Burkhard Stiller

University of Zurich UZH · Department of Informatics IfI

Event tickets being sold in their electronic instances are subject to counterfeiting, profiteering, and black markets. Therefore, suitable service management mechanisms are required to overcome such deficits. This work designs, develops, and evaluates the approach of a Decentralized Ticketing platform—called DeTi—for managing the distribution of el...

The number of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) available in industrial environments is growing mainly due to the evolution of the Internet-of-Things (IoT) paradigm. In such a context, radio frequency spectrum sensing in industrial scenarios is one of the most interesting applications of CPS due to the scarcity of the spectrum. Despite the benefits of o...

Traditionally, data centers have been the preferred target for ransomware attacks. However, the increasing number of IoT (Internet-of-Things) devices managing valuable data is attracting the attention of cybercriminals and ransomware towards resource-constrained devices. So far, literature has demonstrated the suitability of monitoring the behavior...

Intents brought significant improvements in network management by the use of intent-level languages. Despite these improvements, intents are not yet fully integrated and deployed in most large-scale networks. As a result, network operators may still experience problems when deploying new intents, for instance, learning a vendor-specific language to...

The last two decades have experienced a steady rise in the production and deployment of sensing-and-connectivity-enabled electronic devices, replacing “regular” physical objects. The resulting Internet-of-Things (IoT) will soon become indispensable for many application domains. Smart objects are continuously being integrated within factories, citie...

Internet-of-Things (IoT) platforms are vulnerable to cyberattacks due to their exposition to the internet and the resource-constrained capabilities of their devices. Cyberattacks can be conducted by different malware families, being spyware and backdoor, two of the most relevant due to their impact on data handled by IoT devices. Traditional detect...

Cloud Radio Access Networks (Cloud-RANs) have recently emerged as a promising architecture to meet the increasing demands and expectations of future wireless networks. Such an architecture can enable dynamic and flexible network operations to address significant challenges, such as higher mobile traffic volumes and increasing network operation cost...

While wireless sensor networks (WSN) offer potential, their limited programmability and energy limitations determine operational challenges. Thus, a TinyIPFIX-based system was designed such that this application layer protocol is now used to exchange data in WSNs efficiently. The new prototype is based on the Espressif ESP32-WROOM-32D Internet-of-T...

Device fingerprinting combined with Machine and Deep Learning (ML/DL) report promising performance when detecting cyberattacks targeting data managed by resource-constrained spectrum sensors. However, the amount of data needed to train models and the privacy concerns of such scenarios limit the applicability of centralized ML/DL-based approaches. F...

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) is a novel paradigm using crowdsensing spectrum sensors to help with the management of spectrum scarcity. However, well-known vulnerabilities of resource-constrained spectrum sensors and the possibility of being manipulated by users with physical access complicate their protection against spectrum sensing...

The cyber insurance market is still in its infancy but growing fast. Novel models and standards for this particular insurance market are essential due to the use of modern IT (Information Technology) and since insurance providers need to create suitable models for customers.

This work specifies, implements, and evaluates access management based on face recognition. The system developed uses Internet-of-Things (IoT) for video surveillance, Artificial Intelligence (AI) for face recognition, and Blockchains (BC) for immutable permanent storage and provides excellent properties in terms of image quality, end-to-end delay,...

Blockchains (BC) serve as a chain of transactions persisted as backward-linked lists, while being created and maintained within a network of distributed nodes. Potential advances with BCs have reached various application areas beyond FinTech-oriented use cases. Since Internet-of-Things (IoT) based use cases being an important part of them, this cha...

While Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) offer potentials , their limited programmability and energy-limitations determine operational challenges. Thus, a TinyIPFIX-based system was designed, such that this application layer protocol is now usable to exchange data in WSNs efficiently. The system implementation in MicroPython is simple and efficient in...

As the number of blockchain (BC) platforms providing specific features increases, selecting a platform that fits all requirements needed for a specific case becomes a cumbersome task. For example, not only are BCs' technical details relevant, but also their intrinsic characteristics (e.g., cryptocurrency price) must be considered in selecting a BC...

For the protection of people and society against harm and health threats — especially in case of the COVID-19 pandemic — a variety of different disciplines needs to be involved. The data collection of basic and health-related data of individuals in today's highly mobile society does help to plan, protect, and identify next steps health authorities...

