Research

Currently, I am interested in security and privacy in Blockchain, Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, and Privacy-preserving data Analytics. In particular, I am working on mathematical foundations of Blockchain and designing lightweight solutions for IoT use-cases, using cryptographic primitives, such as secret sharing, access-control mechanism, light-weight encryption, and multi-party computation.

Previously, my focus was on resource management and performance analysis of heterogeneous networks in ubiquitous computing, using optimization and stochastic models, like queuing theory. During my masters, I was also involved in projects related to person identification by different bio-metrics and object-tracking.

The Dagstuhl Beginners Guide to Reproducibility for Experimental Networking Research

Security in Cloud Computing and Blockchain based Systems

Designing privacy-aware data deduplication in Cloud Storage

  • Cloud Storage achieves both storage and bandwidth savings by checking the existence of duplicate files (known as data deduplication) on the cloud and by pointing a reference to an already stored file. When the client helps the cloud storage to perform the check, it is called as Client-side data deduplication, which creates a side channel in the cloud storage, exposing the privacy of file existence status to the attacker. In particular, the responses from the cloud storage during the deduplication check reveals the information about the existence of a file in the cloud storage. These responses can be further exploited to launch attacks, like learning the sensitive file content, such as health-related information, and establishing a covert channel. While current solutions provide only weaker privacy assumptions the proposed protocol provides stronger privacy by making the user requests for multiple files. The objective is to keep the deduplication gain to a certain degree and eliminate the leakage of file existence status by allowing the cloud to randomize the response to reach the probabilistic relation.


Papers:

1) Privacy aware data deduplication for side channel in cloud storage

2) Yugala: Blockchain Based Encrypted Cloud Storage for IoT Data

3) A blockchain simulator for evaluating consensus algorithms in diverse networking environments

4) Emergency access control management via attribute based encrypted QR codes


Security in IoT Network

Developing secure and reliable data exchange in IoT network

  • Securing data in the IoT network is very crucial as sensitive data, such as health-data, are being transmitted continuously. For which, End-to-End encryption, i.e., from the data owner till the end user, can be achieved by allowing the data owner to define proper policy to encrypt the data for the end user. Attribute Based Encryption (ABE) along with the existing cryptographic methods appears as promising techniques for ensuring fine grained access control in the IoT network.

Energy-efficient protocol for devices in IoT network

  • Several approaches have been proposed in the recent past to improve the energy efficiency of IoT networks by considering the duty cycle operation (the fraction of time in which a device is active). However, these approaches have three issues: (i) they assign the same duty cycle ratio to all the nodes without balancing energy consumption; or (ii) they distribute different duty cycle ratios without considering the energy consumption during network construction phase; or (iii) their network structure models are based on concentric corona, instead of clustering structure. A new approach to improve Energy is still an open challenge which needs to be addressed in the IoT network.

Papers:

1) Reliable and secure data transfer in IoT networks

2) LISA: Lightweight context-aware IoT service architecture

3) EnergIoT: A solution to improve network lifetime of IoT devices

4) An Efficient QoS Support for Ubiquitous Networks

5) A method of developing an agent based ubiquitous node monitoring protocol


Security of User Devices

Establishing light-weight cryptographic keys management for Implemented Medical Devices

  • There are several works on cryptography approaches that may be suitable for resource-constrained devices such as Implemented Medical Devices (IMD). However, most of these solutions do not tackle the important challenge of establishing (and managing) cryptographic keys in these devices. A novel key management protocol would be to combine cryptography and biometrics to establish a key. Each individual biometrics has two parts: a unique part, which is usually used for authentication purposes, and a random part, which could be used to generate cryptographic keys. As the size of the implemented medical devices are small and they are resource constraints, it would be a good idea to use the biometrics randomness level to generate the key.

Physical layer security in 5G: Key generation and Radio Frequency (RF) fingerprinting

  • 5G aims to provide the low latency and high throughput with fast and efficient security features. For example, the strict latency requirements for safety-critical messages should be less than 200 milliseconds in v2X communication. Hence, symmetric key encryption algorithms are preferred because of their faster performance than asymmetric and hybrid encryption algorithms. However, symmetric algorithms require pre-shared keys, hence key generation is of utmost importance in 5G . Similarly, identifying device authenticity is very crucial in 5G networks. Here, Radio Frequency (RF) fingerprinting could be used for identifying devices in 5G networks. Moreover, RF fingerprinting is used to extract unique features caused by hardware and manufacturing inconsistencies from wireless signal transmissions. Subsequently, the unique features are used to identify devices automatically by exploiting variations in the transmitted signal.


Papers:

1) A noble double dictionary based ecg compression technique for ioth

2) Performance Analysis of a Priority based Resource Allocation Scheme in Ubiquitous Networks.