arXiv subjects

George C. Polyzos

Publications and source records attributed to George C. Polyzos.

28 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2019

Interacting with the Internet of Things using Smart Contracts and Blockchain Technologies

Despite technological advances, most smart objects in the Internet of Things (IoT) cannot be accessed using technologies designed and developed for interacting with powerful Internet servers. IoT use cases involve devices that not only have limited resources, but also they are not always connected to the Internet and are physically exposed to tampering. In this paper, we describe the design, development, and evaluation of a smart contract-based solution that allows end-users to securely interact with smart devices. Our approach enables access control, Thing authentication, and payments in a fully decentralized setting, taking at the same time into consideration the limitations and constraints imposed by both blockchain technologies and the IoT paradigm. Our prototype implementation is based on existing technologies, i.e., Ethereum smart contracts, which makes it realistic and fundamentally secure.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2019

Smart contracts for the Internet of Things: opportunities and challenges

With the Internet of Things (IoT), Things are expected to live in different "domains" and "contexts" during their lifetime. Information generated by and associated with Things should be manageable by multiple, diverse stakeholders accordingly. Moreover, the scope of the information related to Things can range from private and confidential to public and auditable. Identification, security, and interoperability in this vivid environment are expected to be challenging. In this paper we discuss how smart contracts and blockchain technologies create the potential for a viable solution. To this end, we present smart contract-based solutions that improve security and information management, we identify new opportunities and challenges, and we provide security recommendations and guidelines.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2018

ICN enabling CoAP Extensions for IP based IoT devices

The Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) and its extensions, such as observe and group communication, offer the potential for developing novel IoT applications. However, a full-fledged CoAP-based application requires delay-tolerant communication and support for multicast: since these properties cannot be easily provided by existing IP networks, developers cannot take full advantage of CoAP, preferring to use HTTP instead. In this demo we show how proxying CoAP traffic over an ICN network can unleash the full potential of CoAP, simultaneously shifting overhead and complexity from the (constrained) endpoints to the network.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2017

Edge-ICN and its application to the Internet of Things

While research on Information-Centric Networking (ICN) flourishes, its adoption seems to be an elusive goal. In this paper we propose Edge-ICN: a novel approach for deploying ICN in a single large network, such as the network of an Internet Service Provider. Although Edge-ICN requires nothing beyond an SDN-based network supporting the OpenFlow protocol, with ICN-aware nodes only at the edges of the network, it still offers the same benefits as a clean-slate ICN architecture but without the deployment hassles. Moreover, by proxying legacy traffic and transparently forwarding it through the Edge-ICN nodes, all existing applications can operate smoothly, while offering significant advantages to applications such as native support for scalable anycast, multicast, and multi-source forwarding. In this context, we show how the proposed functionality at the edge of the network can specifically benefit CoAP-based IoT applications. Our measurements show that Edge-ICN induces on average the same control plane overhead for name resolution as a centralized approach, while also enabling IoT applications to build on anycast, multicast, and multi-source forwarding primitives.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2017

Securing Content Sharing over ICN

The emerging Information-Centric Networking (ICN) paradigm is expected to facilitate content sharing among users. ICN will make it easy for users to appoint storage nodes, in various network locations, perhaps owned or controlled by them, where shared content can be stored and disseminated from. These storage nodes should be (somewhat) trusted since not only they have (some level of) access to user shared content, but they should also properly enforce access control. Traditional forms of encryption introduce significant overhead when it comes to sharing content with large and dynamic groups of users. To this end, proxy re-encryption provides a convenient solution. In this paper, we use Identity-Based Proxy Re-Encryption (IB-PRE) to provide confidentiality and access control for content items shared over ICN, realizing secure content distribution among dynamic sets of users. In contrast to similar IB-PRE based solutions, our design allows each user to generate the system parameters and the secret keys required by the underlay encryption scheme using their own Private Key Generator, therefore, our approach does not suffer from the key escrow problem. Moreover, our design further relaxes the trust requirements on the storage nodes by preventing them from sharing usable content with unauthorized users. Finally, our scheme does not require out-of-band secret key distribution.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2017

