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Li, Mingyan

Publications and source records attributed to Li, Mingyan.

Technical Bulletin 005: NTP Monitoring

The Center for Alternative Synchronization and Timing (CAST) views Precision Time Protocol (PTP) and Network Time Protocol (NTP) as critical elements of the grid, from generation to the grid edge. This tech bulletin discusses the operation of NTP. The document shows not only commercial but also open-source applications. In some cases, the commercial applications may already have existing feature sets to secure and monitor NTP streams. From a security standpoint, using subscription NTP is risky unless the open bidirectional ports on local firewalls and routers are properly monitored and controlled.

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CAST Technical Bulletin #002: Time Synchronization for Next Generation Power Delivery

This technical bulletin gives a description of the updated effort on Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) Center for Alternative Synchronization and Timing (CAST) project’s work investigating a terrestrial-based high precision timing infrastructure intended for time synchronization of the next generation power delivery infrastructures. We will provide a high-level description of the CAST application context, key protocols, critical architectural issues, and how GPS/timing data traverse through the system.

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CAST Technical Bulletin #004: Network Time Protocol Introduction

Network Time Protocol (NTP), as it traditionally generated and widely consumed, is a legacy system with known security vulnerabilities. The vulnerabilities can be mitigated by modern implementations of NTP that use internal and external redundancy for better accuracy and fault tolerance. Precision Time Protocol (PTP) is an alternative that uses master clocks inside secure networks to eliminate the known vulnerabilities of NTP.

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Incremental Threshold Scheme Enabled IoT Group Key Management

Cyber landscape evolves rapidly. Internet of Things (IoT) and Edge Computing (EC) have rapidly become an integral part of the modern computing infrastructure. It is expected that there will be more than 50 billion active and connected IoT devices by 2025 [1]. Pervasive IoT/EC creates unprecedented opportunities bridging the gap between previously segregated cyber and physical spaces. However, this progress also brings along new security challenges. IoT devices typically have limited computation, communication, and storage resources. This leads to security architecture designs such as using symmetric keys for group communication. While secure and efficient in stable network settings, symmetric key solutions are ill-adapted for IoT's highly dynamic device mobility behavior and frequent group membership turnover. Whenever IoT members leave a group, the known symmetric keys cannot be made forgotten, posing a serious vulnerability. This leads to frequent re-groupings that require expensive re-authentication, key regeneration, and key redistribution in order to maintain IoT/EC security. We present a novel symmetric key management framework that integrate an Incremental Threshold Scheme (ITS) cryptographical function into communication protocol's key rotation mechanism to allow for secure and efficient symmetric key communication group member node revocation. This ITS-enabled key management framework alleviates the need of frequent and expensive re-grouping and re-keying needed by today's large and dynamic IoT/EC operations. We further applied this ITS-enabled key management framework to a distributed IoT/EC-integrated publish and subscribe framework for applicability validation.

Li, Mingyan↗

Smart Packaging for Critical Energy Shipment (SPaCES)

Recent technical advances have brought forth revolutionary Smart Packaging (SP) technology. SP incorporates multiple electronics, chemical, and mechanical sensing technologies into packaging materials, and utilizes them to monitor and display package content status. SP can also employ embedded micro actuators to react to undesirable package conditions such as moisture/temperature anomalies or harmful chemical reactions and neutralize it. When further integrated with wireless sensing and secure networking, SP provides wholistic system-wide remote situation awareness capability for real-time crisis management. Finally, we also see that SP can be further integrated with 3D printing technology to offer form-factor customization and application specific solutions suitable for DOE (Department of Energy) NNSA’s (National Nuclear Security Administration) R/N (radiological/nuclear) material shipment and management needs; this has the potential to improve safety, security, and overall operation process quality. This report surveys SP technology as the state of the art (SOTA) and analyzes how it can integrate with cybersecurity and 3D printing to address NNSA’s critical R/N material shipment and storage requirements. This report further presents our FY23/24 investigation plan describing project background, goal, motivation, proposed work, and statement of work and cost.

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