Vulnerability in WPS and Attack Tool
Dec 30th
Last tuesday, 27th of December, Stefan Viehbock, published a Vulnerability in WPS affecting a large number of domestic routers.
It is a very important discovery, as this vulnerability seems to affect lots of routers in Spain, mainly those by the Network Provider ONO.
After Standardization…Future of the blog
Jun 16th
Well… The last weeks have been a good exercise when it comes to blog writing. As someone that has been active in the internet “tubes” since 1998, this was not my first blog, not even my first web site, but it got a different approach to the old contributions I was involved with. An approach that I have liked… so my initial intentions are to keep writing.
But about what? As my field of work and study is Computer Science and Telecommunications, they will be my primary subjects of writing. I have also experience and education in Computer Security, so I think I will write something about it.
There are no drafts written at the moment, but I have in mind next week to write an small article about Optical Communications and another about Computer Security.
Feel free then to visit the blog again in the next weeks 
Interesting Projects to follow in the field of WSN
Jun 16th
As I wrote in my last article, I took a look at some projects being deployed in the world of WSN. I am not going to go deep into them, because of lack of time, but I think it will be interesting to post them here:
Smart Santander
SmartSantander proposes a unique in the world city-scale experimental research facility in support of typical applications and services for a smart city. This unique experimental facility will be sufficiently large, open and flexible to enable horizontal and vertical federation with other experimental facilities and stimulates development of new applications by users of various types including experimental advanced research on IoT technologies and realistic assessment of users’ acceptability tests. The facility will comprise more than 20,000 sensors and will be based on a real life IoT deployment in an urban setting. The core of the facility will be located in the city of Santander, the capital of the region of Cantabria situated on the north coast of Spain, and its surroundings. SmartSantander will enable the Future Internet of Things to become a reality.
Sensei Project
SENSEI (Integrating the Physical with the Digital World of the Network of the Future) is an Integrated Project in the EU’s Seventh Framework Programme , in the ICT (Information and Communication Technologies). Thematic Priority of Challenge 1: Pervasive and Trusted Network and Service Infrastructures: ICT-2007.1.1: The Network of the Future.
The SENSEI project (Contract no. 215923) started on 1st January 2008, and finished on 31st December 2010. 19 partners from 11 European countries participated in the project.
FastPrk
http://www.worldsensing.com/fastprk/
I have a direct connection to this project as my own brother is working in the company responsible of its development, WorldSensing.
FastPrk provides a complete ICT platform to improve urban mobility and reduce its impact on the
environment, based on real-time high-accuracy information of available parking spaces and traffic in the streets. FastPrkis a novel solution that delivers real-time information of available parking spots to citizens by means of mobile phone app’s and/or panels on the street.
The system includes:
Sensing, monitoring and controlling parking space infrastructures
for urban environments;Platforms to manage the obtained information and provide
this information to end users and managing authorities.
6LoWPAN: Third Part, History of the Standard.
Jun 16th
After a more complete view of the technology behind 6LoWPAN in this article I pretend to write the final bits and pieces about the history of 6LoWPAN, its standarization and where it is heading to.
As I have previously commented, 6LoWPAN is a set of standards defined by the Internet Engineering Tasking Force, IETF.
IP in embedded wireless devices (we are talking most of the time about low power micro-controllers of 8 or 16-bit) is not something new at all. So we can find the precedents as microIP from the Swedish Institute of Computer Science and NanoIP from the Centre of Wireless Communications. But may be the big precursor of 6LoWPAN was the appearance in 2003 of IEEE 802.15.4. It can be considered the first global and widely supported standard for wireless low power embedded devices.
6LoWPAN: Second Part, More concepts about 6LoWPAN
Jun 16th
This article pretends to be a follow-up to the first article I wrote about 6LoWPAN. That one was a general overview of the standard developed by the IETF. With some knowledge acquired about IEEE 802.15.4, I will write some more details about 6LoWPAN.
Industrial automation systems started what is called the “Internet of Things”. Ethernet and Internet protocols began replacing the early proprietary and old protocols used in the industry. Following the evolution of these Internet protocols, came the necessity to bring IPv6 to the Internet of Things.