CoAP over ICN

The Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) is a specialized Web transfer protocol for resource-oriented applications intended to run on constrained devices, typically part of the Internet of Things. In this paper we leverage Information-Centric Networking (ICN), deployed within the domain of a network provider that interconnects, in addition to other terminals, CoAP endpoints in order to provide enhanced CoAP services. We present various CoAP-specific communication scenarios and discuss how ICN can provide benefits to both network providers and CoAP applications, even though the latter are not aware of the existence of ICN. In particular, the use of ICN results in smaller state management complexity at CoAP endpoints, simpler implementation at CoAP endpoints, and less communication overhead in the network.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2017

Multi-Flow Congestion Control with Network Assistance

A well-known technique for enhancing the performance and stability of content distribution is the use of multiple dissemination flows. Multipath TCP (MPTCP), the most popular multiflow protocol on the Internet, allows receivers to exploit multiple paths towards a single sender. Nevertheless, MPTCP cannot fully exploit the potential gains of multipath connectivity, as it must fairly share resources with (single-flow) TCP, without a clear understanding of whether the available paths do share any bottleneck links. In this paper, we introduce a hybrid congestion control algorithm for multisource and multipath transport that enables higher bandwidth utilization compared to MPTCP, while remaining friendly to TCP-like flows. Our solution employs (i) an in-network module that offers essential topological information and (ii) Normalized Multiflow Congestion Control (NMCC), a novel end-to-end congestion control algorithm. While NMCC is architecture-independent and the in-network module can be adapted for Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) or Software Defined Networks (SDNs), our prototype was implemented on the Publish-Subscribe Internetworking (PSI) architecture, which offers centralized path formation and source routing. Using an actual protocol implementation deployed on our test-bed, we provide experimental results which validate the effectiveness of our design in terms of performance, adaptation to shifting network conditions and friendliness to other flows.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2017

Securing Information-Centric Networking without negating Middleboxes

Information-Centric Networking is a promising networking paradigm that overcomes many of the limitations of current networking architectures. Various research efforts investigate solutions for securing ICN. Nevertheless, most of these solutions relax security requirements in favor of network performance. In particular, they weaken end-user privacy and the architecture's tolerance to security breaches in order to support middleboxes that offer services such as caching and content replication. In this paper, we adapt TLS, a widely used security standard, to an ICN context. We design solutions that allow session reuse and migration among multiple stakeholders and we propose an extension that allows authorized middleboxes to lawfully and transparently intercept secured communications.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2016

Object-oriented Packet Caching for ICN

One of the most discussed features offered by Information-centric Networking (ICN) architectures is the ability to support packet-level caching at every node in the network. By individually naming each packet, ICN allows routers to turn their queueing buffers into packet caches, thus exploiting the network's existing storage resources. However, the performance of packet caching at commodity routers is restricted by the small capacity of their SRAM, which holds the index for the packets stored at the, slower, DRAM. We therefore propose Object-oriented Packet Caching (OPC), a novel caching scheme that overcomes the SRAM bottleneck, by combining object-level indexing in the SRAM with packet-level storage in the DRAM. We implemented OPC and experimentally evaluated it over various cache placement policies, showing that it can enhance the impact of ICN packet-level caching, reducing both network and server load.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2014

Efficient Proactive Caching for Supporting Seamless Mobility

We present a distributed proactive caching approach that exploits user mobility information to decide where to proactively cache data to support seamless mobility, while efficiently utilizing cache storage using a congestion pricing scheme. The proposed approach is applicable to the case where objects have different sizes and to a two-level cache hierarchy, for both of which the proactive caching problem is hard. Additionally, our modeling framework considers the case where the delay is independent of the requested data object size and the case where the delay is a function of the object size. Our evaluation results show how various system parameters influence the delay gains of the proposed approach, which achieves robust and good performance relative to an oracle and an optimal scheme for a flat cache structure.

cs.NI↗