Energy Reports 7 (2021) 8075–8082

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Energy Reports
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/egyr

Increasing privacy and security by integrating a Blockchain Secure

Interface into an IoT Device Security Gateway Architecture
∗
Marko Šarac a , Nikola Pavlović a , , Nebojsa Bacanin a , Fadi Al-Turjman b , Saša Adamović a
a
Faculty of Informatics and Computing, Singidunum University, Danijelova 32, 11000 Belgrade, Serbia
b
Artificial Intelligence Engineering Dept., Research Centre for AI and IoT, Near East University, Nicosia, Mersin 10, Turkey

article info a b s t r a c t

Article history: Internet of Things and Blockchain are considered two major technologies. Lower latency and a higher
Received 24 May 2021 linked system number provide greater flexibility for remote execution of Internet of Things (IoT)
Received in revised form 2 July 2021 applications. It is no secret that IoT devices often have insufficient computing capacity (both in
Accepted 26 July 2021
terms of processing power and storage requirements) to support robust protection and encryption
Available online 5 August 2021
algorithms. The Internet of Things is facing many challenges such as poor interoperability, security
Keywords: vulnerabilities, privacy, and lack of industry standards. Cyber-attacks on IoT devices can have an impact
Security on energy trading privacy and security. This paper suggests a method for introducing a basic interface
Internet of Things to an IoT device’s security gateway architecture along with Blockchain to provide decentralization and
Blockchain authentication. It adds much-needed anonymity and versatility to IoT infrastructure, which is currently
Security gateway lacking. The solution enhances the reliability of data sent to remote services by applying compatible
Privacy cryptographic algorithms to it before sending it. The solution’s benefits include compatibility with all
IoT products and the ability to run any cryptographic algorithm on data that can be used for microgrid
trading and can be initialized and securely transported over 5G or 6G network infrastructures. As a
part of this work, a security procedure has been created that supports every cryptographic algorithm
for all IoT devices in the network. In addition, the interface is guarded by the Blockchain technology
which eliminates single control authority, records historical transactions performed by the IoT devices
and provides a trust between devices.
© 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

1. Introduction One of the most significant challenges in IoT is implementing

protection. This paper continues the discussion of the state of
IoT devices need a persistent Internet connection to exchange IoT security and the issues that it raises. It is based on the
data, making the 5G network an excellent choice in terms of low authors’ previous research paper, which had a significant impact
latency and high data peak speeds (Neves et al., 2017). Current 5G and raised awareness for more stable IoT devices (Pavlović et al.,
networks can initialize 106 devices per square kilometre with up 2021). The devices are also related. As a result, IoT may refer to
to 10Mbps per square kilometre and 1 ms round-trip latency, and the interconnection of commonly used electronic devices (Zunino
IoT connects to several computers and devices using wired and et al., 2020). The potential of the Internet of Things to provide a
wireless networks. In terms of availability, these characteristics
variety of services has made it the fastest-growing technology. It
of current 5G networks make them an excellent option for IoT
has had a major impact on the environment and society.
applications, but risks must be considered and handled properly.
The Internet of Things (IoT) aims to transform how we live
The concept of Internet of Things and Internet of Energy (IoE)
is getting more and more embedded in everyday life. It allows today by allowing smart gadgets to do daily chores with minimal
better decision making, easier energy (Devabalaji et al., 2020) human participation. Smart cities, smart homes, smart trans-
transactions and intelligent automatization of distribution (Lu portation and infrastructure, and other terms are used to describe
et al., 2020). This means that IoT and IoE will require strong the Internet of Things.
security solutions on all parts of its infrastructure. The main contribution to this work is:

• The development of a security interface for IoT devices.

