Search arXivSearch

arXiv · 2201.00270

Towards a secure API client generator for IoT devices

Abstract

Given the success of IoT platforms, more developers and companies want to include the technology in their portfolio. However, in the case of single board microcontrollers, the support for networking operations is not ideal, and different IoT platforms allow access to the networking submodule via different libraries and system calls, leading to a steeper learning curve. Code generators for API clients can enhance productivity, but they tend to generate universal purpose code, and on the other hand the networking primitives of IoT devices are platform specific, especially when security mechanisms such as Transport Layer Security are part of the picture. This paper presents \texttt{cpp-tiny-client}, an API client generator developed as a plugin for the OpenAPI Generator project, which can tailor the generated code based on the IoT platform specified by the user. Our work allows to generate correct code for API clients for IoT devices, and thus can empower a developer with more productivity and a faster time-to-market for its own applications. By combining together mainstream technologies only, \texttt{cpp-tiny-client} offers a gentle learning curve. Moreover, experiments show that the generated code has a reasonable footprint, at least with respect to the IoT devices that were used in the validation of the work. The code related to this work is available through the OpenAPI Generator project~\cite{OpenAPIGenerator}. This technical report is an extension of~\cite{acmsac22}, and it integrates the information presented at the ACM SAC 2022 conference.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Anders Aaen Springborg, Martin Kaldahl Andersen, Kaare Holland Hattel, Michele Albano. 2022-01-02. Towards a secure API client generator for IoT devices. https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.00270

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

CSI Simulation: Why Additive Noise Fails and How to Fix It

Channel State Information (CSI) has become a widely used wireless channel sensing modality for applications such as indoor localization, activity recognition, and respiration monitoring. Because collecting labeled data under every target condition is impractical, training CSI-based models often relies on simulated data produced by adding noise or perturbations to recorded channel estimates, most commonly additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). This practice assumes that the receiver chain between the antenna and the channel estimator is linear and gain-invariant. We test this assumption empirically using RF jamming as a controlled perturbation on 6 commodity receivers across 2 indoor environments. The assumption does not hold. Automatic gain control compresses the channel estimate multiplicatively before digitization, producing amplitude distributions that no additive noise variance can reproduce. To close the resulting fidelity gap, we propose M_QTC, a measurement-calibrated model that learns the per-subcarrier distribution transformation through quantile mapping, temporal filtering, and copula-based cross-subcarrier reordering. M_QTC reduces amplitude error 8-fold and closes 89% of the aggregate fidelity gap across four complementary dimensions. The improvement transfers directly to downstream tasks, where 5 classifiers from different families trained on M_QTC-simulated data recover 93% of real-data jamming detection performance, while AWGN-trained classifiers remain near random decision.

cs.NI

BALANCE: Hybrid Autoregressive-Speculative LLM Inference at the Network Edge

Edge inference is a promising paradigm to provide large language model (LLM) inference services in next-generation mobile networks. LLM inference mainly relies on two approaches: Autoregressive decoding (AD) generates output tokens sequentially, resulting in long latency; Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates inference by using a small language model (SLM) to generate multiple draft tokens for LLM verification, but incurs extra memory costs. Due to this latency-memory tradeoff, neither approach alone can efficiently serve users with heterogeneous demands under limited edge computing resources. To address this challenge, we propose a hybrid autoregressive-speculative inference (BALANCE) framework for edge LLM inference. In BALANCE, an edge server hosts both an SLM and an LLM, admits users, assigns each admitted user to the AD or SD mode, and performs the two modes simultaneously. To maximize the number of served users, we formulate a task throughput maximization problem to jointly determine user admission and computing resource allocation between AD and SD under user latency requirements and server memory constraints. Since the problem is NP-hard, we develop a polynomial-time algorithm that transforms the original problem into two sub-problems and obtains a sub-optimal solution with a constant approximation guarantee. Experiments demonstrate that BALANCE consistently outperforms conventional AD and SD and significantly improves task throughput.

cs.NI

Zero-Knowledge Remote Adversarial Attack against Wi-Fi-based Human Activity Recognition for Privacy Protection

The growing capability of Wi-Fi devices to identify human activities using channel state information (CSI) raises privacy concerns. To counter this threat, we propose GRAW, an adversary system, acting as a privacy defender, that degrades the human activity recognition (HAR) system at the user device by perturbing the router's signals that the device uses to estimate CSI. GRAW employs generative adversarial imitation learning (GAIL) to construct perturbation signals, and thereby eliminates the need for any information on the target HAR systems and their inputs (i.e., zero-knowledge operation). We evaluate GRAW against seven representative HAR models, using datasets collected in five environments, including our own dataset. We observe that GRAW is the only remote attack scheme that degrades every tested HAR model to a random-selection level. At the same perturbation level, GRAW achieves an attack success ratio up to 76.7% higher than comparison methods, while maintaining over 99% packet success rate on regular Wi-Fi communication. We demonstrate the feasibility of GRAW through real-time, over-the-air experiments with software-defined radios.

cs.NI