CNS-1932447 CPS: Small: Collaborative Research: A Secure Communication Framework with Verifiable Authenticity for Immutable Services in Industrial IoT Systems

PIs: Prof. Song Han and Prof. Chen Qian

University of Connecticut and University of California Santa Cruz

Project Summary

The Industrial IoT (IIoT) systems focus on the application of IoT technologies in industrial environments and have been employed in a wide range of industrial automation systems, including process control, advanced manufacturing and smart grids. Compared with IoT systems designed for consumer applications, IIoT infrastructures designed for industrial automation systems are usually deployed in harsh and complex environments, and have stringent dependability, timing performance, energy-efficiency and especially security requirements to optimize production efficiency and product quality, and to avoid potentially catastrophic consequences. Furthermore, a recent trend in industry automation is to connect interdependent industrial automation systems together to provide decentralized, verifiable and immutable services. These unique requirements on IIoT systems pose many challenges in their communication fabric design, distributed data management, analysis and decision making, and particularly security protection for both the communication and data infrastructures.

This project aims to 1) design efficient authentication schemes to support verifiable authenticity, integrity, and uniformity for intra-plant two-way communications, and 2) hierarchical and scalable blockchain protocols to support inter-plant immutable services.More specifically, the major goals of this project are to 1) design novel public key authentication and data authentication schemes that are fast and efficient for both the signer and the verifier to ensure authenticity, integrity, and uniformity of sensing data in IIoT networks; 2) enable PKC-based fast control message authentication by extending the control border of IIoT networks to the cloud/Internet and solving the new security challenges; and 3) develop a hierarchical blockchain structure and scalable lightweight consensus protocol to provide inter-plant immutable services.An IIoT testbed will also be developed and deployed to validate the proposed solutions and cover the whole sensing-analysis-control-actuation life cycle of IIoT systems.

Project Publications

[FAB] Xiaoxue Zhang, Chen Qian, Scalable Decentralized Routing for Blockchain Payment Networks, in Proc. of Third International Symposium on Foundations and Applications of Blockchain (FAB), 2020.

[AFT’19] Gang Wang, Zhijie Jerry Shi, Mark Nixon, Song Han, “SoK: Sharding on Blockchain”, in Proc. of First ACM Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT), pp. 41-61, 2019.

[IoTDI’19] Xin Li, Minmei Wang, Shouqian Shi, and Chen Qian, VERID: Towards Verifiable IoT Data Management, in Proc. of ACM/IEEE Conference on Internet of Things Design and Implementation (IoTDI), 2019.

[ToN] Xin Li, Minmei Wang, Huazhe Wang, Ye Yu, and Chen Qian, Towards Secure and Efficient Communication for the Internet of Things, in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON).

[ToN] Minmei Wang, Chen Qian, Xin Li, Shouqian Shi, Collaborative Validation of Public-Key Certificates for IoT by Distributed Caching, in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON).

Students

Graduate: Gang Wang (UConn), Jiachen Wang (UConn), Minmei Wang (UCSC)

Classes related to the project

Winter 2021: CMPE259 Sensor Networks and Internet of Things (UCSC)

Winter 2020: CMPE253 Network Security (UCSC)

Spring 2019: SE5402 Architecture of IoT (UConn)

Collaboration events

Biweekly tele-conference meeting from 2019-2022
CPS PI meeting at Alexandria, VA, Nov. 2019