An Braeken

• PhD Applied Sciences
• Professor at Vrije Universiteit Brussel

Background: Acoustic signals are complex, with temporal, spectral, and amplitude variations. Their non-stationarity complicates analysis, as traditional methods often fail to capture their richness. Environmental factors like reflections, refractions, and noise further distort signals. While advanced techniques such as adaptive filtering and deep l...

Emerging edge devices are transforming the Internet of Things (IoT) by enabling more responsive and efficient interactions between physical objects and digital networks. These devices support diverse applications, from health-monitoring wearables to environmental sensors, by moving data processing closer to the source. Traditional IoT systems rely...

The shift from 5G to 6G networks is anticipated to significantly advance network slicing. This progress is driven by the growing demand for next-generation applications and services. However, these advancements must be managed within the constraints of limited resources. This evolution opens up opportunities for resource sharing through emerging ma...

Emerging edge devices are transforming the Internet of Things (IoT) by enabling more responsive and efficient interactions between physical objects and digital networks. These devices support diverse applications, from health-monitoring wearables to environmental sensors, by moving data processing closer to the source. Traditional IoT systems relie...

Open Radio Access Network (ORAN) is considered the next-generation RAN, which enables several features such as network flexibility, interoperability, and cost efficiency. Leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) techniques has become commonplace in ORAN applications. The modularized nature of the ORAN architecture and the l...

Embedded Operating Systems (OSs) are often developed in the C programming language. Developers justify this choice by the performance that can be achieved, the low memory footprint, and the ease of mapping hardware to software, as well as the strong adoption by industry of this programming language. The downside is that C is prone to security vulne...

Road condition monitoring schemes allow a severe reduction of traffic queues and drastically improve road safety. In these schemes, authorized vehicles communicate the current road condition via a Road Side Unit (RSU) or fog node. The reaction time for these schemes greatly improves in case the RSUs are capable of locally determining the validity o...

The rapid evolution of heterogeneous applications signifies the requirement for network slicing to cater to diverse network requirements. Network Functions (NFs), which are the essential elements of network slices, are required to communicate with each other securely to facilitate network services. Certificates are the established method to authent...

Industry has been the tireless engine of prosperity. The introduction of the Internet acts as a booster to this engine, but, unfortunately, where money goes, crime follows. Big corporations spend a lot of money to secure their IT systems. Although Internet of Things (IoT) devices are not as big nor powerful as these IT systems, their power comes fr...

Elliptic curve cryptography is a widely deployed technology for securing digital communication. It is the basis of many cryptographic primitives such as key agreement protocols, digital signatures, and zero-knowledge proofs. Fast elliptic curve cryptography relies on heavily optimised modular arithmetic operations, which are often tailored to speci...

Group communications play a crucial role in enhancing the quality of service (QoS) of Internet of Things (IoT) networks, enabling efficient information dissemination while minimizing resource utilization. However, ensuring information security and privacy in IoT group communications necessitates the implementation of an efficient and lightweight ke...

The Internet of Things (IoT) facilitates the integration of diverse devices, leading to the formation of networks such as Low-power Wireless Personal Area Networks (LoWPANs). These networks have inherent constraints that make header and payload compression an attractive solution to optimise communication. In this work, we evaluate the performance o...

This paper presents an authentication and key agreement protocol for users who want to have access to constrained sensor nodes deployed in the field, e.g. doctor with healthcare nodes of patient. Both sensor and user device provide direct multi-factor authentication relying on physical unclonable functions and biometrics respectively. In addition,...

The Internet of Things (IoT) is rapidly spreading across a wide range of applications because it is a critical technology for overcoming interoperability and heterogeneity barriers in many applications. IoT is increasingly being deployed in a distributed setting because of the vast number of devices and the physical dispersal of many use cases. Bec...

The fifth generation (5G) is now widely used to access network services due to the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) and mobile devices. To secure 5G communication, the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) organization created the 5G-Authentication and Key Agreement (AKA) protocol. Security evaluations have found a number of problems...

The Internet of Drones (IoD) manages and coordinates communications between drones in Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Ensuring security and privacy in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) networks, i.e., drones, is essential to protect data from cyber attacks. In this context, providing authentication is a major challenge due to the fact that dro...