Although the first Blockchain (BC) was proposed about a decade ago, BC achievements from a technical and functional perspective are measurable, but still face open issues. Since IFIP’s Working Group 6.6 on the “Management of Networks and Distributed System” investigated BCs in various aspects, this contribution here summarizes and clarifies key cha...

Crowdsensing platforms allow sharing data, collected by devices of individuals, to achieve common objectives based on the analysis of shared information. Despite their benefits, these platforms also bring security threats that must be addressed to provide secure data and reliable services. In this context, device behavior fingerprinting becomes a k...

The heterogeneous nature of raw milk production, transportation, processing, transformation, and storage have been triggering concerns on the authenticity of dairy products. For the first time known, this work studied these concerns via interviews with consumers and producers of dairy products. Therefore, this paper introduces “NUTRIA” as a decentr...

Public Blockchains (BC) in support of Smart Contracts (SC), e.g., Ethereum, enable everyone to coordinate in a decentralized model to manage scarce and valuable resources,e.g., cryptocurrencies. Such BCs allow for the building of SCs that own resources and manage a set of permissions describing who is allowed to interact with these resources and wh...

Remote Electronic Voting (REV) systems allow voters to cast their votes in an uncontrolled, distributed environment. At the same time, the REV system must provide ballot privacy and verifiability of the final tally. Research has proposed REV schemes offering ballot privacy based on computational intractability assumptions, but only a few provide Un...

In recent years, the interest growth in the Blockchains (BC) and Internet-of-Things (IoT) integration -- termed as BIoT -- for more trust via decentralization has led to great potentials in various use cases such as health care, supply chain tracking, and smart cities. A key element of BIoT ecosystems is the data transactions (TX) that include the...

Transactions (TX) sent and executed by a public Blockchain (BC) need to pay a TX fee. The fee is relative to the resources consumed when including the TX into a block. The sender of the TX pays the fee in the native currency of the BC used. Such a fee protects the network from Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks and incentivizes the TXs inclusion. BCs...

This chapter classifies communication technologies employed in the Internet-of-Things (IoT) as infrastructure, data, transport, discovery, messaging, and management protocol families as well as semantics and frameworks. Moreover, IoT networks are divided into IP and Constrained Networks with the latter not directly supporting the Transmission Contr...

TC 6: Communication Systems

As the dependency of businesses on digital services increases, their vulnerability to cyberattacks increases, too. Besides providing innovative services, business owners must focus on investing in robust cybersecurity mechanisms to countermeasure cyberattacks. Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks remain one of the most dangerous cyberattack...

This work develops an integration of Blockchains (BC) with the Internet-of-Things (IoT) using a highly constrained TelosB IoT platform based on the MSP430 processor family and CC2420 IEEE 802.15.4-compliant radio interfaces. The system is evaluated in an indoor office environment focusing on overhead and energy efficiency of BC transaction (TX) tra...

While the existence of Public Bulletin Boards (PBB) is often formulated as an assumption in related work on Remote Electronic Voting (REV) systems, this work here on Provotum focuses on the practical design and architecture of such a PBB, including its distributed execution. Further, Provotum leverages a public permissioned Blockchain (BC) as a PBB...

Businesses were moving during the past decades to-ward full digital models, which made companies face new threatsand cyberattacks affecting their services and, consequently, theirprofits. To avoid negative impacts, companies’ investments incybersecurity are increasing considerably. However, Small andMedium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) operate on small...

This is a pre-recorded presentation of a paper presented by Eryk Schiller at the 16th International Conference on Wireless and Mobile Computing, Networking and Communications (WiMob20). The paper entitled Design and Evaluation of an SDR-based LoRa Cloud Radio Access Network was presented on Day Two of the conference (October 13, 2020) within Sessio...

Long Range (LoRa) defines a popular modulation scheme based on the chirp spread spectrum technique. It is used in Low Power Wide Area Networks (LP-WANs) for the Internet-of-Things (IoT). Thus, this work here designs, specifies, implements, and evaluates a Cloud Radio Access Network (C-RAN) architecture for LoRa networks, while using (a) Software De...

