Research Projects

The main goal of this study is to investigate and design security schemes for different data and network protocols of 6TiSCH IoT technology to combat cyber attacks in industrial IoT applications. Current security designs rely on standard data encryption and message integrity algorithms, with some new developments in secured services like secured joining and object security. The main algorithms used for secure communication protocols and services include Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), Cipher Block Chaining - Message Authentication Code (CBC-MAC) security mode, Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA), Digital Signature Algorithm (DSA), and Elliptic Curve DSA (ECDSA). However, the wide heterogeneity of IoT devices and the severe limits in energy, communication, computation, and storage capabilities make it difficult to adopt standard security mechanisms. Insecure control message exchange in different layers can be exploited to launch cyber attacks such as cell depletion attack, energy depletion attack, and communication delay attack in 6TiSCH-based IoT applications. To address these challenges, three solutions are proposed: maintaining a list of authentic children of a parent to identify forged 6P ADD requests, developing a game theoretic model for energy depletion attack, and designing a trust model to mitigate communication delay attack in CoAP. These solutions aim to incorporate security into the design of each protocol in 6TiSCH and help protect against cyber threats in industrial IoT applications.