December 20th, 2015: Professor Sanjay K. Jha, Deputy Director of the Australian Centre for Cyber Security at the University of New South Wales, has been discussing the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead with the emergence of the Internet of Things, at a recent guest lecture hosted by Canadian University Dubai (CUD).
Speaking to an audience of engineering students and faculty on the subject ‘A Changing Landscape: Securing the Internet of Things’, Professor Jha first revealed how the phenomenon has developed through the growing network of objects embedded with the technology to collect and exchange valuable data.
Professor Jha went on to discuss the practical capabilities of the Internet of Things, showing, for example, how commercial stock replenishment can be automatically managed by this kind of technology, with sensors first identifying the need for the re-stock, right the way through to networked navigation devices providing the driver with the best route to make the delivery.
Going on to discuss the key challenges that the technology presents, Professor Jha said that with the rush to market in a competitive environment, security considerations could often be overlooked, creating vulnerabilities for users of these systems.
Professor Jha concluded the discussion by revealing some of the findings of his own research concerned with the security of body-worn devices. He said, “Wireless body-worn sensing devices are becoming popular for fitness, sports training and personalized healthcare applications. Securing the data generated by these devices is essential if they are to be integrated into the current health infrastructure and employed in medical applications.
“Our solution enables both parties to generate closely matching ‘link’ fingerprints, which uniquely associate a data session with a wireless link such that a third party, at a later date, can verify the links the data was communicated on. These fingerprints are very hard for an eavesdropper to forge, lightweight compared to traditional provenance mechanisms, and allow for interesting security properties such as accountability and non-repudiation.”
The guest lecture was organized by Dr. Adel Ben Mnaouer, Associate Professor in the School of Engineering, Applied Science & Technology, as part of CUD’s mission to enhance the curriculum with industry-relevant lessons from academics and practitioner from around the world.
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