Biblio

The main objective of remote substations is to provide the central system with sensitive information from critical infrastructures, such as generation, distribution or transmission power systems. Wireless sensor networks have been recently applied in this particular context due to their attractive services and inherent benefits, such as simplicity, reliability and cost savings. However, as the number of control and data acquisition systems that use the Internet infrastructure to connect to substations increases, it is necessary to consider what connectivity model the sensor infrastructure should follow: either completely isolated from the Internet or integrated with it as part of the Internet of Things paradigm. This paper therefore addresses this question by providing a thorough analysis of both security requirements and infrastructural requirements corresponding to all those TCP/IP integration strategies that can be applicable to networks with constrained computational resources.

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) behave as a digital skin, providing a virtual layer where the information about the physical world can be accessed by any computational system. As a result, they are an invaluable resource for realizing the vision of the Internet of Things (IoT). However, it is necessary to consider whether the devices of a WSN should be completely integrated into the Internet or not. In this paper, we tackle this question from the perspective of security. While we will mention the different security challenges that may arise in such integration process, we will focus on the issues that take place at the network level.

En los nuevos paradigmas de movilidad surgidos durante los últimos años y en aquellos aún por llegar ha quedado patente la necesidad de modernizar la infraestructura viaria y los elementos de señalización y gestión del tráfico. En el presente trabajo se presenta una propuesta para esta nueva generación de dispositivos de gestión del tráfico: un prototipo de semáforo inteligente conectado que implementa diversas medidas de seguridad. Además de las tradicionales señales luminosas, los usuarios de la vía pueden conocer a través de sus dispositivos el estado del semáforo, además de otra información complementaria a través de la difusión de mensajes BLE firmados con criptografía de curva elíptica. A su vez, el semáforo puede ser gestionado remotamente a través de la tecnología LTE Cat M1 protegida por TLS. Esto abre la puerta, entre otros, a facilitar el tránsito de los vehículos de emergencia cuando estos se acercan a un cruce o modificar el tiempo de los estados del ciclo en función de las necesidades del tráfico.

New mobility paradigms have appeared in recent years, and everything suggests that some more are coming. This fact makes apparent the necessity of modernizing the road infrastructure, the signalling elements and the traffic management systems. Many initiatives have emerged around the term Intelligent Transport System (ITS) in order to define new scenarios and requirements for this kind of applications. We even have two main competing technologies for implementing Vehicular communication protocols (V2X), C-V2X and 802.11p, but neither of them is widely deployed yet.

One of the main barriers for the massive adoption of those technologies is governance. Current solutions rely on the use of a public key infrastructure that enables secure collaboration between the different entities in the V2X ecosystem, but given its global scope, managing such infrastructure requires reaching agreements between many parties, with conflicts of interest between automakers and telecommunication operators. As a result, there are plenty of use cases available and two mature communication technologies, but the complexity at the business layer is stopping the drivers from taking advantage of ITS applications.

Blockchain technologies are defining a new decentralized paradigm for most traditional applications, where smart contracts provide a straightforward mechanism for decentralized governance. In this work, we propose an approach for decentralized V2X (D-V2X) that does not require any trusted authority and can be implemented on top of any communication protocol. We also define a proof-of-concept technical architecture on top of a cheap and highly secure System-on-Chip (SoC) that could allow for massive adoption of D-V2X.