arXiv subjects

Spyridon Mastorakis

Publications and source records attributed to Spyridon Mastorakis.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

IoT-AD: A Framework To Detect Anomalies Among Interconnected IoT Devices

In an Internet of Things (IoT) environment (e.g., smart home), several IoT devices may be available that are interconnected with each other. In such interconnected environments, a faulty or compromised IoT device could impact the operation of other IoT devices. In other words, anomalous behavior exhibited by an IoT device could propagate to other devices in an IoT environment. In this paper, we argue that mitigating the propagation of the anomalous behavior exhibited by a device to other devices is equally important to detecting this behavior in the first place. In line with this observation, we present a framework, called IoT Anomaly Detector (IoT-AD), that can not only detect the anomalous behavior of IoT devices, but also limit and recover from anomalous behavior that might have affected other devices. We implemented a prototype of IoT-AD, which we evaluated based on open-source IoT device datasets as well as through real-world deployment on a small-scale IoT testbed we have built. We have further evaluated IoT-AD in comparison to prior relevant approaches. Our evaluation results show that IoT-AD can identify anomalous behavior of IoT devices in less than 2.12 milliseconds and with up to 98% of accuracy.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2023

The Case for the Anonymization of Offloaded Computation

Computation offloading (often to external computing resources over a network) has become a necessity for modern applications. At the same time, the proliferation of machine learning techniques has empowered malicious actors to use such techniques in order to breach the privacy of the execution process for offloaded computations. This can enable malicious actors to identify offloaded computations and infer their nature based on computation characteristics that they may have access to even if they do not have direct access to the computation code. In this paper, we first demonstrate that even non-sophisticated machine learning algorithms can accurately identify offloaded computations. We then explore the design space of anonymizing offloaded computations through the realization of a framework, called Camouflage. Camouflage features practical mechanisms to conceal characteristics related to the execution of computations, which can be used by malicious actors to identify computations and orchestrate further attacks based on identified computations. Our evaluation demonstrated that Camouflage can impede the ability of malicious actors to identify executed computations by up to 60%, while incurring modest overheads for the anonymization of computations.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2023

FoggyEdge: An Information Centric Computation Offloading and Management Framework for Edge-based Vehicular Fog Computing

The recent advances aiming to enable in-network service provisioning are empowering a plethora of smart infrastructure developments, including smart cities, and intelligent transportation systems. Although edge computing in conjunction with roadside units appears as a promising technology for proximate service computations, the rising demands for ubiquitous computing and ultra-low latency requirements from consumer vehicles are challenging the adoption of intelligent transportation systems. Vehicular fog computing which extends the fog computing paradigm in vehicular networks by utilizing either parked or moving vehicles for computations has the potential to further reduce the computation offloading transmission costs. Therefore, with a precise objective of reducing latency and delivering proximate service computations, we integrated vehicular fog computing with roadside edge computing and proposed a four-layer framework named FoggyEdge. The FoggyEdge framework is built at the top of named data networking and employs microservices to perform in-network computations and offloading. A real-world SUMO-based preliminary performance comparison validates FoggyEdge effectiveness. Finally, a few future research directions on incentive mechanisms, security and privacy, optimal vehicular fog location, and load-balancing are summarized.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2023

Investigating the Characteristics and Performance of Augmented Reality Applications on Head-Mounted Displays: A Study of the Hololens Application Store

Augmented Reality (AR) based on Head-Mounted Displays (HMDs) has gained significant traction over the recent years. Nevertheless, it remains unclear what AR HMD-based applications have been developed over the years and what their system performance is when they are run on HMDs. In this paper, we aim to shed light into this direction. Our study focuses on the applications available on the Microsoft Hololens application store given the wide use of the Hololens headset. Our study has two major parts: (i) we collect metadata about the applications available on the Microsoft Hololens application store to understand their characteristics (e.g., categories, pricing, permissions requested, hardware and software compatibility); and (ii) we interact with these applications while running on a Hololens 2 headset and collect data about systems-related metrics (e.g., memory and storage usage, time spent on CPU and GPU related operations) to investigate the systems performance of applications. Our study has resulted in several interesting findings, which we share with the research community.

cs.MM↗

arXiv2023

An NDN-Enabled Fog Radio Access Network Architecture With Distributed In-Network Caching

