Manish Shrestha successfully completed his PhD trial lecture and thesis defense at the Department of Technology Systems, University of Oslo on Tuesday, the 11th of May 2021 and will be awarded the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
The title of his thesis is “LightSC: A light-weight security classification methodology to design and evaluate security of IoT systems” and the given topic for his trial lecture was “Privacy-preserving Machine Learning: Overview and discussion of privacy-enhancing technical approaches for privacy challenges with ML”.
The Internet of Things (IoT) emerged with purely functional purposes providing sensing, connectivity, and control features at a lower cost with little concern for security.
However, the increasing number of cyber-attacks and wider adoption of IoT systems in diverse domains have raised security and privacy challenges. Despite available mechanisms, several IoT systems still lack adequate security implementation. We observed that current security approaches are expensive, time-consuming, and are substantially dependent on security experts and thus are not feasible for low-cost consumer IoT systems. Therefore, this thesis proposes a new goal-based, light-weight methodology called LightSC for IoT systems. The LightSC is tailored for non-security-experts, who can select appropriate connectivity and security mechanisms to obtain the desired security level in their system. We also have proposed a tool to support to make the LightSC methodology, which can be integrated into a DevSecOps tool-chain. DevSecOps refers to a set of practices of integrating development, security, and operation to streamline the system development life cycle process.
The LightSC tool was evaluated by real stakeholders (mostly non-experts) by successfully applying it to nineteen different IoT systems. We believe that our work will help industries to design and develop secure IoT systems, regulatory bodies to establish and enforce security regulations, and end-users to become aware of selecting adequately secure IoT products.
The following committee has been appointed to evaluate his thesis, trial lecture and defense:
- First external opponent: Professor Sokratis Katsikas, NTNU, Norge.
- Second external opponent: Professor Simone Fischer-Hübner, Karlstad Universitet, Sverige.
- Internal member: Professor Paal Engelstad, Department of Technology Systems, University of Oslo, Norway.
- Chair of defence: Professor Cecilie Rolstad Denby, Department of Technology Systems, UiO.
Manish Shrestha carried out his PhD work at the Department of Technology Systems, University of Oslo.
His main supervisor was Dr Christian Johansen, Department of Informatics, UiO and co-supervisors Professor Josef Noll, Department of Technology Systems, UiO and Dr Davide Roverso, eSmart Systems AS.
Congratulations!
