Abstract

The scale and geographic dispersion of the Internet of Things (IoT) will surpass the size of the current day Internet in, at least, 3 orders of magnitude. The IoT will be the largest and most widely distributed system ever, with a multitude of connected sensors and actuators. The current Internet already has some serious, unresolved security problems. Adding physical world autonomous connections brings even more concerns about attacks and their consequences to people and goods. The SureThing project (http://surething-project.eu) is addressing an IoT security need: creating and validating location certificates. The project’s goal is to allow for constrained devices, needed in the provisioning of IoT services, to obtain proof of their location or to request proof of location to other devices. The certificates issued using the SureThing framework will contain location data, obtained and verified using: WiFi and Bluetooth fingerprinting, and ambience sensing. The SureThing framework will allow developers to choose between faster location proofs and more reliable proofs, which will be digitally signed and kept in a ledger. The witness models – providing a validation role for other devices at the same location – will play an important role, particularly when only limited cryptographic mechanisms are available.

Bio

Miguel L. Pardal is an Assistant Professor at Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa and a researcher at INESC-ID in the Distributed Systems Group (GSD). He is currently leading the SureThing project (FCT) and completed a participation in the Safe Cloud EU Project (H2020). He is collaborating with TU Munich as Guest Scientist. During his PhD, he was a visiting student at the Auto-ID Labs at MIT. He currently has more than 40 publications and his main research interest is Cybersecurity applied to the digital frontiers of the Internet of Things and Cloud Computing.