∗ Corresponding author.
• Adding of IP mapping for all devices on security interface.
E-mail addresses: [email protected] (M. Šarac),
[email protected] (N. Pavlović), [email protected]
• Adding of Blockchain to prevent access of third parties to
(N. Bacanin), [email protected] (F. Al-Turjman), interface, provide trust between devices and increase relia-
[email protected] (S. Adamović). bility due to being in the closed decentralized network.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.egyr.2021.07.078
2352-4847/© 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
M. Šarac, N. Pavlović, N. Bacanin et al. Energy Reports 7 (2021) 8075–8082

• Development of solution in Node.js and test memory usage real-world experiment to see if work gives more security after
for AES, DES, Triple DES the recommended solution is developed. The assessment con-
cludes with a summary of what has been accomplished and
Several working groups and business leaders have proposed
recommendations for further work.
IoT device standardization, but no solution has been found (Palat-
Nawir et al. (2016) The key elements associated with IoT sys-
tella et al., 2013). IoT has generated an excessive demand for
tems, their relationships, explained the increasing security issues
protection because of the increasing demand for connected de-
in the various environments in which they are integrated. These
vices and services around the world. For IoT to reach its full
devices are mainly used in home, medical and transportation.
potential, it must be protected from bugs and potential attackers. To support billions of IoT devices worldwide, wireless commu-
A variety of attacks and threats are increasing in number and nity infrastructure needs to be the least convenient in terms of
complexity daily — either to conduct as an attacker or to be capacity and can be expanded exceptionally, but in various IoT
disposed of as a consumer. To provide users with useful perfor- vertical areas. Manage optimally according to the needs of your
mance, the IoT should ensure the suitability and trustworthiness unique provider (Anon, 2015). Mobile Internet and IoT are the
of the processed data. two main ties to the Destiny Cellular Network, providing a vast
There is a critical need for such systems to ensure robustness view of 5G. The 5G generation is defined for the first community
and reliability at the service level, as well as to support protection. to be extensible, versatile, and smartly designed for the second-
Customers’ concerns about security and privacy are increasing as connected IoT world. (Chvez-Santiago et al., 2015). According
they move toward the Internet of Things. Incorporating IoT into to Anon (2014), 5G handles many elements of future lifestyles
the home and workplace raises new security concerns. Customers such as home, work and transportation, and can be character-
and suppliers should be aware of the challenge and exercise ized by high visitor range density, high connection density and
caution when dealing with protection and privacy issues. excessive mobility, IoT ecology. Set the basic functions of the
Security challenges come in the form of design practices, lack system (Mavromoustakis et al., 2016).
of standards and regulations. Many privacy issues are coming This device should be secure and resistant to unauthorized
from the user’s agreement to allow vendors to collect their ac- access when used at home. The most frequent attacks and tech-
tivity on smart devices. This is where Blockchain comes into use. niques of network attacks to IoT devices are Denial of Service
Blockchain technology removes the server which is the centre of (DoS) Attack (Thakur, 2015), Wormholes (Goyal and Dutta, 2018),
the IoT infrastructure. By progressively checking for each transac- Spoofed, alter, or replay network request (Rong et al., 2013),
tion, network request, blockchain allows devices to retain current Sybil (Buford et al., 2008).
data flow while also improving security and privacy. Attacks on IoT devices can be performed at various network
By introducing Blockchain to IoT infrastructure, it provides levels. In the following part of the paper, attacks are sorted and
following advantages: described according to the OSI layer of network they are running
• There is no single control authority. on.
• IoT devices have built trust between them. On physical layer IoT devices can be influenced by jamming or
• All actions performed by IoT devices are recorded. tampering which creates radio interference and exhaustion on IoT
• The data shared by the devices is private. devices which can lead to creation of compromised nodes. Two
nodes can transmit on same frequency which can lead to collision
The following concerns arise because of the introduction of on Data Link. Network level can be influenced by spoofed altered
Blockchain to IoT infrastructure: or replayed routing information, selective forwarding, sinkhole,
wormholes (Goyal and Dutta, 2018), sybil (Rong et al., 2013),
• Limitation of storage
acknowledgment spoofing. Flooding that generates new requests
• Scalability until the IoT device uses all its resources, and de-synchronization