To meet the increasing demands of next-generation cellular networks (e.g., 6G), advanced networking technologies must be incorporated. On one hand, the Fog Radio Access Network (F-RAN), has been proposed as an enhancement to the Cloud Radio Access Network (C-RAN). On the other hand, efficient network architectures, such as Named Data Networking (NDN), have been recognized as prominent Future Internet candidates. Nevertheless, the interplay between F-RAN and NDN warrants further investigation. In this paper, we propose an NDN-enabled F-RAN architecture featuring a strategy for distributed in-network caching. Through a simulation study, we demonstrate the superiority of the proposed in-network caching strategy in comparison with baseline caching strategies in terms of network resource utilization, cache hits, and fronthaul channel usage.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2022

Interest Flooding Attacks in Named Data Networking: Survey of Existing Solutions, Open Issues, Requirements and Future Directions (Extended version)

Named Data Networking (NDN) is a prominent realization of the vision of Information-Centric Networking. The NDN architecture adopts name-based routing and location-independent data retrieval. Among other important features, NDN integrates security mechanisms and focuses on protecting the content rather than the communications channels. Along with a new architecture come new threats and NDN is no exception. NDN is a potential target for new network attacks such as Interest Flooding Attacks (IFAs). Attackers take advantage of IFA to launch (D)DoS attacks in NDN. Many IFA detection and mitigation solutions have been proposed in the literature. However, there is no comprehensive review study of these solutions that has been proposed so far. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a survey of the various IFAs with a detailed comparative study of all the relevant proposed solutions as counter-measures against IFAs. We also review the requirements for a complete and efficient IFA solution and pinpoint the various issues encountered by IFA detection and mitigation mechanisms through a series of attack scenarios. Finally, in this survey, we offer an analysis of the open issues and future research directions regarding IFAs. This manuscript consists of an extended version of the paper published in ACM Computing Surveys: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3539730.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2022

The Promise and Challenges of Computation Deduplication and Reuse at the Network Edge

In edge computing deployments, where devices may be in close proximity to each other, these devices may offload similar computational tasks (i.e., tasks with similar input data for the same edge computing service or for services of the same nature). This results in the execution of duplicate (redundant) computation, which may become a pressing issue for future edge computing environments, since such deployments are envisioned to consist of small-scale data-centers at the edge. To tackle this issue, in this paper, we highlight the importance of paradigms for the deduplication and reuse of computation at the network edge. Such paradigms have the potential to significantly reduce the completion times for offloaded tasks, accommodating more users, devices, and tasks with the same volume of deployed edge computing resources, however, they come with their own technical challenges. Finally, we present a multi-layer architecture to enable computation deduplication and reuse at the network edge and discuss open challenges and future research directions.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2022

An Information Centric Framework for Weather Sensing Data

Weather sensing and forecasting has become increasingly accurate in the last decade thanks to high-resolution radars, efficient computational algorithms, and high-performance computing facilities. Through a distributed and federated network of radars, scientists can make high-resolution observations of the weather conditions on a scale that benefits public safety, commerce, transportation, and other fields. While weather radars are critical infrastructure, they are often located in remote areas with poor network connectivity. Data retrieved from these radars are often delayed or lost, or even lack proper synchronization, resulting in sub-optimal weather prediction. This work applies Named Data Networking (NDN) to a federation of weather sensing radars for efficient content addressing and retrieval. We identify weather data based on a hierarchical naming scheme that allows us to explicitly access desired files. We demonstrate that compared to the window-based mechanism in TCP/IP, an NDN based mechanism improves data quality, reduces uncertainty, and enhances weather prediction. Our evaluation demonstrates that this naming scheme enables effective data retrieval, while compared to the window-based mechanism in TCP/IP, an NDN based mechanism improves data quality, reduces uncertainty, and enhances weather prediction.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2022

Harpocrates: Anonymous Data Publication in Named Data Networking

Named-Data Networking (NDN), a prominent realization of the Information-Centric Networking (ICN) vision, offers a request-response communication model where data is identified based on application-defined names at the network layer. This amplifies the ability of censoring authorities to restrict user access to certain data/websites/applications and monitor user requests. The majority of existing NDN-based frameworks have focused on enabling users in a censoring network to access data available outside of this network, without considering how data producers in a censoring network can make their data available to users outside of this network. This problem becomes especially challenging, since the NDN communication paths are symmetric, while producers are mandated to sign the data they generate and identify their certificates. In this paper, we propose Harpocrates, an NDN-based framework for anonymous data publication under censorship conditions. Harpocrates enables producers in censoring networks to produce and make their data available to users outside of these networks while remaining anonymous to censoring authorities. Our evaluation demonstrates that Harpocrates achieves anonymous data publication under different settings, being able to identify and adapt to censoring actions.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2021

