February 24, 2023 - Faculty Candidate Seminar - Secure and Lightweight Mutual Authentication Protocols based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography

Dr. Kuljeet Kaur
Ecole de technologie superieure (ETS) Montreal
 

Friday, February 24, 2023 at 10:00 am
Room EV003.309

Abstract

With the evolution of the Internet of Things (IoT) and other underpinning technologies, the physical and digital communities are becoming more tightly integrated. The popularity of IoT is also evidenced in industrial settings (also referred to as Industrial IoT (IIoT)), such as power systems, aviation, industrial automation, smart retail, and smart farming. These systems are generally characterized by everything being connected and smart. However, these well-connected smart devices and networks can be and have been targeted to facilitate different cyber and/or physical attacks, such as information leakage, identity revelation, spoofing, tracking, etc. Hence, this necessitates the design of secure and robust security IIoT systems, particularly for mission/national security critical sectors. To address these issues, this talk will focus on designing efficient and lightweight mutual authentication protocols using Elliptical Curve Cryptography (ECC). The overall idea is to establish mutual authentication between the server and the clients without jeopardizing security; while ensuring the designed protocol is lightweight in terms of communication overhead, computational overhead and overall energy consumption.

Biography

Dr. Kuljeet Kaur works as an Assistant Professor at École de technologie supérieure (ÉTS), Montreal since 2020. Her research interests are cybersecurity, Cloud/Edge Computing, the Internet of Things (IoT), applied machine learning and artificial intelligence, Communications, and Smart Grids. She published over 75 scientific/technical articles and two books. She has secured research funding from various sources such as the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), Fonds de Recherche du Québec Nature et technologies (FRQNT), Department of Science and Technology (DST), and TCS Innovations Labs. Dr. Kaur is the recipient of the 2021 IEEE Technical Committee on Scalable Computing (TCSC) Award for Excellence in Scalable Computing for Early Career Researchers. She was also awarded the 2021 IEEE System Journal and 2018 IEEE ICC best paper awards. In addition, she also received the Best Research Paper Awards from the Thapar Institute of Engineering & Technology in 2022 and 2019.

She has been serving/served as an Editor/Guest Editor for various international journals of repute, such as IEEE Transactions of Industrial Informatics, Wiley Security and Privacy Journal, Journal of Information Processing Systems, Springer Human‑centric Computing and Information Sciences, and Frontiers in Communications and Networking. She has been organizing international workshops for several flagship conferences such as IEEE INFOCOM, IEEE ICC, ACM MOBICOM and others. She served as a technical program committee (TPC) member for several international conferences, including IEEE GLOBECOM and IEEE ICC.

She serves as the Faculty Representative for the IEEE ÉTS student branch and Deputy Secretary for the IEEE ComSoc Women in Communications Engineering (WICE). In addition, she served as the Vice‑Chair (2020‑22) of the IEEE Montreal Young Professionals Affinity Group and the Website co‑chair (2020‑22) for the Networking Networking Women (N2Women), a discipline‑specific community for female researchers.