Program Monday, May 17, 14:15-18h45 (WS3)

The workshop takes place Monday, May 17, 2021, 13-17h30 as WS7 in Room2.

  • 14h15-14h30 Opening (Marc-Oliver Pahl, Hanan Loutfiyya)

Keynote – Chair: Marc-Oliver Pahl

  • 14h30-15h30 Keynote by Yiannis Psaras, “Decentralised CDNs for IoT using InterPlanetary File System and the Filecoin Network

The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a peer-to-peer content-addressable distributed file system that seeks to connect all computing devices with the same system of files. It is an open-source, community-driven project with a global community of thousands of contributors and hundreds of thousands of monthly users.

An adjacent project to IPFS is Filecoin. Filecoin is a cryptographic token that supports a decentralised storage and delivery network through the Filecoin blockchain. Storage and retrieval miners are rewarded according to their contribution to the network and the mechanics of Filecoin secure the network against malicious activity.

As IoT applications take center stage in our everyday lives (both from a personal and a business perspective) and users are increasingly concerned about data persistence and privacy, there is an urgent need to build infrastructure that can break away from centralised entities and give to users the guarantees they need for storage of their IoT data. As IPFS and Filecoin have become the de facto standard for data storage in the Decentralised Web, in this talk we are going to discuss how they can be used in the context of IoT, discuss open issues and invite the research community to experiment with and enhance the existing tools.

You can find many more resources related to the keynote here: https://research.protocol.ai/tutorials/resnetlab-on-tour/

Yiannis Psaras

Bio: Dr. Yiannis Psaras is a Research Scientist at Protocol Labs. He is heavily involved in identifying the future research directions for IPFS and Filecoin, especially with regard to the limitations that current versions of the protocols are expected to face.

Before joining Protocol Labs, he was an EPSRC Fellow and University Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at University College London. For the past decade he has been interested in areas related to resource management techniques for current and future networking architectures with a particular focus on routing, caching, and congestion control. Over the last few years he has focused on function-centric networks to realize distributed and decentralized edge computing, also referred to as “computing in the network”. He held a prestigious EPSRC Early Career Fellowship (2015-2020) in the area of “decentralized content-oriented and service-centric edge-computing architectures”. He has been heavily involved in the effort to shift the Internet towards an Information-Centric Networking environment, which he is now materializing through his contribution to the IPFS Ecosystem.

Dr. Psaras has received five (5) Best Paper Awards for his work and has attracted more than £2.5M in research funding to date from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC, UK), the EU FP7/H2020 framework programs, and from Innovate UK.

  • 15h30-15h45 Pause (in Gather.town or our conference tool)

Session 1 – Chair: Christian Lübben

  • 15h45-16h15 S3MP: A SCION based Secure Smart Metering Platform
    Tony John (OVGU Magdeburg – Germany),
    David Hausheer (OVGU Magdeburg – Germany)

    The number of smart meters deployed around the world is increasing every day. Soon, all energy meters will be smart meters, especially in developed countries. The data from smart meters will enable energy companies to manage their distribution more efficiently and reduce wastage. It eliminates the monthly manual meter readings and enables energy companies to implement services like dynamic pricing. Along with the many benefits of smart meters, it raises various privacy and security concerns. Hackers gaining access to them can cause blackouts and other catastrophic failures. The energy consumption data can reveal many household characteristics using off the shelf statistical methods raising privacy concerns. Energy companies should make sure that the smart meter data does not fall into the wrong hands. Smart metering infrastructures ultimately use the Internet for communication, making it vulnerable to present day Internet security flaws. The SCION network architecture is a secure next-generation Internet architecture that aims to overcome the flaws of todays Internet, especially in terms of security and privacy. This paper presents the design of a secure smart metering platform on top of the SCION network. Furthermore, a prototypical implementation of the proposed approach is developed and evaluated. We show that with our approach it is possible to achieve a high resilience against potential attacks without compromising on performance.
  • 16h15-16h45 Unified SNMP Interface for IoT Monitoring
    Petr Matousek (Brno University of Technology – Czech Republic),
    Ondrej Rysavy (Brno University of Technology – Czech Republic),
    Libor Polcak (Brno University of Technology – Czech Republic)