• Processing time can be model of attacks on Transport layer. On Application layer
The storage limitation is tied to the distributed ledger, which is attackers can operate like the normal user in the IoT system.
required for all blockchain transactions to be saved into. Scalabil- Attackers can execute malicious activities in that IoT system
ity issues are linked to adding more IoT devices to decentralized which can lead to attack on reliability (clock altering, selective
networks which also increases the processing time for activities data forwarding, and data exaggeration).
done by the devices. Mahmoud et al. (2015b) tried to contribute to a better un-
Blockchain technology is based on four concepts: derstanding of the threat. The author explained why IoT devices
are so beneficial to attackers. Most IoT devices operate without
• A peer-to-peer network, all participants use private/public human interaction, making them physically easily accessible to
keys to interact with the network. The private key is used attackers. These devices also operate using wireless networks to
to sign transactions and the public key is used as an address allow attackers to carry out moderate attacks and easily obtain
on the network. sensitive information. Most devices are unable to support com-
• Open and distributed ledger, database of all transactions, plex security algorithms due to hardware limitations. This paper
which is open to everyone. focused on the challenges surrounding devices and services and
• Ledger copies synchronization, a way to synchronize ledger outlined the most important Internet of Things security issues.
across all participants. The authors concluded that both end users and vendors need to
• Mining, a way to prevent adding nodes on a chain, because do a lot of work. It is important to define standards that address
the chain must be valid and ordered. the shortcomings of current IoT security mechanisms.
D. Usha et al. (Mahmoud et al., 2015a) provides a compre-
2. State of the art — related work hensive overview of attacks on all layers of the network. New
network protocols (such as IPv6 and 5G) must be implemented
The research for the related work is described in the work’s to drive security devices to achieve dynamic IoT topology combi-
continuation. Other researchers have discovered the most preva- nations. Most attacks occur at the perception layer, network layer
lent security issues in IoT hubs, as well as the most popular and application layer. Most of the signals transmitted between IoT
attacks and strategies used against IoT devices. We conduct a devices may be interfered with and thus affected. Relay attacks
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will take advantage of this layer of confidentiality. Relay attacks • Custom home server (hub) for all connected smart devices.
can be carried out by changing, copying, or forging the identity • Using wired connections between the smart device and
information provided by the device. Another type of attack that home servers.
can be performed on this layer is the time attack. Perform timing • Adding a layer of security to home server-firewall, serializa-
attacks by analyzing the time required to perform encryption. The tion of data, compression of data, encryption.
result of this attack is that the attacker can access the encryption • Using a programming language so the server would be able
key. The attacker can gain physical access to the node and capture to run on any device.
all information and data. This is called a node capture attack. • Prevents the smart device from communicating directly to
At the network layer, the most popular attacks are denial of the internet or the internet to communicate directly to the
service (DoS) attacks and man-in-the-middle attacks. Due to the smart device. All communication must be done through the
lack of security standards or policies on the Internet of Things, a home server.
large number of devices can withstand attacks at the application • Adding Blockchain technology and decentralizing the net-
layer. Different programs and applications have different security work. Add distributed ledger to monitor all requests and add
algorithms or no security algorithms. The biggest problem here an additional layer of security by using blockchain authen-
is that different IoT devices need to be compatible with each tication and prevent any requests done by the device to be
other. The author concludes that the equipment should use a tempered with.
newer network standard. They proposed an implementation of
On Fig. 1. Blockchain logic is included in Home Server. When
a smart device smart framework with end-to-end security. New
parsing incoming data, Blockchain validate the data, create new
hardware, software, wireless and identification technologies are
Blocks, and add them to Distributed ledger.
needed to overcome the challenges of the Internet of Things.
The security of smart devices is the same as the security of
Silex/Brickerbot (Shouran et al., 2019) was discovered in 2017
wireless networks (Kavianpour and Anderson, 2017). The abuse of
but appeared again in 2019. The software scans for public inter-
the hub device is the same as the abuse of any connected device.
