the effectiveness of different ML and DL models on our CCD-IDSv1 dataset. In this study, we consider both cyber anomaly detection and multi-attack classification. To improve the performance, we developed two DL-based ensemble models: Ensemble-CNN-10 and Ensemble-CNN-LSTM. Ensemble-CNN-10 combines 10 CNN models developed from 10-fold cross-validation, whereas Ensemble-CNN-LSTM combines base CNN and LSTM models. This paper also presents feature importance for both anomaly detection and multi-attack classification. Overall, the proposed ensemble models performed well in both the 10-fold cross-validation and independent testing on our dataset. Together, these results suggest the robustness and effectiveness of the proposed IDSs based on ML and DL models on the CCD-IDSv1 intrusion detection dataset. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Security in Embedded Systems and IoT: Challenges and New Directions)

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Review

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33 pages, 2058 KiB

Open AccessReview

Blockchain Systems in Embedded Internet of Things: Systematic Literature Review, Challenges Analysis, and Future Direction Suggestions

by Mehdi Darbandi, Hamza Mohammed Ridha Al-Khafaji, Seyed Hamid Hosseini Nasab, Ahmad Qasim Mohammad AlHamad, Beknazarov Zafarjon Ergashevich and Nima Jafari Navimipour

Electronics 2022, 11(23), 4020; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics11234020 - 04 Dec 2022

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 5654

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) environments can extensively use embedded devices. Without the participation of consumers; tiny IoT devices will function and interact with one another, but their operations must be reliable and secure from various threats. The introduction of cutting-edge data analytics methods for linked IoT devices, including blockchain, may lower costs and boost the use of cloud platforms. In a peer-to-peer network such as blockchain, no one has to be trusted because each peer is in charge of their task, and there is no central server. Because blockchain is tamper-proof, it is connected to IoT to increase security. However, the technology is still developing and faces many challenges, such as power consumption and execution time. This article discusses blockchain technology and embedded devices in distant areas where IoT devices may encounter network shortages and possible cyber threats. This study aims to examine existing research while also outlining prospective areas for future work to use blockchains in smart settings. Finally, the efficiency of the blockchain is evaluated through performance parameters, such as latency, throughput, storage, and bandwidth. The obtained results showed that blockchain technology provides security and privacy for the IoT. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Security in Embedded Systems and IoT: Challenges and New Directions)

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