Thesis defense - Secure internet-of-things integration into pervasive applications

We have the pleasure of inviting you to Arthur Desuert's thesis defense, which will take place on Monday, November 6, 2023 at 10:00 am in Amphitheater D030 at Esisar (50, Barthélémy de Laffemas Street, Building D).

The thesis in entitled: Secure internet-of-things integration into pervasive applications

It was conducted within the Laboratory of Conception and Integration of Systems and with the Trust chair, directed by Stéphanie Chollet, David Hély and Laurent Pion.

The jury members are:
– Pr. Philippe Roose, professor at the Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour, reporter
– Pr. Lilian Bossuet, professor at the Université Jean Monnet, reporter
– Pr. Philippe Lalanda, professor at the Université Grenoble Alpes, examiner
– Dr. Yoann Maurel, associate professor at the Université de Rennes, examiner

Abstract

Pervasive applications provide services to users while remaining invisible, requiring minimal attention from them. Accordingly, a good management of the devices heterogeneity and volatility is a prerequisite. Another topic of importance is the management of cybersecurity (hardware and software). It is for the upcoming years a major concern of pervasive computing to continue its deployment in sensitive domains such as home automation, smart cities, 4.0 Industry or smart health. Cybersecurity should be as transparent and unobtrusive as possible for novice applications users. This implies support for a wide range of connected devices with diverse characteristics, interfaces and security properties; ranging from well secured high-tech equipment to low-cost devices with less advanced security features. It must also be simple to use by developers of pervasive applications. They must be able to easily design applications capable of interacting in a secure manner with the connected devices at their disposal.

To meet these needs, my thesis proposes a new pervasive platform architecture whose main characteristics are the integration of security and its ease of use. The platform will act as an intermediary between the pervasive applications and the connected devices, hiding the heterogeneity of the latter from the applications and managing the communication security. In addition to offering a uniform interface using a service approach, the platform allows the applications to easily manage their security by evaluating the security quality of the provided services. This evaluation is synthesized in the form of different levels of security which are associated with the services. The applications can use those security levels to compare the services and to guide their selection. On the connected devices side, the platform aims at allowing the simple management of a set of communication protocols and the associated security configurations, with the support of classic protocols, such as HTTPS for example. Our platform makes it easy to add new protocols to stay up to date. We were able to test this functionality with the second main contribution of this thesis: a new lightweight authentication protocol based on a hardware fingerprint generation technology, the Physical Unclonable Functions (PUF). The protocol goal is to secure the connected devices at an affordable cost. To validate the relevance and proper functioning of these contributions, we designed concrete test scenarios based on the deployment of pervasive applications in home automation use-cases.

Keywords: Pervasives applications, Cybersecurity, Connected devices, Physical Unclonable Functions (PUF)