Motivated with the proliferation of smart, low-cost and small devices, there is a growing trend towards the development of smart buildings, cities, and infrastructures in order to make our lives more efficient, cleaner, safer and less costly than before. Examples of these devices include smart sensors, meters, phones, tablets, cameras, wearable technologies (e.g., glasses, watches) and cars that are currently ubiquitous. These smart devices have typically computation, communication, sensing, and storage capabilities and have been the focus of a great deal of research in the last several years. Such research activities range from the hardware/software characteristics of these individual devices to their deployment challenges in the development of smart infrastructures that involve wireless communications at various levels. This led to the conceptualization of these ideas under the names Internet-of-Things (IoT) and Cyber-physical Systems (CPS), latter adding the capability of interaction with the physical systems.
In addition to challenges that are related to networking aspects, IoT and CPS are also vulnerable to various attacks that may include malware, unauthorized device/network access, jamming, impersonation, privacy breaches, data modification, etc. My research has focused on both networking and security aspects of these challenges at different layers of protocols stack. In the past, I have mostly tackled challenges in regards to self-configuration, self-healing, topology control, node deployment, energy-aware communication and computation and quality of service (QoS) provisioning. We have published extensively at top venues and were able to attract funding from federal agencies.
While we still continue to conduct research on the above issues, my group’s research has been mostly focusing on the communication security and privacy aspects of CPS and IoT within the last decade. We specifically target the privacy leaks that arise due to use of smart meters, phones and electric vehicles. My main interest is in security and privacy-aware protocol design that can exploit tools from cryptography, game theory, and social sciences. In particular, we are interested in employing homomorphic systems and secure multi-party computation while also considering user’s perception on privacy preservation. Another important challenge for large-scale CPS is the effective key management strategies to reduce complexity that may arise due to certificate revocations. We develop techniques specifically geared for energy systems. Finally, I am interested in applying the recently emerging software-defined networking (SDN) techniques to provide security, defense and resilience in CPS.
Dr. Akkaya's group research produces top quality publications in top ranked journals and proceedings which are consistently cited by other researchers.
Please check our ADWISE Lab Site for specific projects and the detailed research statement below.
