Title:Security-by-Design in IoT: Securing IoT Protocols against Cyber Attacks in Industrial IoT Applications

Sponsor:Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB), Govt. of India. (under CRG Scheme)

Duration: Feb'2024 - Jan'2027

Role: Principal Investigator

Project Overview: Main goal is to investigate and design security schemes for the different data and network protocols of 6TiSCH IoT technology to battle with cyber attacks in industrial IoT applications. In many cases, the design of protocols for providing different services in IoT do not consider any security service during control message exchange. The insecure control message exchange in different layers becomes the potential vulnerable point that can be exploited to launch cyber attacks. So. it is of utmost important to incorporate security aspect in the design of each protocol in 6TiSCH networks.

Publications: INDICON'23

Title:AI and IoT based Attack Detection and Authentication Scheme for Cyber Security in Grid Connected Power Electronic Converters

Sponsor: Central Power Research Institute (CPRI), Bangalore

Duration: February 2022 - September 2023 (Ongoing)

Role: Principal Investigator

Project Overview: Main goal of the proposal is to detect and prevent cyber-attack in grid connected power electronic converters by designing AI-based intrusion detection system (IDS) and adaptive authentication protocol for IoT.

Members who worked:

• Dr. Habila Basumatary; Email: habila[at]rnd[dot]iitg[dot]ac[dot]in; Postdoc Research Scholar
• Ms. Prapti Barman; Email: prapti[at]rnd[dot]iitg[dot]ac[dot]in; (Completed Tenure)
• Mr. Bipul Kumar Das; Email: bkd[at]rnd[dot]iitg[dot]ac[dot]in; (Completed Tenure)
• Mr. Nobodit Choudhury; Email: nobodit12[at]gmail[dot]com; (Completed Tenure)
• Mr. Sujay Mondal; Email: sujoymondal189[at]gmail[dot]com; (Completed Tenure)

Title:Study of Peak Shaving in Drilling Rigs

Sponsor: Oil India Limited (OIL), Duliajan

Duration: July 2023 - June 2024 (Ongoing)

Role: Co-PI

Project Overview: The project involves detailed study and analysis of drilling rigs of OIL located in Duliajan, Assam. The objective is to suggest power electronics based peak shaving technologies which can provide good amount of fuel saving and reduce the carbon footprint of rigs significantly.

Members working:

• Mr. Gokul Prasanth; Email: gokulprasanth[at]iisi[dot]iitg[dot]ac[dot]in
• Mr. Khan Mohammad; Email: khanmohd2469[at]iisi[dot]iitg[dot]ac[dot]in

Title: Adaptive Cell Scheduling Function of 6TiSCH Network for Efficient Data Communication in Industrial IoT

Sponsor: Science & Engineering Research Board (SERB), Govt. of India. (under SRG scheme)

Duration: Dec'2019 - Jun'2022 (Completed)

Role: Principal Investigator

Project Overview: Main goal of the proposal is to improve the performance of present Industrial IoT (IIoT) network. Broad objective of this proposal is the development of adaptive cell scheduling function in 6TiSCH network for efficient management of TSCH cells used in data communication.

Members who worked:

• Mr. Arijit Dutta; Email: aricric[at]rnd[dot]iitg[dot]ac[dot]in
• Mr. Atul Kumar Prajapati; Email: prajapatiatul201[at]gmail[dot]com
• Ms. Karnish N.A. Tapadar, PhD Research Scholar (Running)
• Mr. Alakesh Kalita, PhD Research Scholar (Graduated in 2022)

Publications: IEEE JIoT'21, ICDCN'22, ICSTE'23, COMSNETS'24, Elsevier ADHOC'24

Title: Adaptive Resource Allocation for Rapid Formation of 6TiSCH Network in Industrial IoT

Sponsor: IIT Guwahati

Duration: Feb'2019 - Feb'2021 (Completed)

Role: Principal Investigator

Project Overview: Main objective of this project is to resolve the issues related to rapid formation of 6TiSCH network effectively and efficiently in industrial internet of things (IIoT). Explicitly, the objectives are of designing and development of:

• adaptive and faster resource allocation protocol for enhanced beacon scheduling
• coordination protocol between RPL and network formation for resource optimal beaconing
• a working prototype of IoT network testbed
• implementation of proposed protocols in the developed testbed

Members who worked:

• Mr. Alakesh Kalita, PhD Research Scholar (Graduated in 2022)

Publications: COMSNETS'19, ICDCN'20, IEEE TMC'21, ACM TIoT'21, IEEE JIoT'21, IEEE JIoT'22, ACM TIoT'22, IEEE TMC'24

Title: Cross-functional Information System for Decision Making (CISDeM)

Sponsor: Ministry of Defence, Government of Singapore.

Duration: 2015-16 (During my Post-Doc at SUTD, Singapore)

Designation: Post-doctoral Research Fellow

Project Overview: CISDeM is a cyber-information research program for decision making against network security threats. It adopts an inter-disciplinary research view — spanning security, natural language processing, machine learning, signal processing, and networking — to protect mission-critical network infrastructures. It stresses an experimental approach supported by a laboratory for sensing, computing, networking, visualization, and command-and-control. The synergistic research tracks will integrate to achieve holistic decision support for agile and proactive security informed by multi-modal and multi-layer empirical data. In this project, I was involved in Track 4: Network & System Level Anomaly Detection.

