Special Talks by Invited Speakers and Panel Discussions to Highlight Future of Cybersecurity ��

Khalifa University hosted top research scientists that presented flagship activities and discussed current challenges of interest for the UAE and the international community in incorporating advanced machine learning techniques into the next generation of intelligent systems and mobile networks at the third Center for Cyber-Physical Systems (C2PS) Symposium.��

The symposium titled “Next Generation Secure Networks and Systems” was held at Khalifa University Main Campus on 20 June 2022. Experts, from industry and academia, discussed how to provide advanced distributed services at unprecedented scale, with low latency and high throughput, while guaranteeing data protection, robustness in the face of attacks, and resilience to recover from failures.��

Prof. Dr. Ernesto Damiani, Director, C2PS, said: “We are delighted to organize this symposium to highlight the need to adopt and standardize advanced solutions to ensure cybersecurity for the next generation of intelligent systems and mobile networks. We believe presentations by visiting experts will benefit UAE industry stakeholders and those involved in research of relevant systems.”��

The Keynote speech on “Edge Intelligence over Wireless: Present and Future” was delivered by Dr. Mehdi Bennis, Head of the Intelligent Connectivity and Networks/Systems Group (ICON) Faculty of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, Center for Wireless Communications, University of Oulu, Finland. The day’s events included invited talks by top speakers including Dr. Merouane Debbah, Chief Researcher, AI Cross-Center Unit and Digital Science Research Center at the Technology Innovation Institute (TII), Dr. Ticky Thakkar, Chief Researcher, Secure Systems Research Center (TII), and Dr. Antonio Lioy, Professor of Computer Security at Politecnico di Torino, as well as technical presentations by C2PS researchers. A panel discussion on “Securing Intelligent Cyber-Physical Systems” was moderated by Dr. Damiani.

Other speakers from C2PS included researchers and faculty members from Khalifa University, Dr. Chan Yeun, Dr. Naoufel Werghi, Dr. Rabeb Mizouni, Dr. Hadi Otrok, and Dr. Paschalis C. Sofotasios, and Dr. Hanane Lamaazi.

C2PS is part of the overall research line under the Robotics and Intelligent Systems Institute. C2PS research covers key areas like edge-cloud computation and blockchain, mobile network and 5G, data analytics and applied artificial intelligence, as well as cybersecurity and privacy.

Clarence Michael
English Editor Specialist
20 June 2022

The post Khalifa University’s C2PS Symposium to Focus on Next Generation of Secure Mobile Networks and Intelligent Systems appeared first on Khalifa University.

An Agenda for Establishing Secure and Resilient Smart Cities

by Dr. Steve Griffiths

The Rise of Smart Cities��

Today more than half of the world’s population lives in cities, and by 2050 this percentage is expected to rise to nearly 70 percent. In parallel to rapid growth in urbanization, technological progress has led to the mass proliferation of digital information about people, places, and things that can be rapidly transmitted and analyzed with increasingly powerful networking technologies and analytical tools. This digital proliferation is synonymous with the internet-of-things, or IoT, and has converged with urbanization to create the paradigm of “smart” cities.

A smart city is not just technologically advanced; it is a platform for the sustainable and inclusive enhancement of nearly all aspects of society. However, achieving such positive outcomes as smart cities evolve is not a simple task.����

The Evolution of Smart Cities��

While urbanization and technology have laid the foundation for smart cities, the COVID-19 pandemic that emerged in 2020 may ultimately shape long-term implementations.��

As a result of social distancing mandates implemented to mitigate disease spread, smart city technologies and services for healthcare, work, education, retail, finance, security, entertainment, food services, mobility, and essentially any other activity requiring human interaction have undergone both acceleration and transformation.

