A Drone-Powered IoT System for Information Assurance Research and Education
Abstract
The Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging paradigm of technical, social, and economic significance. IoT refers to the interconnection of connected physical objects embedded with electronics, software, sensors, and actuators. Gartner forecasts that there will be 8.4 billion IoT devices worldwide in 2017 and 20.4 billion by 2020. In addition to numerous civilian applications, IoT has great potential in the defense sector, corresponding to the Internet of Battlefield Things (IoBT). There are enormous IoBT applications, including connected ISR (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance), connected operations, smart and connected bases, connected logistics, etc. The IoBT blurs the boundary between traditional proprietary, isolated DoD networks and open civilian networks. In particular, the IoBT will include munitions, weapons, vehicles, robots, human-wearable devices on military personnel, DoD facilities, military bases, and many other networked DoD systems. The IoBT may also extend to numerous civilian IoT devices in an adhoc fashion; for example, ubiquitous civilian IoT devices in a megacity can be requisitioned for military operations. In addition, the IoBT may extensively use commercial, off-the-shelf (COTS) devices and applications to enable the massive system scale in a cost-effective way. The enormous benefits of the IoBT come with enormous cyber threats and risks, which create the new battleground for cyber warfare. For instance, a determined adversary can launch kinetic, directed-energy, and electronic attacks to jeopardize the physical survival of IoBT nodes; the adversary can threaten the information confidentiality, integrity, and availability in the IoBT through eavesdropping, radio jamming, and malware; the adversary can construct large-scale botnets from compromised IoBT nodes to mount DDoS attacks or massive spam campaigns; the adversary can infiltrate the IoBT system and inject fake information to attack information aggregation, situational awareness, and critical decision making; the adversary can cause catastrophic damage and casualty by manipulating IoBT devices embedded into military facilities and personnel; and the adversary can discourage the participation in the IoBT by breaching the location privacy of civilians who carry numerous IoT devices such as smartphones and tablets. The massive, heterogeneous, semiopen nature of the IoBT makes it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to employ traditional cyber defenses. As such, security and privacy concerns have been widely acknowledged as probably the most significant barrier to IoT adoption and deployment in both defense and civilian sectors. The PI proposes a drone-powered IoT system for information assurance research and education relevant to the IoBT and also more generic IoT systems. The proposed research infrastructure can greatly enhance the PIÕs current ARO-funded research on trustworthy social-cyberphysical systems. It can also largely enhance the capabilities of the PIÕs research group for performing research and reseacrh-oriented education in broad areas of interest to the DoD, which include secure and usable mobile authentication, secure dynamic spectrum access, secure storagecentric IoT systems, secure and usable indoor wayfinding, drone-aided establish of secure associations in IoT systems, adversarial machine learning in IoT systems, secure and privacy-preserving data aggregation in IoT systems, and wireless cyber deception.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Feb 14, 2019
- Source ID
- W911NF1810245
Entities
People
- Yanchao Zhang
Organizations
- Arizona State University
- Army Contracting Command
- United States Army