Internet of Things (IoT) is transforming everyones life by provisioning features such as controlling and monitoring of the connected smart objects. IoT applications scale from smart cities, homes, cars, manufacturing, e-healthcare to smart control system, transportation, wearables, farming and much more. The adaptation of these devices is growing exponentially, which generates substantial amount of data for processing and analyzing. Thus, alongside bringing ease to the human lives, these devices are susceptible to different threats and security challenges which does not only worry the users for adopting it in sensitive environments such as e-health and smart home etc., but also pose hazard for nourishment of IoT in coming days. Hence, this paper thoroughly reviews the threats, security requirements, challenges and the attack vectors pertinent to IoT networks. Based on the gap analysis, we then draw the attention for a network based deployment of IoT architecture through Software Defined Networking (SDN): an emerging paradigm for next generation networks. This paper endevours to present an overview of the SDN along with thorough discussion on SDN based IoT deployment models i.e., centralized and decentralized. We, further elaborated SDN based IoT security solutions to present the comprehensive overview of Software Defined Security (SDSec) technology. Furthermore, based on the literature, core issues are highlighted that are the main hurdles in unifying all IoT stakeholders on one platform and few findings that emphases on a network based security solution for IoT paradigm. Finally, the paper also highlights some future research directions of SDN-based IoT security technologies.

The Signalling System No. 7 (SS7) is used in GSM/ UMTS telecommunication technologies for signalling and management of communication. It was designed on the concept of private boundary walled technology having mutual trust between few national/ multinational operators with no inherent security controls in 1970s. Deregulation, expansion, and merger of telecommunication technology with data networks have vanquished the concept of boundary walls hence increasing the number of service providers, entry points, and interfaces to the SS7 network, which made it vulnerable to serious attacks. The SS7 exploits can be used by attackers to intercept messages, track a subscriber’s location, tape/ redirect calls, adversely affect disaster relief operations, drain funds of individuals from banks in combination with other methods and send billions of spam messages. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the SS7 attacks with detailed methods to execute attacks, methods to enter the SS7 core network, and recommends safeguards against the SS7 attacks. It also provides a machine learning based framework to detect anomalies in the SS7 network which is compared with rule based filtering. It further presents a conceptual model for the defense of network.

The most detrimental cyber attacks are usually not originated by malicious outsiders or malware but from trusted insiders. The main advantage insider attackers have over external elements is their ability to bypass security checks and remain undiscovered, this may cause serious damage to the organizational assets. This paper focuses on insider threat detection through behavioral analysis of users. User behavior is categorized as normal or malicious based on user activity. A series of events and activities are analyzed for feature selection to efficiently detect adversarial behavior. Selected feature vectors are used for model training during the implementation phase. A deep learning based approach is proposed that detects insiders with greater accuracy and low false positive rate. A rich event / user role based feature set containing Logon/Logoff events, User_role, Functional_unit etc are used for detection. The dataset used is the CMU CERT synthetic insider threat dataset r4.2. Performance of our proposed algorithm has been compared to other well-known techniques i.e. long short term Memory- convolutional neural network, random forest, long short term memory- recurrent neural network, one class support vector machine, Markov chain model, multi state long short term memory & convolutional neural network, gated recurrent unit & skipgram. The comparison proved that our novel approach produces relatively good accuracy(90.60%), precision(97%) and F1 Score (94%).

Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAVs, Drones), initially known only for their military applications, are getting increasingly popular in the civil sector as well. Over the military canvas, drones have already proven themselves as a potent force multiplier through unmanned, round-the-clock, long-range and high-endurance missions for surveillance, reconnaissance, search and rescue, and even armed combat applications. With the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT), commercial deployments of drones are also growing exponentially, ranging from cargo and taxi services to agriculture, disaster relief, risk assessment and monitoring of critical infrastructures. Irrespective of the deployment sector, drones are often entrusted to conduct safety, time and liability critical tasks, thus requiring secure, robust and trustworthy operations. In contrast, the rise in UAVs’ demand, coupled with market pressure to reduce size, weight, power and cost (SwaP-C) parameters, has caused vendors to often ignore security aspects, thus inducing serious safety and security threats. As UAVs rely on Global Positioning System (GPS) for positioning and navigation, they can fall prey to GPS jamming and spoofing attacks. The vulnerability of GPS to spoofing has serious implications for UAVs, as victim drones using civil GPS can be misdirected or even completely hijacked for malicious intents, as already demonstrated in several academic research efforts using commercially available GPS spoofing hardware. Beside UAVs, GPS spoofing attacks are equally applicable to other GPS-dependent platforms, including manned aircraft, ground vehicles, and cellular systems. This paper conducts a comprehensive review of GPS spoofing threats, with a special focus on their applicability over UAVs and other GPS-dependent mobile platforms. It presents a novel taxonomy of GPS spoofing attacks and critically analyzes different spoofing techniques based upon placement of spoofing device, attack stealthiness, attack methodologies, and objectives of the attacker. We also discuss some of the recent experiments from open literature which utilized commercially available hardware for successfully conducting spoofing attacks.

Internet of Things (IoT) is a system of interconnected devices that have the ability to monitor and transfer data to peers without human intervention. Authentication, Authorization and Audit Logs (AAA) are prime features of Network Security and easily attained in legacy systems, however, remains unachieved in IoT. The IoTs require due security considerations as the conventional security mechanisms are not optimized for such devices due to various aspects such as heterogeneity, resource constrained processing, storage and multiple factors. Additionally, the legacy systems are mostly centralized and thus introduce a single point of failure. In this research, a novel framework, FBASHI is presented that is based on fuzzy logic and blockchain technology to achieve AAA services. The proposed system is developed using Hyperledger that is a blockchain platform providing privacy and fast response capability, therefore, it is best suited for the healthcare IoT environments. This work proposes behavior driven adaptive security mechanism for healthcare IoTs and networks based on blockchain by utilizing fuzzy logic and presents a heuristic approach towards behavior driven adaptive security providing AAA services. FBASHI is implemented to analyze its security and practicality. Furthermore, a comparison is drawn with other blockchain-based solutions.