Although the fundamental architecture of smart cities remains centered around an IoT foundation upon which applications are built for defined use cases, the use cases themselves have both evolved and accelerated in their implementation.��

In healthcare alone, activities such as telemedicine, contact tracing, public health messaging, mobility pattern analysis, and robotic patient care have emerged and begun to transform the notion of healthcare delivery from one of in-person interaction to one of digital engagement.��

Likewise, urban transportation is seeing significant changes due to changing social practices resulting from the pandemic and government policies being implemented for pandemic recovery. Digital technologies will play a key role in these changes as efforts to reestablish demand for public transportation increasingly focus on flexible transit scheduling and planning and the development of multimodal digital platforms that integrate public transportation with bikes, scooters, ride-hailing, and other mobility modes.��

In short, even the most established smart cities face the innovation challenge of re-imagining city operations for a new era of heightened concerns for health and resiliency, the latter of which additionally factors into climate change considerations. Similar to the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change is now generally recognized as a globally disruptive and destructive issue that must be mitigated through increased government efforts that include the design, implementation, and operation of smart cities.��

While the noted trend towards increased city intelligence through digitalization affords many opportunities for improving the lives of citizens, it also creates a number of security concerns.��

The rapid growth in digital information collection, storage, and use has opened up multiple new attack surfaces for cyber-terrorism, cyber-warfare, and cyber-crime. While cyber-terrorism and cyber-warfare often have social and political motivations, cyber-crime is tied largely to commercial and economic interests and can impart significant financial costs on victims. Indeed, the financial impact of cyber-crimes is expected to amount to as much as US$6 trillion in 2021 considering damage and destruction of data, stolen money, lost productivity, theft of intellectual property, theft of personal and financial data, embezzlement, fraud, post-attack disruption to business operations, forensic investigation, restoration and deletion of hacked data and systems and/or reputational harm.��

This considerable cost is expected to rise to as much as US$10.5 trillion by 2025 as the storage of digital data rises in the coming years. The accumulation of digital data has only hastened as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic as the extent of consumer online interactions has been accelerated by three to four years and the extent of business product and service digitalization has been accelerated by six to ten years.����

The rapid, and now accelerated, pace of digital activity places a great burden on smart city infrastructure as operational technologies (OT) and information technologies (IT) converge to offer new services and capabilities. Legacy OT systems that are not secure combined with the proliferation of novel, but insecure, digital devices combine to make cybersecurity and cyber resilience urgent for smart cities. Preservation of the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information in cyberspace coupled with the capacity for rapid recovery from cyber incidents must sit at the top of cyber secure and cyber resilient smart city agendas.��

A Forward-Looking Agenda for Smart Cities����

The sharing of international expertise, technologies, and best practices can play an important role in achieving cyber secure and cyber resilient smart cities. The United Arab Emirates, Singapore, and Israel are three highly urbanized countries that are aligned in their ambitions for innovation and security in the urban context. While each country scores highly in international innovation rankings, Singapore is particularly advanced in smart city technology innovation while Israel is a global leader in cyber security innovation.��

The UAE has rapidly built smart city visibility, particularly related to developments in the emirates of Abu Dhabi and Dubai, and has visible initiatives to ensure that these cities are cyber secure and resilient, including the 2020 formation of a Cybersecurity Council headed by a recently appointed government Head of Cyber Security.��

Among emirate level initiatives, Dubai has established a Cyber Security Strategy and in Abu Dhabi, the Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC) was formed in 2020 and has set forth a research and development strategy that clearly puts cybersecurity at the forefront by including cryptography, digital security, and secure systems as three of seven top priority research areas for the emirate.����

An agenda for smart city collaboration among the UAE, Singapore and Israel would certainly involve the exchange of best practices regarding legal and regulatory frameworks as well as engagement in technology investment and trade.��

However, ecosystem development is what underpins long-term sustainability and hence international collaboration should further entail targeted initiatives addressing human capital, R&D, and innovation. Human capital development is very important given the growing shortage of skilled cyber security manpower. R&D supports the development of human capital and further brings value to the development of cutting-edge approaches to smart city services, security, and resiliency.��

R&D topics of particular merit within the cyber security context include the protection of edge devices, application of artificial intelligence techniques, application of blockchain, and in the coming years, the implementation of quantum technologies. Innovation further builds on human capital and R&D advances to establish commercially viable new technologies tailored to applications.

