Contemporary IoT environments, such as smart buildings, require end-users to trust data-capturing rules published by the systems. There are several reasons why such a trust is misplaced—IoT systems may violate the rules deliberately or IoT devices may transfer user data to a malicious third-party due to cyberattacks, leading to the loss of individuals’ privacy or service integrity. To address such concerns, we propose IoT Notary , a framework to ensure trust in IoT systems and applications. IoT Notary provides secure log sealing on live sensor data to produce a verifiable “proof-of-integrity,” based on which a verifier can attest that captured sensor data adhere to the published data-capturing rules. IoT Notary is an integral part of TIPPERS, a smart space system that has been deployed at the University of California, Irvine to provide various real-time location-based services on the campus. We present extensive experiments over real-time WiFi connectivity data to evaluate IoT Notary , and the results show that IoT Notary imposes nominal overheads. The secure logs only take 21% more storage, while users can verify their one day’s data in less than 2 s even using a resource-limited device.

We present our experiences in adapting and deploying TIPPERS1, a novel privacy-enabled IoT data collection and management system for smart spaces, to facilitate the monitoring of adherence to COVID-19 regulations in a university campus and a military facility.

Contemporary IoT environments, such as smart buildings, require end-users to trust data-capturing rules published by the systems. There are several reasons why such a trust is misplaced - IoT systems may violate the rules deliberately or IoT devices may transfer user data to a malicious third-party due to cyberattacks, leading to the loss of individuals' privacy or service integrity. To address such concerns, we propose IoT Notary, a framework to ensure trust in IoT systems and applications. IoT Notary provides secure log sealing on live sensor data to produce a verifiable `proof-of-integrity,' based on which a verifier can attest that captured sensor data adheres to the published data-capturing rules. IoT Notary is an integral part of TIPPERS, a smart space system that has been deployed at UCI to provide various real-time location-based services in the campus. IoT Notary imposes nominal overheads for verification, thereby users can verify their data of one day in less than two seconds.

Internet of Thing (IoT) systems, such as smart buildings and smart cities, provide services to users (individuals and organizations) in various aspect of our lives. To provide such services, IoT systems need to handle data captured from multiple devices/sensors, and translation of data processing policies agreed by users (high-level) into commands for devices (device-level). The underlying assumption is that users trust IoT systems in honoring their policies. However, this trust assumption is incorrectly positioned since IoT systems may not be honest or may fall victim to cyberattacks. We address such concerns by providing mechanisms to help in ensuring trust and accountability at the time of translating a contract (agreed and signed policies). The objective of the proposed scheme is two fold, (1) translation of contracts from a high-level to device-level, (2) attestation of the translation. We have implemented the proposed scheme for contract translation and attestation of translation as a module and integrated it with the TIPPERS system (our IoT testbed under development). The results of our experiments highlight the feasibility of our proposed schemes.

The practicality of existing techniques for processing encrypted data stored in untrusted cloud environments is a limiting factor in the adoption of cloud-based applications. Both public and private sector organizations are reluctant to push their data to the cloud due to strong requirements for security and privacy of their data. In particular, mission-critical defense applications used by governments do not tolerate any leakage of sensitive data. In this paper, we propose Nomad, a framework for developing mission-critical cloud-based applications. The framework is comprised of: 1) a homomorphism encryption-based service for processing encrypted data directly within the untrusted cloud infrastructure, and 2) a client service for encrypting and decrypting data within the trusted environment, and storing and retrieving these data to and from the cloud. Both services are equipped with GPU-based parallelization to accelerate the expensive homomorphic encryption operations. To evaluate the Nomad framework, we developed Call For Fire, amission-critical application which enables defense personnel to call for fire on targets. Due to the nature of the mission, this application requires guaranteed security. The experimental results highlight the performance enhancements of the GPU-based acceleration mechanism and the feasibility of the Nomad framework.

This paper describes the CloudProtect middleware that empowers users to encrypt sensitive data stored within various cloud applications. However, most web applications require data in plaintext for implementing the various functionalities and in general, do not support encrypted data management. Therefore, CloudProtect strives to carry out the data transformations (encryption/decryption) in a manner that is transparent to the application, i.e., preserves all functionalities of the application, including those that require data to be in plaintext. Additionally, CloudProtect allows users flexibility in trading off performance for security in order to let them optimally balance their privacy needs and usage-experience.

Decentralized applications are composed of distributed entities that directly interact with each other and make local autonomous decisions in the absence of a centralized coordinating authority. Such decentralized applications, where entities can join and leave the system at any time, are particularly susceptible to the attacks of malicious entities. Each entity therefore requires protective measures to safeguard itself against these entities. Trust management solutions serve to provide effective protective measures against such malicious attacks. Trust relationships help an entity model and evaluate its confidence in other entities towards securing itself. Trust management is, thus, both an essential and intrinsic ingredient of decentralized applications. However, research in trust management has not focused on how trust models can be composed into a decentralized architecture. The PACE architectural style, described previously [21], provides structured and detailed guidance on the assimilation of trust models into a decentralized entity's architecture. In this paper, we describe our experiments with incorporating four different reputation-based trust models into a decentralized application using the PACE architectural style. Our observations lead us to conclude that PACE not only provides an effective and easy way to integrate trust management into decentralized applications, but also facilitates reuse while supporting different types of trust models. Additionally, PACE serves as a suitable platform to aid the evaluation and comparison of trust models in a fixed setting towards providing a way to choose an appropriate model for the setting.