Reservoir: Named Data for Pervasive Computation Reuse at the Network Edge

In edge computing use cases (e.g., smart cities), where several users and devices may be in close proximity to each other, computational tasks with similar input data for the same services (e.g., image or video annotation) may be offloaded to the edge. The execution of such tasks often yields the same results (output) and thus duplicate (redundant) computation. Based on this observation, prior work has advocated for "computation reuse", a paradigm where the results of previously executed tasks are stored at the edge and are reused to satisfy incoming tasks with similar input data, instead of executing these incoming tasks from scratch. However, realizing computation reuse in practical edge computing deployments, where services may be offered by multiple (distributed) edge nodes (servers) for scalability and fault tolerance, is still largely unexplored. To tackle this challenge, in this paper, we present Reservoir, a framework to enable pervasive computation reuse at the edge, while imposing marginal overheads on user devices and the operation of the edge network infrastructure. Reservoir takes advantage of Locality Sensitive Hashing (LSH) and runs on top of Named-Data Networking (NDN), extending the NDN architecture for the realization of the computation reuse semantics in the network. Our evaluation demonstrated that Reservoir can reuse computation with up to an almost perfect accuracy, achieving 4.25-21.34x lower task completion times compared to cases without computation reuse.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2021

CLEDGE: A Hybrid Cloud-Edge Computing Framework over Information Centric Networking

In today's era of Internet of Things (IoT), where massive amounts of data are produced by IoT and other devices, edge computing has emerged as a prominent paradigm for low-latency data processing. However, applications may have diverse latency requirements: certain latency-sensitive processing operations may need to be performed at the edge, while delay-tolerant operations can be performed on the cloud, without occupying the potentially limited edge computing resources. To achieve that, we envision an environment where computing resources are distributed across edge and cloud offerings. In this paper, we present the design of CLEDGE (CLoud + EDGE), an information-centric hybrid cloud-edge framework, aiming to maximize the on-time completion of computational tasks offloaded by applications with diverse latency requirements. The design of CLEDGE is motivated by the networking challenges that mixed reality researchers face. Our evaluation demonstrates that CLEDGE can complete on-time more than 90% of offloaded tasks with modest overheads.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2021

Hash-MAC-DSDV: Mutual Authentication for Intelligent IoT-Based Cyber-Physical Systems

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) connected in the form of Internet of Things (IoT) are vulnerable to various security threats, due to the infrastructure-less deployment of IoT devices. Device-to-Device (D2D) authentication of these networks ensures the integrity, authenticity, and confidentiality of information in the deployed area. The literature suggests different approaches to address security issues in CPS technologies. However, they are mostly based on centralized techniques or specific system deployments with higher cost of computation and communication. It is therefore necessary to develop an effective scheme that can resolve the security problems in CPS technologies of IoT devices. In this paper, a lightweight Hash-MAC-DSDV (Hash Media Access Control Destination Sequence Distance Vector) routing scheme is proposed to resolve authentication issues in CPS technologies, connected in the form of IoT networks. For this purpose, a CPS of IoT devices (multi-WSNs) is developed from the local-chain and public chain, respectively. The proposed scheme ensures D2D authentication by the Hash-MAC-DSDV mutual scheme, where the MAC addresses of individual devices are registered in the first phase and advertised in the network in the second phase. The proposed scheme allows legitimate devices to modify their routing table and unicast the one-way hash authentication mechanism to transfer their captured data from source towards the destination. Our evaluation results demonstrate that Hash- MAC-DSDV outweighs the existing schemes in terms of attack detection, energy consumption and communication metrics.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2021

LightIoT: Lightweight and Secure Communication for Energy-Efficient IoT in Health Informatics

Internet of Things (IoT) is considered as a key enabler of health informatics. IoT-enabled devices are used for in-hospital and in-home patient monitoring to collect and transfer biomedical data pertaining to blood pressure, electrocardiography (ECG), blood sugar levels, body temperature, etc. Among these devices, wearables have found their presence in a wide range of healthcare applications. These devices generate data in real-time and transmit them to nearby gateways and remote servers for processing and visualization. The data transmitted by these devices are vulnerable to a range of adversarial threats, and as such, privacy and integrity need to be preserved. In this paper, we present LightIoT, a lightweight and secure communication approach for data exchanged among the devices of a healthcare infrastructure. LightIoT operates in three phases: initialization, pairing, and authentication. These phases ensure the reliable transmission of data by establishing secure sessions among the communicating entities (wearables, gateways and a remote server). Statistical results exhibit that our scheme is lightweight, robust, and resilient against a wide range of adversarial attacks and incurs much lower computational and communication overhead for the transmitted data in the presence of existing approaches.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2021

