skip to main content
10.1145/3131672.3131700acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagessensysConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Proof-Carrying Sensing: Towards Real-World Authentication in Cyber-Physical Systems

Published: 06 November 2017 Publication History

Abstract

It is paramount to ensure secure and trustworthy operations in Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs), guaranteeing the integrity of sensing data, enabling access control, and safeguarding system-level operations. In this paper, we address trustworthy operations of next generation CPSs. Our idea is inspired by a trustworthy computing framework known as Proof-Carrying Code, in which foreign executables carry a model to prove that they have not been tampered with and they function as expected. In our context, we leverage the physical world--a channel that encapsulates properties impossible to tamper with remotely, such as proximity and causality--to create a challenge-response function. We call it Proof-Carrying Sensing and use it to help authenticate devices, collected data, and locations. A unique advantage of this approach, vis-à-vis traditional multi-factor or out-of-band authentication mechanisms, is that authentication proofs are embedded in sensor data and can be continuously validated over time and space without resorting to complicated cryptographic algorithms. This, in turn, makes it fit particularly well to CPSs where mobility and resource constraints are common.

References

[1]
E. A. Lee. Cyber physical systems: Design challenges. In ISORC, 2008.
[2]
R. Rajkumar, I. Lee, L. Sha, and J. Stankovic. Cyber-physical systems: The next computing revolution. In Design Automation Conference, pages 731--736, 2010.
[3]
G. Schirner, D. Erdogmus, K. Chowdhury, and T. Padir. The future of human-in-the-loop cyber-physical systems. Computer, 46(1):36--45, 2013.
[4]
Alvaro Cardenas, Saurabh Amin, Bruno Sinopoli, Annarita Giani, Adrian Perrig, and Shankar Sastry. Challenges for securing cyber physical systems. In Workshop on future directions in cyber-physical systems security, page 5, 2009.
[5]
A. Banerjee, K. K. Venkatasubramanian, T. Mukherjee, and S. K. S. Gupta. Ensuring safety, security, and sustainability of mission-critical cyber-physical systems. Proceedings of the IEEE, 100(1):283--299, 2012.
[6]
George C. Necula. Proof-carrying code. In POPL, pages 106--119, 1997.
[7]
Masoud Rostami, Ari Juels, and Farinaz Koushanfar. Heart-to-heart (h2h): authentication for implanted medical devices. In CCS, pages 1099--1112, 2013.
[8]
J. Han, Y. Lin, A. Perrig, and F. Bai. MVSec: Secure and easy-to-use pairing of mobile devices with vehicles. In WiSec, pages 51--56, 2014.
[9]
A. Das, N. Borisov, and M. Caesar. Do you hear what I hear?: Fingerprinting smart devices through embedded acoustic components. In CCS, pages 441--452, 2014.
[10]
Lin Yang, Wei Wang, and Qian Zhang. Secret from muscle: Enabling secure pairing with electromyography. In SenSys, pages 28--41, 2016.
[11]
L. Guan, J. Xu, S. Wang, X. Xing, L. Lin, H. Huang, P. Liu, and W. Lee. From physical to cyber: Escalating protection for personalized auto insurance. In SenSys, pages 42--55, 2016.
[12]
Antonio L. Maia Neto, Artur L. F. Souza, Italo Cunha, Michele Nogueira, Ivan Oliveira Nunes, Leonardo Cotta, Nicolas Gentille, Antonio A. F. Loureiro, Diego F. Aranha, Harsh Patil, and Leonardo B. Oliveira. AoT: Authentication and access control for the entire iot device life-cycle. In SenSys, 2016.
[13]
Eyal Ronen, Colin O'Flynn, Adi Shamir, and Achi-Or Weingarten. IoT goes nuclear: Creating a zigbee chain reaction. Cryptology ePrint Archive, 2016.
[14]
Sindhu Karthikeyan and Mikhail Nesterenko. RFID security without extensive cryptography. In SASN, pages 63--67, 2005.
[15]
Daniel J. Bernstein, Johannes Buchmann, and Erik Dahmen. Post Quantum Cryptography. Springer Publishing Company, Incorporated, 1st edition, 2008.
[16]
R. Barbulescu, P. Gaudry, A. Joux, and E. Thomé. A heuristic quasi-polynomial algorithm for discrete logarithm in finite fields of small characteristic. In Eurocrypt, volume 8441, pages 1--16, 2014.
[17]
R. Garg, A. Hajj-Ahmad, and M. Wu. Geo-location estimation from electrical network frequency signals. In ICASSP, pages 2862--2866. IEEE, 2013.
[18]
Catalin Grigoras. Applications of ENF analysis in forensic authentication of digital audio and video recordings. Journal of the Audio Engineering Society, 57(9):643--661, 2009.
[19]
Matthew C Stamm, Min Wu, and KJ Ray Liu. Information forensics: An overview of the first decade. IEEE Access, 1:167--200, 2013.
[20]
Yinian Mao and Min Wu. Tracing malicious relays in cooperative wireless communications. TIFS, 2(2):198--212, 2007.
[21]
B Satchidanandan and PR Kumar. Dynamic watermarking: Active defense of networked cyber--physical systems. Proceedings of the IEEE, 105(2):219--240, 2017.
[22]
Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek. Remote exploitation of an unaltered passenger vehicle. Technical report, UBER, 01 2015.
[23]
A. Swaminathan, Y. Mao, and M. Wu. Robust and secure image hashing. TIFS, 1(2):215--230, June 2006.
[24]
Dorothy E. Denning and Peter J. Denning. Certification of programs for secure information flow. Communications of the ACM, 20:504--513, 1977.
[25]
Amir Pnueli. The temporal logic of programs. In SFCS, pages 46--57, 1977.
[26]
Susanne Albers and Stefano Leonardi. On-line algorithms. ACM Computing Surveys, 31(3es), 1999.
[27]
Sanjoy K. Baruah, Louis E. Rosier, and R. R. Howell. Algorithms and complexity concerning the preemptive scheduling of periodic, real-time tasks on one processor. Real-Time Systems, 2(4):301--324, 1990.

