by Mohammed M. Alshahrani

Is your cellphone hackable? What about your television, or your coffeemaker? Today, we feature research in Electrical and Computer Engineering, that examines authentication strategies related to the “Internet of Things” — the myriad of interconnected devices that help us in our daily lives. https://dspace.library.uvic.ca:8443/handle/1828/11349

Abstract (excerpt):

IoT platforms face huge challenges in deploying robust authentication mechanisms due to the fact that edge devices and resource-constrained devices may not have enough compute and storage capabilities to deploy and run existing mechanisms, which involve in general complex computations. Moreover, establishing end-to-end device authentication in the Internet of Things (IoT) networks is challenging because of the heterogeneous nature of IoT devices. One of the well-known challenges confronting the IoT infrastructure is related to authentication. Many IoT devices rely on weak authentication schemes, which has led in the last few years to several successful and widely publicized hacking incidents. According to the ISO/IEC 27002 standard, authentication is the process of determining whether something is, in fact, what it is declared to be. Authentication is considered the main gate to protect IoT networks from various security threats; determining who the entity is (authentication) is of high importance to establish a secure session between IoT devices. This dissertation identifies gaps in the literature and presents new authentication schemes and security mechanisms to improve IoT security and privacy against common attacks such as replay and impersonation.

To read more, visit UVicSpace https://dspace.library.uvic.ca:8443/handle/1828/11349

*UVic’s open access repository, UVicspace, makes worldwide knowledge mobilization possible. Through this platform, researchers at any institution have access to dissertations (and theses and graduate projects) published by our graduate students. This also makes works available to the interested layperson, who may be engaged in learning more about the research being done at UVic, with no paywall. UVic’s graduate students are doing valuable research every day – but sometimes it goes unsung. Our goal with this series is to shine a light on our students by featuring excellence, one achievement at a time.

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