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The use of the Internet of Things (IoT) in the electronic health (e-health) management systems brings with it many challenges, including secure communications through insecure radio channels, authentication and key agreement schemes between the entities involved, access control protocols and also schemes for transferring ownership of vital patient information. Besides, the resource-limited sensors in the IoT have real difficulties in achieving this goal. Motivated by these considerations, in this work we propose a new lightweight authentication and ownership transfer protocol for e-health systems in the context of IoT (LACO in short). The goal is to propose a secure and energy-efficient protocol that not only provides authentication and key agreement but also satisfies access control and preserves the privacy of doctors and patients. Moreover, this is the first time that the ownership transfer of users is considered. In the ownership transfer phase of the proposed scheme, the medical server can change the ownership of patient information. In addition, the LACO protocol overcomes the security flaws of recent authentication protocols that were proposed for e-health systems, but are unfortunately vulnerable to traceability, de-synchronization, denial of service (DoS), and insider attacks. To avoid past mistakes, we present formal (i.e., conducted on ProVerif language) and informal security analysis for the LACO protocol. All this ensures that our proposed scheme is secure against the most common attacks in IoT systems. Compared to the predecessor schemes, the LACO protocol is both more efficient and more secure to use in e-health systems.

Designers of smart environments based on radio frequency identification devices have a challenging task to build secure mutual authentication protocols. These systems are classified into two major factions which are traditional closed-loop systems, and open-loop systems. To the best of our knowledge, all of the mutual authentication protocols previously introduced for these two categories rely on a centralized database but they fail to address decentralized mutual authentication and their related attacks. Thanks to the blockchain technology, which is a novel distributed technology, in this paper, we propose two decentralized mutual authentication protocols for IoT systems. Our first scheme is utilized for traditional closed-loop RFID systems (called CLAB), and the second one applies to open-loop RFID systems (called OLAB). Meanwhile, we examine the security of the Chebyshev chaotic map-based authentication algorithm and confirm that this algorithm is unprotected against tag and reader impersonation attacks. Likewise, we present a denial of service (DoS), tag impersonation, and reader impersonation attacks against the Chebyshev chaotic-map based protocol when employed in open-loop IoT networks. Moreover, we discover a full secret recovery attack against a recent RFID mutual authentication protocol which is based on blockchain. Finally, we use the BAN-logic method to approve the security characteristics of our CLAB and OLAB proposals.

In recent years, researchers have proposed many authentication protocols for RFID tagged objects supporting tag ownership transfer. In this paper, first we present a tag traceability attack on a recent authentication protocol, called LSDARP+, proposed to enhance its predecessor, known as the LSDARP protocol. The LSDARP protocol is based on a sliding window mechanism with two important “authentication” and “ownership transfer” phases. We also show that LSDARP’s ownership transfer phase fails to protect new owner privacy. Moreover, we present our proposal for improving the security of these protocols. The proposed protocol has two phases, the “authentication” phase which is based on the sliding window mechanism, and a dedicated “generating new shared keys for new owner” phase. Finally, we show that our proposed protocol is secure and lightweight enough for the EPC-C1G2 standard.

Model uncertainty is an important factor hindering reliability of any model-based failure detection and identification (FDI) method. Use of joint torque sensing reduces significantly the complexity of robot modeling by excluding hardly-identifiable link dynamics from overall manipulator dynamics. Application of such model in the proposed FDI filter increases reliability of fault monitoring against modeling uncertainty. The proposed filter is based on a smooth velocity observer of degree 2 n where n stands for the number of manipulator joints. No velocity measurement and assumption on smoothness of faults are used in the fault detection process.

Through its implication on the International Space Station (ISS), Canada is responsible for the verification of all robotic tasks involving the SPDM. To this end, the Canadian Space Agency is building the SPDM Task Verification Test-bed (STVF). Risks associated with the proposed concept have been identified, particularly in the area of control systems, dynamic behaviour and contact stability of the STVF Manipulator Test-bed (SMT). To mitigate these risks, a one degree-of-freedom prototype is implemented to validate the proposed control system architecture. The results are presented and discussed in light of the final SMT implementation.