On this latter point, R&D and innovation collaboration may focus on specific smart city sectors of common interest and growing importance. Given that both healthcare and transportation are being re-imagined as a result of COVID-19, focused initial collaboration efforts in these domains, for instance, could lead to large rewards for all involved.��

Urbanization and technological trends make the rise of smart cities inevitable. As discussed in this paper, however, smart cities will inherently face threats and challenges. Collaboration among countries that have common interests in securing a successful future for their smart cities can help mitigate these threats. The UAE, Singapore, and Israel are three such countries that can reap the benefits of collaboration through a holistic partnership that addresses human capital, R&D, and innovation while taking into consideration applications with both near and long-term importance.��

The full conference session to which the story relates is available online, here:

Dr. Steve Griffiths is the Senior Vice President of Research and Development and Professor of Practice at Khalifa University.��

The post The Role of Tech-Building Resilience through Smart Cities and Cybersecurity appeared first on Khalifa University.

As our cities become ‘smarter’ and increasingly connected by Internet of Things (IoT) devices that collect and transmit data every second, governments across the world are figuring out the best way to keep this new IoT infrastructure secure and sustainable.

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In the UAE, the Technology Innovation Institute (TII) – part of the Abu Dhabi Government’s Advanced Technology Research Council, which oversees research in the emirate – is partnering up with Khalifa University on a number of strategic research projects in cryptography, digital security, and secure communication, to help the country develop efficient and secure communications infrastructure.

Seven projects have been funded by TII as part of this partnership, each spanning a period of years across various topics.

Project 1: Energy-Aware IoT Devices

To have a powerful communications infrastructure, IoT devices need to communicate sustainably in an energy-efficient manner. The short battery lifetime in most IoT devices, however, still pose a major design challenge. In response, researchers are turning their attention to developing energy-aware, self-sustaining devices that can harvest and recycle energy from various sources.

One such technology under development is BackCom, which has emerged as a new communications paradigm for low-power wireless networks. BackCom is based on the concept that a transmitter sends data to its receiver by backscattering ambient signals, consuming significantly less power than traditional transceivers.

BackCom systems suffer from several drawbacks though, which a team from Khalifa University aims to solve by integrating radio frequency-powered transmission systems and optimizing them for network scenarios.

Dr. Sami Muhaidat, Professor, Dr. Paschalis Sofotasios, Assistant Professor, Dr. Lina Bariah, Postdoctoral Fellow, and Dr. Ernesto Damiani, Professor, Senior Director of the Robotics and Intelligent Systems Institute and Director of the Center for Cyber-Physical Systems (C2PS), will develop scalable solutions that can accommodate power-constrained wireless mesh networks (networks where a group of devices act as a single Wi-Fi network) with protocols that are energy aware and security systems that are lightweight, among other solutions to these challenges.

Project 2: Machine Learning to Optimize IoT Connectivity

Another project looking at wireless mesh networks and IoT devices aims to use machine learning to optimize IoT connectivity. Dr. Muhaidat, Dr. Sofotasios, Dr. Bariah, and Dr. Damiani are joined by Dr. Hany Elgala, Assistant Professor from the University of Albany, to address key challenges in mobile wireless mesh networks, with particular emphasis on unmanned aerial vehicle networks.

Current wireless technologies cannot meet the demands of the envisioned IoT where devices are more reliable with higher data-rates, extended coverage and better security. Machine learning techniques can address the various design challenges of mobile wireless mesh networks, and deep learning, a subset of machine learning, allows machines to learn complex functions with high accuracy and online self-optimization.

Project 3: Detecting Malware in Smart Phones

Also investigating machine learning are Dr. Damiani, Gabriele Gianini, Senior Researcher, and Hussam AlHammadi, Research Scientist, who will design a malware detection engine for Android phones based on machine learning techniques.

Data collected and routed by Android phones are targets for malware. Attacks targeting mobile phones often inject sleepers, malware modules that use open and cover channels, piggybacking legitimate protocols for infiltration and exfiltration (when malware carries out an unauthorized data transfer from a computer).

