Transparent and Decentralized Security Framework for the Internet of Things

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This research program aims to empower IoT users by providing a decentralized and transparent (minimal dependency on trusted third parties) security infrastructure for the majority of their IoT devices. Such devices have already outnumbered the world's population and a compounded growth of 20% is expected each year. IoT devices vary drastically in their physical and cyber resources, communication protocols and application domains which render the adoption of the common "one fits all" security solution unfeasible. This fact has been confirmed by the 600% increase in the number of attacks on IoT in the last two years [2]. Our program will build a generalized blockchain-like network for IoT devices. In doing so, we will leverage the blockchain's decentralization, pseudonymity, trust, autonomy, and strong cryptographic guarantees to provide security solutions for IoT. However, current blockchain models are not adequate to provide the required security for IoT. Particularly, they lack efficient consensus protocols which translates into slow response time to IoT devices requests. Blockchains also require public key infrastructure for authentication which is computationally expensive and will be eventually insecure in the presence of large-scale quantum computers. Furthermore, blockchains provide no communication privacy/confidentiality which is counterintuitive to the privacy goals of IoT. Accordingly, the following two streams of inquiry will tackle two of the challenges that hinder the direct adoption of current blockchain models in a computationally and communicationally diversified IoT. 1. Developing efficient and quantum resilient digital signature schemes with strong security assumptions. Specifically, we will explore the literature on hash functions, Merkle trees, and error correcting codes to build stateless hash-based signatures with small signature size. 2. Exploiting the literature on Lattice cryptographic constructions, we will build one shot zero-knowledge proofs and utilize them in developing smart contract-oriented privacy preserving protocols for IoT applications. The novelty of this program lies in the redesigning of an extensively analysed infrastructure (blockchains) to develop solutions to one of the top global challenges in cybersecurity, i.e., security and privacy of IoT. The work under this DG will be extended by partnerships for applications deployment in several market sectors including but not limited to supply chain management and smart homes. It also has a positive impact on the Canadian economy which according to the Canadian Chamber of Commerce 2017 cybersecurity report, has suffered over $12 millions in losses as a result of IoT cyber attacks [24]. Overall, this program will provide a unique, interdisciplinary environment for budding researchers in the Canadian system, training technical leaders equipped to tackle the complex engineering and security challenges of the 21st century.