Nowadays, a lot of Internet-of-Things devices and its applications are developed to improve the people's quality of life. With the growth of circulating IoT devices in human's community, improper device management and firmware distribution mechanism could lead to many issues that harm the security and privacy of the device owner. In this paper, a firmware update framework for IoT devices based on blockchain technology is proposed. The proposed framework aims to provide secure verification on the firmware released by the device manufacturer. In addition, the integrity of distributed firmware to the end-device could be maintained. The proposed firmware update framework consists of four processes: the creation of firmware update contract, the creation of firmware replication contract, the direct firmware update mechanism and the indirect firmware update mechanism.

The development of information technology has paved the way for faster and more convenient payment process flows and new methodology for the design and implementation of next generation payment systems. The growth of smartphone usage nowadays has fostered a new and popular mobile payment environment. Most of the current generation smartphones support Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology to communicate with nearby BLE-enabled devices. It is plausible to construct an Over-the-Air BLE-based mobile payment system as one of the payment methods for people living in modern societies. In this paper, a secure indoor positioning-based mobile payment authentication protocol with BLE technology and the corresponding mobile payment system design are proposed. The proposed protocol consists of three phases: initialization phase, session key construction phase, and authentication phase. When a customer moves toward the POS counter area, the proposed mobile payment system will automatically detect the position of the customer to confirm whether the customer is ready for the checkout process. Once the system has identified the customer is standing within the payment-enabled area, the payment system will invoke authentication process between POS and the customer’s smartphone through BLE communication channel to generate a secure session key and establish an authenticated communication session to perform the payment transaction accordingly. A prototype is implemented to assess the performance of the proposed design for mobile payment system. In addition, security analysis is conducted to evaluate the security strength of the proposed protocol.

Nowadays, smartphone has become a vital tool for both productivity and entertainment that most people can't live without it. Due to the widespread usage of smartphone for both personal and professional purposes, many people consider them as private property. This means other people should not be able to freely gain access to their smartphone, because it contains a lot of sensitive data. Therefore, its security is a very important research area with the potential to benefit millions of people in the world. A security system that protects owners from any breaches of privacy is needed to ensure the data inside the device stays private. In this paper, we propose a new system for securing smartphone. We incorporate a multi-factor authentication method to provide high security. Our system also incorporates an implicit authentication method to continuously authenticate the user and prevent unauthorized individuals from accessing the device. A prototype based on the proposed system is also constructed.