While periodically checking Android configuration can detect installed exfiltration code, only external monitoring systems, which continuously analyze the behavior of Android and onboard applications, can hope to detect and alleviate data leakage as it happens. The research team will design an exfiltration detection engine for Android phones based on machine learning to detect when exfiltration occurs.

Project 4: Protecting UAVs

Another team is conducting research on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). UAVs can play a vital role in shaping the future of wireless networks, which is why protecting the networks from malicious parties is crucial.

UAV networks contain elements which make them more vulnerable to several types of attacks, since a security issue in any one element may impact the entire system. Some attacks could be performed by directly tampering with the physical elements in the networks, such as batteries, or realized through malware and software.

Dr. Arafat Al-Dweik, Associate Professor, Dr. Baker Mohammed, Associate Professor, and Dr. Yousuf Alsalami, Assistant Professor, are evaluating the feasibility of adopting physical layer security (PLS) techniques for UAV-aided wireless communications networks. PLS exploits the intrinsic characteristics of wireless channels, such as noise, fading, and interference, to secure the communications. Using PLS, the team aims to design a novel communications system with high reliability, security and anti-jamming capabilities for use with UAVs.

Project 5: Protecting Drones

Further targeting drone vulnerabilities, Dr. Abdulhadi Shoufan, Associate Professor, Dr. Faisal Shah Khan, Assistant Professor, Dr. Damiani, and Hussam Al-Hammadi, Research Scientist, aim to provide a holistic security analysis of drone operations in the context of unmanned traffic management systems to form the basis of the security functions and objectives which should be implemented on the drone.

Flying a drone is associated with security, privacy, and safety risks which have shaped the progress of this technology over the last few years. Security is an especially critical requirement for drone operations because cyber and physical attacks on drones do not only present a threat to information security, but also to people, assets and infrastructure.

The first challenge in securing drone operations is understanding all the vulnerabilities of this technology. Once understood, the security objectives will be implemented using a dedicated system-on-chip, which will support important security functions.

Project 6: Securing Wireless Sensor Networks with Hash Chains

IoT technology is accompanied by numerous cybersecurity challenges that must be addressed to ensure the security and privacy of the network. Many possible solutions have been proposed and many of them address important fundamental security requirements such as authentication, confidentiality and authorization. However, no proposed security protocol completely satisfies all the cybersecurity requirements of an IoT network. Dr. Chan Yeob Yeun, Associate Professor, Dr. Yousof Al Hammadi, Assistant Professor and Dean of Graduate Studies, and Dr. Damiani are looking to provide more secure and flexible solutions for wireless sensor networks using a combination of high-level and low-level key chains.

Comprising hundreds or thousands of small devices each with sensing, processing, and communication capabilities, wireless sensor networks have varied applications, but due to their distributed nature and deployment in remote areas, these networks are vulnerable to numerous security threats. The research team will use hash chain techniques – a method to produce many one-time keys from a single key or password – to ensure continuity of authentication and enhance the security of the network.

Project 7: Securing Data on the Cloud

The final project considers cybersecurity in the cloud. A field-programmable gate array (FGPA) is an integrated circuit designed to be configured by a customer or designer after manufacturing.

The main security risk to using FGPAs in the cloud stems from the multi-user environment, where several users may be sharing the same physical hardware platform, with the possibility of one user sniffing the bitstream file.

A sniffing attack involves the theft or interception of data by capturing the network traffic using a sniffer, an application aimed at capturing network packets. When data is transmitted across networks, if the data packets are not encrypted, the data can be read using a sniffer. An attacker can analyze the network and gain information to eventually crash or corrupt the network or read the communications happening within. Encryption may be a possible defense, with Dr. Ibrahim Elfadel, Professor, Dr. Abdulhadi Shoufan, Associate Professor, looking at cryptography to secure the information on a cloud using FGPAs with the intent that the security will be robust against even quantum computers.��

Jade Sterling
Science Writer
10 February 2021

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