The advent of the 6G era brings forth unprecedented challenges and opportunities in network management and orchestration. As networks become more complex and diverse, there is a growing need for efficient resource allocation, security, trust, and service delivery. In the 6G era, blockchain technology can significantly enhance network management and...

The metaverse, which consists of several universes called verses, is predicted to be the Internet of the future. Recently, this idea has received a lot of discussions, but not enough attention has been paid to the security concerns of these virtual worlds. Primarily when the user and platform server communicate with each other and share sensitive i...

The exponential growth in connected devices with Internet-of-Things (IoT) and next-generation wireless networks requires more advanced and dynamic spectrum access mechanisms. Blockchain-based approaches to Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA) seem efficient and robust due to their inherited characteristics such as decentralization, immutability and transp...

Controller-Pilot Data Link Communications (CPDLC) are rapidly replacing voice-based Air Traffic Control (ATC) communications worldwide. Being digital, CPDLC is highly resilient and bandwidth efficient, which makes it the best choice for traffic-congested airports. Although CPDLC initially seems to be a perfect solution for modern-day ATC operations...

Serverless computing is a recent deployment model for cloud, edge and fog computing platforms, which ultimate goal is to provide cost reduction and scalability enhancement with no additional deployment overhead. The main implementation of this model is Functions-as-a-Service (FaaS): Developers deploy modular functions, which are typically event-dri...

Network slicing is considered as one of the key technologies in future telecommunication networks as it can split the physical network into a number of logical networks tailored to diverse purposes that allow users to access a variety of services speedily. The fifth-generation (5G) mobile network can support variety of applications by using network...

Open RAN (ORAN, O-RAN) represents a novel industry-level standard for RAN (Radio Access Network), which defines interfaces that support inter-operation between vendors' equipment and offer network flexibility at a lower cost. Open RAN integrates the benefits and advancements of network softwarization and Artificial Intelligence to enhance the opera...

Internet of Things (IoT) has proved its applicability in numerous domains, such as healthcare, agriculture, automobile, industrial production, logistics, and supply chain management. Looking at the current trend, we expect a massive proliferation of such IoT devices all around us. However, one of the issues with the widespread use of IoT is the inc...

Fog and dew computing represent relatively new computing paradigms in the literature. The main idea is to offload the computation processes from the device to a more nearby fog or dew server, who further forwards it to the central server. In the case of dew computing, the dew server is considered to lose connection with the central server and shoul...

The next generation of mobile communication systems must be secured because of the ongoing entrance of numerous security attacks. Thus, to secure the underlying network, the 3GPP has designed an authentication and key agreement protocol, 5G-AKA, to safely and stably access the mobile services. However, some recent observations indicate that 5G-AKA...

We present a novel approach to privacy preserving electronic road pricing (ERP) based on on-board units (OBUs) and zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs), and without any need for tamper-proof elements. Since our approach is software-only and protocol-enforced , it can be rapidly deployed on off-the-shelve or even pre-existing hardware, such as a smartph...

Open RAN (ORAN, O-RAN) represents a novel industry-level standard for RAN (Radio Access Network), which defines interfaces that support inter-operation between vendors' equipment and offer network flexibility at a lower cost. Open RAN integrates the benefits and advancements of network softwarization and Artificial Intelligence to enhance the opera...

One of the primary authentication mechanisms defined for the 5G system is the 5G-Authentication and Key Agreement (5G-AKA) protocol. It is set to be used in the next generation of mobile communications but has several serious flaws such as privacy issues, vulnerability to traceability attacks, and has de-synchronization problem. To deal with these...

Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) is a lightweight publish/subscribe protocol, which is currently one of the most popular application protocols in Internet of Things (IoT) thanks to its simplicity in use and its scalability. The secured version, MQTTS, which combines MQTT with the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol, has several shortc...

Abstract: Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are becoming increasingly prevalent in numerous fields. Industrial applications and natural-disaster-detection systems need fast and reliable data transmission, and in several cases, they need to be able to cope with changing traffic conditions. Thus, time-slotted channel hopping (TSCH) offers high reliabil...

Dew computing is complementing fog and cloud computing by offering the first layer of connection for any IoT device in the field. Typically, data are stored locally in the dew servers in cases when for instance Internet is not available. Therefore, dedicated authentication and key agreement protocols need to be developed in order to guarantee secur...