This paper presents a new approach to analyse cybersecurity challenges and opportunities, focused on the development of a new risk assessment and management framework. Such a multi-sector assessment framework should be able to evaluate and prioritize cybersecurity risks in trans-sectoral and inter-sectoral contexts. It leads toward proper resource...

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks are one of the major causes of concerns for communication service providers. When an attack is highly sophisticated and no countermeasures are available directly, sharing hardware and defense capabilities become a compelling alternative. Future network and service management can base its operations on eq...

Trust in electoral processes is fundamental for democracies. Further, the identity management of citizen data is crucial, because final tallies cannot be guaranteed without the assurance that every final vote was cast by an eligible voter. In order to establish a basis for a hybrid public verifiability of voting, this work (1) introduces Proverum,...

In the last years, cryptocurrencies have becomeincreasingly popular along with their underlying distributedledger technology, referred to as a Blockchain (BC). Nowadays,a wide variety of BC implementations are available. However,the selection of a suitable implementation for a particularapplication or use case is complex because it requires technic...

In Industry 4.0 (I4), the Industrial Internet of Things (I2oT) data streams are prone to significant data manipulation risks. The integration of Blockchains (BC) with I2oT may become a solution preventing from this problem. This paper provides a blockchain-agnostic Blockchain I2oT (BI2oT) architecture called BIIT that allows developing a broad rang...

For the protection of people and society against harm and health threats -- especially for the COVID-19 pandemic -- a variety of different disciplines needs to be involved. The data collection of very basic and health-related data of individuals in today's highly mobile society does help to plan, protect, and identify next steps health authorities...

Due to the growing interest in the blockchain (BC), several applications are being developed, taking advantage of the benefits that such technology promises to deliver, such as removal of Trust Third Parties (TTP) to verify transactions and data immutability. However, these applications require certain aspects, such as high transaction throughput o...

Digitization of electoral processes depends on confident systems that produce verifiable evidence. The design and implementation of voting systems has been widely studied in prior research, bringing together expertise in many fields. Switzerland is organized in a federal, decentralized structure of independent governmental entities. Thus, its decen...

Blockchains (BCs) are back-linked chain of records termed as blocks. To establish decentralized trusted systems, BCs employ consensus mechanisms. During the past ten years, there have been various proposals of BC design and implementations. However, most of the developed sate of the art BCs suffer from scalability issues. In order to enhance the sc...

Academic certificates have a significant influence on the job market, proving a particular competence or skill of a recipient. However, the ability to verify the authenticity of certificates does not follow its relevance in the labor market, causing several companies to exploit this inefficiency to falsify information or even to make fake certifica...

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Passive and Active Measurement, PAM 2020, held in Eugene, Oregon, USA, in March 2020. The 19 full papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 65 submissions. They were organized in topical sections named: active measurement; security; best...

Over the last decades the Internet of Things raised in its importance and became more and more part of everyone's life (e.g., smarthome, fitness tracking). In parallel different requests for privacy support, mobility support and flexible privilege handling raised. Thus, this book chapter summarizes the current situation and concerns of users and ne...

Current projects applying blockchain technology to enhance the trust of NFV environments do not consider the VNF repository. However, the blockchain’s properties can enhance trust by allowing to verify a VNF package’s integrity without relying (a) on a Trusted Third Party (TTP) for remote attestation or (b) a secure database. This paper presents BU...

Cybersecurity concerns are one of the significant side effects of an increasingly interconnected world, which inevitably put economic factors into perspective, either directly or indirectly. In this context, it is imperative to understand the significant dependencies between complex and distributed systems (e.g., supply-chain), as well as security...

Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) decouples the network package performed by network functions from dedicated hardware appliance by running Virtual Network Functions (VNF) on commercial off-the-shelf hardware. Network operators can create customized network services by chaining multiple VNFs, defining a so-called Service Function Chaining (SFC...

Cyberattacks are the cause of several damages on governments and companies in the last years. Such damage includes not only leaks of sensitive information, but also economic loss due to downtime of services. The security market size worth billions of dollars, which represents investments to acquire protection services and training response teams to...

This paper studies various methods that improve the performance of Blockchain systems integrated with the Internet of Things (BIoT) using the LoRaWAN access method. Duty Cycle Enforcement (DCE) and Listen Before Talk (LBT) mechanisms as the channel access methods, Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ) on the Transport Layer, and transaction aggregation on...