net access and tries to find IoT devices in it. If the IoT device
The hub connects smart devices to the IP network and has a pre-
is discoverable, it tries to access it using most common weak
established trust relationship. It is the same as the security of the
login combinations. If it gains access, it deletes all network data
wireless network to which the hub’s security is connected. Since
on the smart device which makes it unusable unless somebody
some smart devices do not support hubs, this security is based
physically gets access to the device to restart it to factory defaults.
on network security. To improve the security of these devices, we
The malware has no other purpose but destructive one, making
have proposed a custom home server (hub) based solution for all
the device unusable.
smart devices regardless of the support of the hub. This solution
In 2016 Mirai botnet (Kambourakis et al., 2017) took over 8.4
consists of a home server, wired or wireless connection to a smart
million IoT devices. The devices were used to perform Distributed
device, and the Blockchain technology. All data sent from smart
Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. Some actions to find malicious
devices to their remote services will be intercepted and parsed
code on devices are performed even today. The problem here is
by the server. This means unnecessary leaked information can
that there is no recorded history of actions performed by devices
be removed about the device and properly encrypt the package
which makes it even harder to find a malicious device in the
before sending it to the service. The data from the smart device
network.
needs to be parsed and prepared for the remote service in the
Kumar and Mallick (2018) researched what challenges are
correct format. To intercept this data, we are using Blockchain
facing current IoT infrastructure. In the paper authors dealt with
technology to monitor each network request done by the node,
privacy and security challenges. They have identified the biggest
IoT device. Using a sniffing application such as Wireshark (Iqbal
issues with current infrastructure and provided an overview of
and Naaz, 2019) we can detect which device is sending a request
them all. With the provided overview authors also provided why
to which service, their IP address, and port, this way we can make
Blockchain is needed in the IoT. Some of the sectors where
sure that the data written in the distributed ledger is correct. All
blockchain and IoT can be merged and provide good benefits are
the requests inside a private network are transactions and there
Agriculture, Business, Distribution, Energy (Yuvaraj et al., 2017),
is no way for them to be fabricated or changed. Each transaction
Food, Finance, Healthcare, Transport and logistics and Smart city.
is saved in Distributed Ledger, a database that can be on the
Authors also provided a list of benefits such as tamper proof data,
blockchain interface. A blockchain interface could be hosted on
elimination of single control authority, robust, record data of old
any computer and the distributed ledger could be saved on the
transactions in smart devices and others.
device, local network server or in case of usage in smart homes
The motivation for this work comes from the observed prob-
where there is no local server a remote database that can be
lems that exist in all IoT devices. The IoT hub provided by the
encrypted with strong encryption algorithm and requested to this
manufacturer (if any) offers few or no security features. These
server can be done using RSA algorithm.
hubs mainly integrate different IoT devices of the same brand.
The home server performs the following functions: Obtain
Other IoT centers are mainly used to observe the IoT devices
information from the smart device; Data should be parsed. Deter-
(smart cameras, walkie-talkies, etc.) in the smart home and dis-
mine that this data is correctly encrypted and transmitted to the
play the data they provide on the PC. The solution is a simple
remote service (using the Http(s) protocol). Additional features
interface suitable for any IoT device and network infrastructure.
we want on the home server:
Using blockchain as an additional layer prevents other attackers
from accessing smart devices. The main feature of this work is • Smart device data monitor for any suspicious requests.
that it supports any encryption algorithm used by remote servers • If possible, using a strong encryption algorithm (Faheem
to provide data to IoT devices. Mushtaq et al., 2017) (only possible if remote service is
supporting different encryption standards). This should be
3. Proposed solution possible to activate per smart device in-home network.
• Use Blockchain technology to prevent any tampering with
Theoretically, the paper presents a solution that has been network requests by third parties.
developed down to the actual implementation and security eval- • Add additional authentication via Blockchain to provide
uation. This solution is based on the following environment: trust between IoT devices in the same network.
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Fig. 1. Proposed solution displayed on activity diagram.

