Abstract: With the emergence of the Internet of things (IoT), plenty of battery-powered and energy-harvesting devices are being deployed to fulfill sensing and actuation tasks in a variety of application areas, such as smart homes, precision agriculture, smart cities, and industrial automation. In this context, a critical issue is that of denial-of-sleep attacks. Such attacks deprive low-power devices of entering energy-saving sleep modes, thereby draining their charge. At the very least, a successful denial-of-sleep attack causes a long outage of the victim device. Moreover, as for battery-powered devices, successful denial-of-sleep attacks necessitate replacing batteries, which is tedious and sometimes even infeasible if a battery-powered device is deployed at an inaccessible location. While the research community came up with numerous defenses against denial-of-sleep attacks, most present-day IoT protocols include no denial-of-sleep defenses at all, presumably due to a lack of awareness and unsolved integration problems. After all, despite there are many denial-of-sleep defenses, effective defenses against certain kinds of denial-of-sleep attacks are yet to be found. The overall contribution of my PhD research, which I outline in this talk, is a denial-of-sleep-resilient medium access control (MAC) layer for IoT devices that communicate over IEEE 802.15.4 links. Altogether, my MAC layer resists, or at least greatly mitigates, all denial-of-sleep attacks against it I am aware of. Furthermore, my MAC layer is self-contained and thus can act as a drop-in replacement for IEEE 802.15.4-compliant, yet insecure MAC layers.

CV: Konrad-Felix Krentz received a BSc and an MSc degree in IT-Systems Engineering from the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI). He specialized in the areas Security & Safety Engineering and Mobile & Embedded Systems. After his MSc studies, he worked at the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute within the scope of the BMBF project ?Providing Physical Layer Security for the Internet of Things (PROPHYLAXE)?. Since 2015, he is pursuing a PhD in IT-Systems Engineering at the HPI. His PhD research focuses on developing security solutions for the Internet of things.