Devices that populate the Internet of Things (IoT) are typically constrained with respect to energy consumption. When the data that are processed, stored and/or communicated by these devices need to be secured, low-energy security mechanisms have to be designed and implemented. Related work mainly concentrates either on low-energy security algorith...

In 2015, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) announced Keccak as the new primitive to be used in SHA 3, not replacing but complementing SHA 2. The Keccak primitive, based on a sponge construction, has flexible parameters that can be controlled by the user to fit the needs of the application. However, the SHA 3 standard constra...

To enable today’s industrial automation, a significant number of sensors and actuators are required. In order to obtain trust and isolate faults in the data collected by this network, protection against authenticity fraud and nonrepudiation is essential. In this paper, we propose a very efficient symmetric-key-based security mechanism to establish...

Upgradation of technologies for sustainable smart cities has led to rapid growth in Internet of Things (IoT) applications, including e-healthcare services wherein smart devices collect patient data and deliver it remotely to the servers in real-time. Despite its enormous benefits, IoT in healthcare has not received much attention primarily due to t...

Recent evolution of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) empowers the classical manufacturing model with cloud computing integration for Industry 4.0. Cloud integration advances the capabilities of manufacturing systems with cloud-based controlling and real-time process monitoring, which is renowned as Cloud Manufacturing (CM). However, cloud i...

Driven by the increased consciousness in data ownership and privacy, zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) have become a popular tool to convince a third party of the truthfulness of a statement without disclosing any further information. As ZKPs are rather complex to design, frameworks that transform high-level languages into ZKPs have been proposed. We pr...

Identity-based identification (IBI) schemes allow a prover to provide entity identification, based on its unique identity. This paper provides the first non-trivial IBI scheme with implicit certification by using the Elliptic Curve Qu Vanstone (ECQV) implicit certification scheme. In contrast to the conventional identity-based schemes, the implicit...

Internet of Things (IoT) devices have enveloped our surroundings and have been increasingly deployed in many domains. Even though the IoT has generated unprecedented opportunities, the poorly secured design of IoT devices makes them an easy target for cyber attacks. Aimed at securing IoT devices, Remote Attestation (RA) is a security technique that...

Research into a pandemic like Covid-19 needs a tremendous input of patient histories and characteristics. Patients and doctors are only willing to share these sensitive data when they are ensured that the data are solely used by legitimate research laboratories. Asymmetric group key agreement (AGKA) protocols provide a good cryptographic primitive...

Device-to-device (D2D) communication in 5G can offload large amounts of data from the core network and offer smaller delays in communication, making advantage of the proximity between the devices. Specific attention should be given to a dedicated authentication process as there are significant challenges with respect to security and privacy. We pro...

More and more applications are nowadays distributed and rely on collaborative input. Group key protocols, enabling the construction of a common shared key, are the most evident primitive to efficiently provide the required authentication and confidentiality in the group. Asymmetric group key agreement (AGKA) protocols allow the construction of a co...

We are witnessing the evolution from Internet of Things (IoT) to Internet of Vehicles (IoV). Internet connected vehicles can sense, communicate, analyze and make decisions. Rich vehicle-related data collection allows to apply artificial intelligence (AI) such as machine learning and deep learning (DL) to develop advanced services in Intelligent Tra...

Typical wearable devices use a dedicated mobile phone as relay node to transfer the collected sensor data to a server. However, such relay nodes can be faulty or inactive due to various reasons, leading to interruptions of the communication link. To mitigate this challenge, we propose a novel security-enhanced emergency situation detection system,...

Nearly most of the organizations store massive amounts of data in large databases for research, statistics, and mining purposes. In most cases, much of the accumulated data contain sensitive information belonging to individuals which may breach privacy. Hence, ensuring privacy in big data is considered a very important issue. The concept of privacy...

The availability of safety has always been a challenge in all fields of computing and networking, and the development of reliable security measures for low operating power systems has been a continuous task for researchers. This paper focuses on Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems, whose market is tremendously growing due to the increasin...