    Internet of Things (IoT) is a network connecting various devices like sensors, actuators, and intelligent gadgets that monitor and control temperature, light, humidity, electrical power, and other physical quantities in a smart environment such as smart buildings. Data provided by IoT devices are essential for the management of the smart environment. So, it is important to be aware of the reachability of connected IoT devices, their state, volume of transferred data, connections they make, etc. Unfortunately, many IoT devices communicate directly over the data link layer (Layer 2) as ZigBee, Bluetooth, or WiFi. Traditional network monitoring techniques like SNMP, Netflow, or Syslog, however, require the full TCP/IP stack, so they cannot be directly applied on IoT networks. IoT devices are managed independently through vendor-specific solutions mostly implemented in the cloud. This leads to the divided network management where IP network devices are managed by a central network management system (NMS) while IoT devices are managed separately using proprietary applications. In order to include IoT devices into the network monitoring, two steps are required: (i) obtain IoT monitoring data, (ii) present these data in a standardized format supported by a common NMS. In this paper, we propose a solution based on the SNMP Proxy Agent that collects IoT information from IoT communication and IoT log file on a local gateway. The agent converts gathered data into MIB objects that are provided to the SNMP monitoring system. Thus, information about IoT devices are fed to the locally deployed network management system. The paper demonstrates the proposed solution on the smart building where IoT data are obtained from MQTT communication and the Home Assistant log file.
  • 16h45-17h15 A novel scheme for congestion notification in IoT low power networks
    Moussa Aboubakar (Université de Technologie de Compiègne – France),
    Pierre Roux (CEA, LIST, Communicating Systems Laboratory – France),
    Mounir Kellil (CEA, LIST, Communicating Systems Laboratory – France),
    Abdelmadjid Bouabdallah (UTC – France)

    In this paper, we present a novel scheme for transmission of congestion state of IoT low power nodes managed by a central entity. The proposed scheme enables an efficient aggregation of congestion state of nodes, in a given routing path, into a block called Congestion Information Block (CIB), which contains binary values representing the congestion state of nodes. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme provides a good performance compared to Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) mechanism in terms of network throughput, network overhead and offers low divergence (regarding the time of observation) between the network congestion observed by the network manager and the real congestion of nodes.
  • 17h15-17h30 Pause (in Gather.town or our conference tool)

Session 2 – Chair: Amina Boubendir

  • 17h30-18h00 Cyber-Physical Anomaly Detection for ICS
    Lars Wuestrich (Technical University Munich – Germany),
    Lukas Schröder (TUM – Germany),
    Marc-Oliver Pahl (IMT Atlantique – France)

    Industrial Control Systems (ICS) are complex systems made up of many components with different tasks. For a safe and secure operation, each device needs to carry out its tasks correctly. To monitor a system and ensure the correct behavior of systems anomaly detection systems are used. Models of expected behavior often rely only on cyber or physical features for anomaly detection. We propose an anomaly detection system that combines both types of features to create a dynamic fingerprint of an ICS. We present how such a system can be designed and which challenges need to be overcome for a successful implementation.
  • 18h00-18h30 UAVs-as-a-Service: Cloud-based Remote Application Management for Drones
    Jerico Moeyersons (Ghent University – imec – Belgium),
    Martijn Gevaert (Ghent University – Belgium),
    Karl-Erik Réculé (Ghent University – Belgium),
    Bruno Volckaert (Ghent University – imec, IDLab – Belgium),
    Filip De Turck (Ghent University – imec – Belgium)

    In recent years, the Internet of Drones (IoD) became an important research topic for both industry and academy. An IoD environment consist of different drones, called Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), flying in different zones whereby communication is important. Therefore, drones are becoming increasingly ambiguous, capable and more cost effective than ever before. These drones have been equipped with different sensors, making it IoT-enabled drones, capable of capturing multiple data sources and send them to the cloud for further research, but the continuous advance in drone technology has not necessarily made drone application development easier. While mature Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platforms offer features such as hardware abstraction, resource allocation and tools to manage applications remotely, commercial drones often offer a restrictive software environment instead. Inspired by the technical success and convenience of IaaS platforms, this article sets out to bring that experience to drones, resulting in the creation of the UG-One UAVs-as-a-Service (UAVaaS) platform. Because many of the goals for the UAVaaS platform aligned with those of an IaaS platform, many of the technologies used in the UAVaaS platform can be found in the world of Cloud computing as well. Applications created for drones are containerized using Docker and application management can be done through a web interface. The drones host a REST API for platform management and they have a Linux onboard computer. Developers can deploy applications on the drones or forward the required data and deploy their applications on a remote server instead. This approach has delivered promising results when evaluated using several reference applications that either represent real world applications such as video streaming and movement control or instead just stress tests to check for resource availability and reliability. In the end, the UG-One platform, is shown to succeed in simplifying drone application development and management while maintaining the reliability and versatility required from any drone platform.
  • 18h30 Closing (Marc-Oliver Pahl, Hanan Loutfiyya)