The home server interface should be written in a program- 4. Security, trust, and solution limitations
ming language that can be run on most devices. In solution,
Node.js (Sun et al., 2018) is used as a programming language. As shown in Fig. 1., the proposed solution has four concerns.
Node.js has good support for most devices. Some process man- The first focus is on smart devices. Smart devices use sensors to
agers for Node.js such as PM2 have good support for the container collect data and process the data necessary to send it to a remote
approach. This means the home server would be in a container server. Due to the low processing power of this device, the data
and any attacker would have a hard time connecting to it. PM2 collected from external sources is poorly encrypted or not en-
also supports cluster mode. Since Node.js is a single-threaded lan- crypted at all. To ensure the security of this data on the Internet,
the proposed solution must intercept it. Data interception starts
guage cluster mode allows applications to utilize all cores of the
from the second point of interest. The second point of interest
CPU allowing applications to be scalable. This greatly increases
is the Blockchain interface. Blockchain interface looks for each
the performance of the server depending on the number of core
network request as a new transaction. Each transaction is saved
CPUs. Each process is created on a new cluster. If an attacker tries in the Distributed Ledger. After a new transaction is saved, the
to exploit any process on the server, the cluster will destroy the request will be forwarded to the remote server.
process after a certain amount of time to make sure the server To process this data from the router, server is capturing it
works as intended. Using the home server, the work will prevent locally. The data that comes from the device has the follow-
the following attacks: ing request header and request body. The request header has
information like request URL, the request method, status code,
• Man in the middle (Sarma and Barbhuiya, 2019), there will
version of request (HTTP/1.1 or HTTP/2), encoding information,
be no way for attackers to directly sniff data from smart
user agent information, authorization information, and content
devices. The only data they will be able to get is one from
type information. Some IoT Hubs (Cirani et al., 2015) to work
the router to the internet. If properly encrypted there will correctly send additional information regarding the hub in the
be a very low chance of doing any exploitation. header.
• Directly connecting to a smart device and doing any exploit Most of the data in request headers are not used by remote
on it. All connections from remote to a smart device are for- service so it can be omitted. The request body has data that is
warded to the home server and then checked if the request required for remote service to parse. To prevent data leaking, the
is coming from approved sources. server is omitting unused data from each request to the remote
• Devices in local area networks that have no authentication service. All requests from the server made to the internet are
will have a new layer of security based on authentication on using the HTTP/2 version of the protocol. To further improve the
the home server. To gain access to any smart house device security of each request it is possible to add a layer of encryption
authentication and authorization on the home server would for the request body. This means if a remote service has the
be needed. functionality to use different encryption algorithms, the server
can add it here. For example, the server can generate an RSA
This proposed solution can be furthermore improved by key pair (Zhou and Tang, 2011) and add a public key on remote
adding the following: service or generate any symmetric key to use with AES, DES, or
Triple DES (Bhat et al., 2015). New prepared requests can now be
• Filtering allows cloud services that can access a Blockchain
processed and sent to remote service.
network, by allowing certain IP addresses or range of ad-
The request is sent from the server to the blockchain interface
dresses that can access.
which then forwards it to the internet. The only entry point
• Adding an additional layer of security by implementing an for any IoT device in the home network is through blockchain
interface that will encrypt/decrypt the data that is leaving interface requests made to the home server. The same goes for
the blockchain network. another way around. The remote service parses the data sent by
• Adding a form of caching response from the cloud to prevent the server and returns the relevant action for the device to take.
requests leaving the blockchain network. If the same request Again, the blockchain interface is forwarding this request to the
is sent to the cloud, we can use a distributed ledger to server. Any request for an IoT device is forwarded to the server.
provide a smart device with a previous response from the The validity of the request is checked on the server. The server is
cloud. then answering the following questions:
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Fig. 2. AES heapTotal memory from 20 processes in MBs. Fig. 4. Triple — DES heapTotal memory from 20 processes in MBs.

