Thread (network protocol)

Abstract: Extending an Internet subnet by connecting resource-constrained nodes (e.g., embedded sensors and actuators) over multiple wireless hops is necessary to support the future Internet of Things (IoT). RPL, the IPv6 routing standard for low-power and lossy networks, tried to achieve this goal but has not seen wide adoption in practice. As an alternative, Thread is a recently standardized low-power network protocol for IoT, driven by the Thread group, an industry consortium led by Google/Nest. We provide a comparative analysis of the technical aspects of RPL and Thread based on their specifications, explaining why using Thread, as opposed to RPL, may make sense for the future Internet. Specifically, the fundamental differences between RPL and Thread are their respective scopes and multihop network architectures, which result in Thread's unique design and advantages over RPL. Lastly, we evaluate Thread in an indoor multihop wireless testbed using OpenThread, an official open source implementation of Thread. This work serves as the first analysis of the Thread protocol in academia.

Abstract: Internet of Things provides complicated value-added services to mobile intelligent terminal users. Different sensors collect various data from the users and transmit the data to the mobile intelligent terminal for storage. Consequently, a great amount of personal and sensitive information related to these rich and colorful applications is stored in the mobile intelligent terminal. Mobile intelligent terminals have become the prominent target of network attackers. Security breach and privacy leakage severely thread the application development of the Internet of Things. We present a privacy-preserving implicit authentication framework using users’ behavior features sensed by the mobile intelligent terminal based on the artificial intelligence methodology. More precisely, we first summarize the security and privacy requirements for the security authentication of the mobile intelligent terminal. Then, we present a privacy-preserving implicit authentication framework using the cosine similarity and partial homomorphic public-key encryption scheme. Finally, a performance evaluation of the proposed protocol is conducted. The result shows that the communication and computation efficiency of our protocol is more efficient than other related protocols.

Abstract: Proximity service (ProSe), using the geographic location and device information by considering the proximity of mobile devices, enriches the services we use to interact with people and things aroun ...

Abstract: Motivated by the proliferation of wireless building automation systems (BAS) and increasing security-awareness among BAS operators, in this paper, we propose a taxonomy for the security assessment of BASs. We apply the proposed taxonomy to Thread, an emerging native IP-based protocol for BAS. Our analysis reveals a number of potential weaknesses in the design of Thread. We propose potential solutions for mitigating several identified weaknesses and discuss their efficacy. We also provide suggestions for improvements in future versions of the standard. Overall, our analysis shows that Thread has a well-designed security control for the targeted use case, making it a promising candidate for communication in next generation BASs.