Remote patient monitoring is one of the cornerstones to enable Ambient Assisted Living. Here, a set of devices provide their corresponding input, which should be carefully aggregated and analysed to derive health-related conclusions. In the new Fifth-Generation (5G) networks, Internet of Things (IoT) devices communicate directly to the mobile netwo...

The computer vision community has paid much attention to the development of visible image super-resolution (SR) using deep neural networks (DNNs) and has achieved impressive results. The advancement of non-visible light sensors, such as acoustic imaging sensors, has attracted much attention, as they allow people to visualize the intensity of sound...

The computer vision community has paid much attention to the development of visible image super-resolution (SR) using deep neural networks (DNNs) and has achieved impressive results. The advancement of non-visible light sensors, such as acoustic imaging sensors, has attracted much attention, as they allow people to visualize the intensity of sound...

The exponential growth in the number of Internet of things (IoT) devices and their potential in many applications in a vast number of domains fuelled the development of different IoT platforms, supported by big companies and industry groups. These platforms are able to provide reliable services to IoT devices and reduce the time to market for the t...

This paper describes a security protocol and proof-of-concept implementation for wearable medical sensor devices that are deployed in hospitals. The sensor device measures the patient’s vital sign parameters and sends them to the hospital server, such that the data can be processed and stored in the EMR (Electronic Medical Record) of the patient. T...

Every month, several new protocols are popping up, comparing themselves with a few others and claiming to outperform the whole state of the art. The most popular domain of protocols is the one for authentication in a client–server architecture for which both symmetric key- and public key-based protocols are being proposed. The usage of public key-b...

Smart buildings benefit from IEEE 802.15.4e time slotted channel hopping (TSCH) medium access for creating reliable and power aware wireless sensor and actuator networks (WSANs). As in these networks, sensors are supposed to communicate to each other and with actuators, IPv6 multicast forwarding is seen as a valuable means to reduce traffic. A prom...

Fog computing improves efficiency and reduces the amount of bandwidth to the cloud. In many use cases, the internet of things (IoT) devices do not know the fog nodes in advance. Moreover, as the fog nodes are often placed in open publicly available places, they can be easily captured. Therefore, it should be ensured that even if the key material is...

Acoustic cameras allow the visualization of sound sources using microphone arrays and beamforming techniques. The required computational power increases with the number of microphones in the array, the acoustic images resolution, and in particular, when targeting real-time. Such a constraint limits the use of acoustic cameras in many wireless senso...

Sharing of students' credentials is a necessary and integral process of an education ecosystem that comprises various stakeholders like students, schools, companies, professors and the governmental authorities. As of today, all these stakeholders have to put-in an enormous amount of efforts to ensure the authenticity and privacy of students' creden...

This chapter contains the state of the art of the latest security issues of cloud computing as well as security issues of internet of things (IoT) applications. It discusses the integration of IoT platforms with cloud computing services, security of the hosted data, intrusion and anomaly detection techniques used to detect attacks in virtualized ne...

There is a global hype in the development of digital healthcare infrastructure to cater the massive elderly population and infectious diseases. The digital facilitation is expected to ensure the patient privacy, scalability, and data integrity on the sensitive life critical healthcare data, while aligning to the global healthcare data protection st...

The recent advances in mobile devices and wireless communication sector transformed Mobile Augmented Reality (MAR) from science fiction to reality. Among the other MAR use cases, the incorporation of this MAR technology in the healthcare sector can elevate the quality of diagnosis and treatment for the patients. However, due to the highly sensitive...

Data is central to the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem. With billions of devices connected, most of the current IoT systems are using centralized cloud-based data sharing systems, which will be difficult to scale up to meet the demands of future IoT systems. The involvement of such a third-party service provider requires also trust from both the...

This theme issue will elaborate on the opportunities, challenges, and solutions to be offered by combining blockchain and cyberphysical systems for different application domains. Cyberphysical systems (CPSs) combine physical objects or systems with integrated computing facilities and data storage. Such CPSs can be interconnected in networks, within...

Industry 4.0 has promised to bring new digital ecosystem for various key industrial applications in terms of providing secure, intelligent, autonomous and self-adaptive industrial IoT (IIoT) networks. Such industrial systems will be relatively more complex because of the involvement of the vast number of the heterogeneous sensors/devices and divers...