Networking and Computing in Biomechanical Research: Challenges and Directions

Biomechanics is a scientific discipline that studies the forces acting on a body and the effects they produce. In this paper, we bring together biomechanists and networking researchers to shed light into how research efforts in biomechanics, primarily related to the study of the human body, can be facilitated through networking and computing technologies, such as edge and cloud computing, Software Defined Networking, and Information-Centric Networking. We first present challenges related to networking and computing that biomechanists face today and we then describe how networking and computing technologies can address them. Finally, we identify directions for future networking research with a focus on biomechanics to facilitate and encourage interdisciplinary collaborations between biomechanists and networking researchers.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2021

Information-Centric Networking in Wireless Environments: Security Risks and Challenges

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) has emerged as a paradigm to cope with the lack of built-in security primitives and efficient mechanisms for content distribution of today's Internet. However, deploying ICN in a wireless environment poses a different set of challenges compared to a wired environment, especially when it comes to security. In this paper, we present the security issues that may arise and the attacks that may occur from different points of view when ICN is deployed in wireless environments. The discussed attacks may target both applications and the ICN network itself by exploiting elements of the ICN architecture, such as content names and in-network content caches. Furthermore, we discuss potential solutions to the presented issues and countermeasures to the presented attacks. Finally, we identify future research opportunities and directions.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2020

Access Control Mechanisms in Named Data Networks: A Comprehensive Survey

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) has recently emerged as a prominent candidate for the Future Internet Architecture (FIA) that addresses existing issues with the host-centric communication model of the current TCP/IP-based Internet. Named Data Networking (NDN) is one of the most recent and active ICN architectures that provides a clean slate approach for Internet communication. NDN provides intrinsic content security where security is directly provided to the content instead of communication channel. Among other security aspects, Access Control (AC) rules specify the privileges for the entities that can access the content. In TCP/IP-based AC systems, due to the client-server communication model, the servers control which client can access a particular content. In contrast, ICN-based networks use content names to drive communication and decouple the content from its original location. This phenomenon leads to the loss of control over the content causing different challenges for the realization of efficient AC mechanisms. To date, considerable efforts have been made to develop various AC mechanisms in NDN. In this paper, we provide a detailed and comprehensive survey of the AC mechanisms in NDN. We follow a holistic approach towards AC in NDN where we first summarize the ICN paradigm, describe the changes from channel-based security to content-based security and highlight different cryptographic algorithms and security protocols in NDN. We then classify the existing AC mechanisms into two main categories: Encryption-based AC and Encryption-independent AC. Each category has different classes based on the working principle of AC (e.g., Attribute-based AC, Name-based AC, Identity-based AC, etc). Finally, we present the lessons learned from the existing AC mechanisms and identify the challenges of NDN-based AC at large, highlighting future research directions for the community.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2020

CCIC-WSN: An Architecture for Single Channel Cluster-based Information-Centric Wireless Sensor Networks

The promising vision of Information-Centric Networking (ICN) and of its realization, Named Data Networking (NDN), has attracted extensive attention in recent years in the context of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). However, a comprehensive NDN/ICN-based architectural design for WSNs, including specially tailored naming schemes and forwarding mechanisms, has yet to be explored. In this paper, we present single-Channel Cluster-based Information-Centric WSN (CCIC-WSN), an NDN/ICN-based framework to fulfill the requirements of cluster-based WSNs, such as communication between child nodes and cluster heads, association of new child nodes with cluster heads, discovery of the namespace of newly associated nodes, and child node mobility. Through an extensive simulation study, we demonstrate that CCIC-WSN achieves 71-90% lower energy consumption and 74-96% lower data retrieval delays than recently proposed frameworks for NDN/ICN-based WSNs under various evaluation settings.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2020

Irregular Metronomes as Assistive Devices to Promote Healthy Gait Patterns

Older adults and people suffering from neurodegenerative disease often experience difficulty controlling gait during locomotion, ultimately increasing their risk of falling. To combat these effects, researchers and clinicians have used metronomes as assistive devices to improve movement timing in hopes of reducing their risk of falling. Historically, researchers in this area have relied on metronomes with isochronous interbeat intervals, which may be problematic because normal healthy gait varies considerably from one step to the next. More recently, researchers have advocated the use of irregular metronomes embedded with statistical properties found in healthy populations. In this paper, we explore the effect of both regular and irregular metronomes on many statistical properties of interstride intervals. Furthermore, we investigate how these properties react to mechanical perturbation in the form of a halted treadmill belt while walking. Our results demonstrate that metronomes that are either isochronous or random metronome break down the inherent structure of healthy gait. Metronomes with statistical properties similar to healthy gait seem to preserve those properties, despite a strong mechanical perturbation. We discuss the future development of this work in the context of networked augmented reality metronome devices.

physics.med-ph↗