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as a Standards Organization
Jun 9th
Internet Engineering Task Force or IETF as is commonly known is an organization which aims to develop and maintain Internet Standards. It is an open organization, there is no mandatory membership and all the members are working voluntarily. They only get paid by sponsors or external companies.
Their motto is: “to make the Internet work better”. Their objective is to improve Internet from an engineering point of view, while trying to avoid policy and business questions. Most of their members are qualified engineers with networking protocols, software and hardware knowledge.
IEEE-SA and IEEE 802 as Standards Organizations.
Jun 8th
If you have been following my previous blog entries, my main objective on these blog posts was to write about a wireless technology defined as an standard. I have been focusing on IEEE 802.15.4 and some of the technologies working over it, as ZigBee and 6LoWPAN. To which I will focus is still not decided, as recently I got in contact with an Electronic Engineer working for an Spanish company which are using their own protocol over IEEE 802.15.4 but in collaboration with some other companies after a global European Initiative. I am waiting for some information, as I think exploring a technology in development could be quite interesting. Meanwhile I will write about the organizations behind the 802.15.4. My initial idea was also to write about IETF that is behind 6LoWPAN, but the blog entry become quite long, so I will keep that information for the next day.
IEEE-SA
IEEE Standards Association develops global technologies through IEEE. They try to gather from individuals to companies to develop standards and collaborations. They have a presence in more than 160 countries. IEEE-SA members elect a a Board of Governors, who are responsible in overseeing the different committees and also the IEEE-SA Standards Board.
The standards development by IEEE-SA is open to members and non-members of the organisation, but of course it is easier to participate and influence the process if one is a member.
Update: Links to other blogs about Wireless Standards.
Jun 8th
As the title says, I have updated the blog with links to other blogs from some mates also working on wireless standards. I have not had the time to check them all deeply, but I made an overview of them.
E-Health, Bluetooth Low Energy
Irina and Gianluca are writing their blogs about e-health and an organisation called Continua Health Alliance which tries to keep a series of standards for communicating e-health devices. Both Blogs contain a lot of information about ZigBee, Continua and Bluetooth Low Energy.
LTE technologies
Peter, Ambes and Bomkazi are writing blogs about different aspects of LTE technologies.
Peter is focusing on the frequencies used by LTE and how are they standarized. There is not still a lot of information, but I will keep taking a look to it as it sounds very interesting.
Ambes in this case has got deeper in LTE in a technical way as a basis to keep talking about the MIMO technology in LTE. It is an interesting read to know how LTE is working. On the other hand Bomkazi talks about how voice communication in LTE. The blog has only two entries, but the last one is really interesting as it is a chronological view about the technology.
802.15.4 and ZigBee.
The last group of blogs is focused on the same technologies I started to talk about in my blog. As they have already start writing about ZigBee, I think that maybe it would be more interesting if my technological choice shifts from ZigBee to another technology still not developed by any of them.
Emmanuel has already developed and finished his approach to ZigBee. He also explains a little bit how 802.15.4 works. I think I will take a deeper look at it to see how different is his approach to mine.
Serhat on the other hand is starting now the blog, there is still not a lot of information. But as Emmanuel he is also talking about 802.15.4, so I will also keep track of the blog.
IEEE 802.15.4: Low Rate Wireless Networks
May 10th
Following the last entry in the blog, with this article I pretend to take a deeper look at IEEE 802.15.4.
Contrary to my initial thoughts, the published standard for IEEE 802.15.4 (2006 revision) is publicly and freely available for download here. I am also using the book “IEEE 802.15.4 Low-Rate Wireless Personal Area Networks: Enabling Wireless Sensor Networks” from IEEE Press as an important source of information.
The creation of the IEEE 802.15 Working Group brought the concept of WPAN (wireless personal area networks) to the main public. The first standard developed by this Working Group was the IEEE 802.15.1™, also known as Bluetooth®. It was followed by IEEE 802.15.3™, focused on high speed WPANs. After them, the IEEE 802.15.4 task group was created to develop a new standard with the same name. The main purpose of IEEE 802.15.4 task group was to develop a standard for low power, low cost and low bandwidth WPANs.