Driven by the requirement of increasing performance and flexibility, networks are being softwarized by paradigms such as software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV). These solutions reduce the complexity and the specialization of hardware devices, by extracting the inherently distributed control plane of forwarding n...

The storage of data in the cloud is critical for business and private users to protect their assets from any physically accessible and easily breakable hard disk. An important issue for cloud services is the privacy of the stored data at risk of a breach following an attack or the possibility that the cloud service provider may be tempted to sell d...

The recently standardised 5G AKA protocol, to be used in the next generation of mobile communications, possesses some severe shortcomings. In particular, different types of attacks, leaking parts of the identity, activity pattern and localisation of the user, have been proposed in literature. In this paper, we propose a new version of the 5G AKA pr...

Indoor localization based on ultrasound signals has been carried out by several research groups. Most of the techniques rely on a single ultrasound pulse ranging, where the Time of Flight between the ultrasound emitters and a receiver is computed. Ultrasound orthogonal modulation techniques have also been investigated and allow to compute the range...

Mobile and sensor related technologies are significantly revolutionizing the medical and healthcare sectors. In current healthcare systems, gadgets are the prominent way of acquiring medical services. However, the recent technological advancements in smart and ambient environments are offering users new ways to access the healthcare services withou...

Internet of Things(IoT) is a key topic of interest in modern communication context. The IoT interconnects millions and billions of devices through wireless communication. The wireless communication exposes the devices to massive security risks in different dimensions. The Public Key Infrastructure(PKI) is one of the promising solutions to eliminate...

Efficient authentication and key agreement protocols between two entities are required in many application areas. In particular, for client–server type of architectures, the client is mostly represented by a constrained device and thus highly efficient protocols are needed. We propose in this paper two protocols enabling the construction of a mutua...

The world transforms towards the intelligent information era by 2030. The key domains linked with human life such as healthcare, transport, entertainment, and smart cities are expected to elevate the quality of service with high-end user experience. Therefore, the telecommunication infrastructure has to meet unprecedented service level requirements...

Consider the situation of a patient carrying a body area network with sensors measuring different body characteristics. These data should be securely sent to the cloud and only retrievable by doctors authorized by the patient. Even the cloud service provider should not be able to derive the sensible data. In order to address this problem, this pape...

This chapter starts with an introduction on different methods to provide key establishment and authentication using symmetric key‐based mechanisms limited to hashing, xoring and encryption/decryption operations. Based on an idea coming from the context of multi‐server authentication, and already applied in several IoT contexts, we present a new key...

Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) is extensively applied in various security protocols for authentication and key management. ECC is a public key or asymmetric key cryptographic approach which is based on elliptic curve theory. ECC was introduced to minimize computational costs while providing equal and faster layers of security than other familiar...

In a connected smart grid, several kinds of sensors have been integrated in smart meters to measure energy usage and execute the control commands and/or instructions from the utility companies. This becomes possible through the digital processing and communications organized in the smart grid (SG) networks. As, a smart grid enables the two‐way comm...

One of the major trends in the development of the Internet is the one of ambient Internet of Things (IoT) and even more ambient Internet of Everything (IoE). In this case, the user seamlessly interacts with various systems and devices, which automatically adapt to the user's needs based on the surrounding context. To even further enhance the user e...

The Internet of things (IoT) is the network of the countless physical devices that have the possibility to connect and exchange data. Among the various security requirements, authentication to the IoT is the first step to prevent the impact of attackers. IoT Security offers an important guide into the development of the many authentication mechanis...

Key agreement between two constrained IoT devices that have never met each other is an essential feature to provide in order to establish trust among its users. Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) on a device represent a low‐cost primitive exploiting the unique random patterns in the device allowing it to generate a unique response for a given cha...

Internet of Things (IoT), together with fifth-generation (5G) mobile systems and related enabling communication technologies, constantly contributing for the enhancement in various industrial applications and driving towards the vision of complete industrial automation. In this context, both Blockchain and Edge computing are considered as promising...

Fog architectures are currently present in many applications. Constrained devices equipped with sensors produce measurements that will be sent to a nearby gateway, called the fog. The fog verifies, aggregates and forwards them to the server. Group authentication among these devices allows them to securely accept messages of the group members, resul...