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The Security and Privacy of Sensor and Actuator Networks

A special issue of Sensors (ISSN 1424-8220). This special issue belongs to the section "Sensor Networks".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (10 December 2021) | Viewed by 6087

Special Issue Editor


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Guest Editor
Department of Electrical Engineering, Polytechnique Montreal, Montreal, QC H3T-1J4, Canada
Interests: privacy and security for cyber-physical systems; control theory; networked control systems; dynamic games; robotics; signal processing; navigation systems

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

With advances in distributed computing, communication, signal processing, and control technologies, a new generation of large-scale sensor and actuator networks is emerging. Two defining features of these networks are that: 1) they are integrated into safety-critical and strategically important infrastructure systems (power grids, smart buildings, transportation systems, water networks, public safety systems, etc.); and 2) they interact with and collect detailed data about individual citizens, in order to optimize system performance. As a result, security and privacy issues in these networks are key concerns, which have also been fueled in recent years by reports of an increasing number of attacks on critical infrastructure and by the inappropriate use of personal information by various data aggregators.

This Special Issue aims to present rigorous methodologies for the design of secure and private sensor/actuator networks and cyber-physical systems (CPSs) in general. We welcome the submission of both theoretical contributions presenting novel ideas to enforce various formal notions of security and privacy, as well as the description of practical but rigorous solutions to protect CPS against real-world attacks.

Dr. Jerome Le Ny
Guest Editor

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. Sensors 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 2600 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

  • Models of attacks on cyber-physical systems
  • Notions of privacy applicable to sensor/actuator networks
  • Attack detection, identification, and isolation in distributed cyber-physical systems
  • Secure and private communications for sensor/actuator networks
  • Designing sensor/actuator networks that are resilient against attacks
  • Privacy-preserving mechanisms for an intelligent infrastructure
  • Distributed control systems that operate under security and privacy constraints
  • Differential privacy in cyber-physical systems
  • Secure signal processing, communications, control and distributed computations using cryptographic techniques
  • Tradeoffs between security, privacy, and performance
  • Incentives to strengthen security and privacy in sensor/actuator networks
  • Real-world applications and case studies on security and privacy in cyber-physical systems

Published Papers (1 paper)

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27 pages, 6201 KiB  
Article
Preventing MQTT Vulnerabilities Using IoT-Enabled Intrusion Detection System
by Muhammad Husnain, Khizar Hayat, Enrico Cambiaso, Ubaid U. Fayyaz, Maurizio Mongelli, Habiba Akram, Syed Ghazanfar Abbas and Ghalib A. Shah
Sensors 2022, 22(2), 567; https://doi.org/10.3390/s22020567 - 12 Jan 2022
Cited by 22 | Viewed by 5606
Abstract
The advancement in the domain of IoT accelerated the development of new communication technologies such as the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol. Although MQTT servers/brokers are considered the main component of all MQTT-based IoT applications, their openness makes them vulnerable to potential [...] Read more.
The advancement in the domain of IoT accelerated the development of new communication technologies such as the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol. Although MQTT servers/brokers are considered the main component of all MQTT-based IoT applications, their openness makes them vulnerable to potential cyber-attacks such as DoS, DDoS, or buffer overflow. As a result of this, an efficient intrusion detection system for MQTT-based applications is still a missing piece of the IoT security context. Unfortunately, existing IDSs do not provide IoT communication protocol support such as MQTT or CoAP to validate crafted or malformed packets for protecting the protocol implementation vulnerabilities of IoT devices. In this paper, we have designed and developed an MQTT parsing engine that can be integrated with network-based IDS as an initial layer for extensive checking against IoT protocol vulnerabilities and improper usage through a rigorous validation of packet fields during the packet-parsing stage. In addition, we evaluate the performance of the proposed solution across different reported vulnerabilities. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed solution for detecting and preventing the exploitation of vulnerabilities on IoT protocols. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Security and Privacy of Sensor and Actuator Networks)
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