Smart Device, parsing, and sending it encrypted to remote service

is not possible without direct contact with the manufacturer.
Some manufacturers however provide documentation for devel-
opers and dashboards where data can be changed, improved, and
provided to remote service in a different format.

5. Security evaluation

A class diagram for the proposed solution is presented in

Fig. 5. IoT devices send data to an observer. This data can be
anything. In this work, Arduino (Andriansyah et al., 2017) is used
Fig. 3. DES heapTotal memory from 20 processes in MBs. with sensors for temperature and humidity. Temperature and
humidity are measured, and this data is sent to the internet.
Before sending it directly to the internet, the Blockchain interface
forwards this data to Observer (home server). The observer is
• Do home servers expect remote service to send a request to
parsing the data, performing encryption, and sends it to remote
an IoT device?
service. Remote service is parsing data, decryption in that process,
• Do the request body and header contain any suspicious
and based on data it sends a notification to IoT devices to perform
data?
certain actions. After authenticating the request, establishing a
If the server concludes that the request is valid it will be sent new transaction, and recording it to the distributed ledger, the
to an IoT device in the local area network. After this IoT device Blockchain interface transmits the request to the observer, who
will handle the specific action requested by the remote service, decrypts the data and sends it to the IoT device to conduct the
as legitimate action. required action. In the Class diagram 0 and 1 is used for the
Memory usage is evaluated using AES, DES, and Triple DES, Multiplicity. This means that Observer in our case have optional
and here are the results. The measurements are displayed in part of it. Sending to remote server can be done or not.
megabytes. Heap is a memory segment dedicated to storing ref- The proposed solution network structure is shown in Fig. 6. It
erence types like objects, strings, and closures. The Heap total consists of IoT devices, sensors, home server, blockchain interface,
represents the total size of the heap used by the server (see network provider, and remote service server.
Fig. 2). On Fig. 6. It displays the structure of the proposed solution.
The home server does not require more than 200 MB of RAM Each IoT device is connected to Blockchain infrastructure, and
to perform encryption/decryption on smart device data, according each network request is a transaction. As previously mentioned,
to the memory measurements. This means that making of the the security interface is between the Blockchain interface, and
home server would be inexpensive for mass-production. The the router and it monitors each request made to the internet.
lowest memory usage is in the AES algorithm. DES and Triple DES On Fig. 7. Wireshark is used to capture network requests that
have stable memory usage but are higher than AES (see Fig. 3). come from an IoT device to the internet. As shown in the image,
The solution requires a database to save keys for different de- the network request body is in plain text. Using the proposed
vices for encryption/decryption purposes. This means if anything solution, security of the network request body can be much
happens to the database it will make the solution unusable. This improved. Wireshark has been used for network capture request
can be solved by using a memory database. When the proposed as a de facto standard for network packet inspection.
solution is expecting a response from remote service, and it does The evolution of 5G and 6G network infrastructure is con-
not respond it halts the process on the server (see Fig. 4). sidered an important building block for the integration of IoT
Another problem here is linked to the Blockchain interface. devices. We can expect more IoT solutions with this infrastruc-
By adding the Blockchain to the current IoT infrastructure, we ture in the coming years. Still, the adoption of IoT devices in 5G
have introduced the problem of scalability. By adding more smart and 6G networks certainly presents new security challenges and
devices to the network, the processing speed lowers. The en- new types of attacks on personal data collected by IoT sensors
ergy consumption can be furthermore improved by adding smart and devices. This paper proposes flexible use of any IoT device
meters with grid-connected (Shabalov et al., 2021) inverter to without worrying about the security provided by the IoT device.
provide good performance with low energy consumption cost This solution provides a simple interface that adds the highest
when upscaling the network. security compatibility with the remote service the IoT device is
The most important limitation of all is that most of the code connected to. This solution is meant to provide security compati-
running on smart devices is not open sourced so getting data from ble with remote services. The encryption algorithm is moved from
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Fig. 5. Proposed solution presented on class diagram.

Fig. 6. Blockchain based diagram for the proposed solution.

Fig. 7. Wireshark capture of single packet from the proposed solution.

the IoT device to the host server. Servers provide confidentiality, • Strong security that is moved from IoT device to network
integrity, and availability in a way that is met by the production layer and device.
network. This is done by using existing cryptographic algorithms.
• IoT device security is the same as local area network secu-
rity, server operates at the network layer.
This work provides the following:
• Intrusion prevention, Check all incoming requests for IoT
• Flexibility to use all encryption algorithms. devices on our local area network.
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Declaration of competing interest //dx.doi.org/10.1109/SURV.2012.111412.00158, Third Quarter.
Pavlović, N., Šarac, M., Adamović, S., Sarčević, M., Khaleel, A., Maček, N., 2021.
An approach to adding simple interface as security gateway architecture for
The authors declare that they have no known competing finan-
IoT device. Multimedia Tools Appl..
cial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared
Rong, C., Zhao, G., Yan, L., Cayirci, E., Cheng, H., 2013. Computer and Information
to influence the work reported in this paper. Security Handbook, second ed. pp. 345–361. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-
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