Cited By

View all
  • (2021)A Novel Model-Based Security Scheme for LoRa Key GenerationProceedings of the 20th International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (co-located with CPS-IoT Week 2021)10.1145/3412382.3458256(47-61)Online publication date: 18-May-2021
  • (2020)Internet of Things device authentication via electromagnetic fingerprintsEngineering Reports10.1002/eng2.122262:8Online publication date: 9-Jul-2020

Index Terms

  1. Proof-Carrying Sensing: Towards Real-World Authentication in Cyber-Physical Systems

      Recommendations

      Comments

      Information & Contributors

      Information

      Published In

      cover image ACM Conferences
      SenSys '17: Proceedings of the 15th ACM Conference on Embedded Network Sensor Systems
      November 2017
      490 pages
      ISBN:9781450354592
      DOI:10.1145/3131672
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

      Sponsors

      Publisher

      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      Published: 06 November 2017

      Permissions

      Request permissions for this article.

      Check for updates

      Author Tags

      1. Cyber-Physical Systems
      2. Information Forensics
      3. Security

      Qualifiers

      • Research-article
      • Research
      • Refereed limited

      Conference

      Acceptance Rates

      Overall Acceptance Rate 198 of 990 submissions, 20%

      Contributors

      Other Metrics

      Bibliometrics & Citations

      Bibliometrics

      Article Metrics

      • Downloads (Last 12 months)10
      • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
      Reflects downloads up to 07 Mar 2025

      Other Metrics

      Citations

      Cited By

      View all
      • (2021)A Novel Model-Based Security Scheme for LoRa Key GenerationProceedings of the 20th International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (co-located with CPS-IoT Week 2021)10.1145/3412382.3458256(47-61)Online publication date: 18-May-2021
      • (2020)Internet of Things device authentication via electromagnetic fingerprintsEngineering Reports10.1002/eng2.122262:8Online publication date: 9-Jul-2020

      View Options

      Login options

      View options

      PDF

      View or Download as a PDF file.

      PDF

      eReader

      View online with eReader.

      eReader

      Figures

      Tables

      Media

      Share

      Share

      Share this Publication link

      Share on social media