Principal Investigator of Track 4: Dr. Ngai-Man Cheung, SUTD Singapore

Publications: IEEE GLOBECOM'17, IEEE TSIPN'18, GSP'18,

Title: Towards Robust Efficient and Secure Data Acquisition in UWSNs

Sponsor: DIT (presently MeitY), Govt. of India

Duration: 2010-2013 (During my Ph.D. at IIT Kharagpur)

Designation: Senior Research Fellow

Project Overview: Under the surface of water, networks of sensors can be used for different applications such as submarine monitoring, oil exploration, seismic monitoring and ocean mapping. Data acquisition scheme for those applications using underwater sensor networks (UWSNs) faces many challenges due to dynamic behavior of aquatic environment and acoustic communication. Therefore, the objectives of the project are:

• Design and development of Robust UWSN Architecture, Delay Tolerant and Fault Tolerant Routing Protocols, Jamming Detection Scheme
• Development of UWSN simulator using MATLAB

Principal Investigator: Prof. Sudip Misra, IIT Kharagpur

Publications: IET Comm'12, ICDCN'13, IET WSS'13, Elsevier PMC'14

Thesis Title: Analysis of Collisions in Contention-Based Wireless Networks

The objective of the research work was to analyse different aspects of frame collision in wireless MAC protocol design, specifically in the area of Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN). For achieving this, it was required to analyse the theoretical performance of the standard IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol followed by the design and analysis of performance tuning mechanisms from the frame collision view point. It was also important to analyse frame collision from the network security view point.

• Proposed an absorbing Markov chain-based model to evaluate the packet-centric delay, fairness, trade-offs, and the scope of performance improvement of the IEEE 802.11 DCF multiple channel access protocol form the packet-centric viewpoint.
• Designed a new backoff scheme, namely semi-distributed backoff (SDB), for performing on-demand sender- and receiver-centric backoff counter selection. Receiver-centric backoff always selects a disjoint set of optimal backoffs for the colliding stations, and, thus, helps in avoiding successive collision in WLANs.
• Proposed Semi-DCF MAC protocol for delay sensitive applications in WLANs. In Semi-DCF, on-the-fly migration from random to deterministic backoff provides guaranteed channel access in random access MAC.
• Identified the advantages of anomalous slot, which is in general considered as a cause of performance degradation, in the DCF protocol.
• Proposed an anomalous transmission scheme for exploiting the opportunities created by anomalous slots, which, in turn, helps in performance improvement.
• Proposed an ad-hoc, distributed, and runtime estimation approach, namely delay deviation ratio, for observing the experienced delay status of a station.
• Proposed an approach for avoiding blind update of CW by introducing channel observation-based probabilistic update of CW in the backoff algorithm of the DCF protocol.
• Proposed a joint optimization scheme, named delay-aware distributed dynamic adaptation of CW, for improving the saturation throughput and channel access delay of the MAC protocol at runtime.
• Proposed a partial-packet-based channel observation metrics for capturing frame collision effect due to unauthorized activities in energy-constrained wireless network.
• Established that the correct detection of controllable reactive jamming is possible in energy-constrained wireless networks.
• Finally, theoretical performance analysis of all the proposed solution schemes have been performed using Markov chain model as it suits better for channel access protocols in WLANs.

Thesis Title: GSPIN: Gradient-based Sensor Protocol for Information via Negotiation in WSNs

The objective of the project work was to reduce communication activity and energy consumption during information dissemination among sensor nodes in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Heinzelman et al. proposed Sensor Protocols for Information via Negotiation (SPIN), a family of adaptive protocol, that solves the classic problem of flooding by finalizing communication decision of sensor nodes based upon application-specific knowledge of the data and knowledge of the resources that are available to them. However, the SPIN protocol has some shortcomings. Therefore, the specific objective of the Thesis work was to improve the performance of the SPIN protocol.

• The proposed solution GSPIN improved the performance of SPIN protocol by utilizing the relative positioning information of sensor nodes specifically the position of a sink w.r.t. the source.

Worked as Assistant System Engineer in TATA Consultancy Services Ltd. (TCS) for 2 years and 5 months.

Projects

• Insurance Solution Development

  Duration: 2008 — 2010.

  1. Client: Scandia BSM, China

  • Developed different types of Insurance Products and customized the associated modules such as Party, Business, Accounting, Work-flow, etc.
  • Designed the managerial work-flow as well as the automated work-flow for approving an insurance application.
  • Worked on both the front end and back end of software development. J2EE, JSP, JS, and XML have been used for designing the GUI and functional call, and ORACLE 10i Database Server has been used for data processing and storing.

  2. Client: DLF Pramerica, Noida, India

  • Developed different types of Insurance Products and customized the associated modules such as Party, Business, Accounting, Work-flow, etc.
  • Supervised a small development team of four employees.
  • Developed many SQL Packages for reducing product deployment overhead.
  • Worked on both the front end and back end of software development. J2EE, JSP, JS, and XML have been used for designing the GUI and functional call, and ORACLE 10i Database Server has been used for data processing and storing.