Chapter 45: I Have an Idea

The discussion among the professors and Director Wang grew increasingly animated. It was not a quarrel, merely voices raised in passion, as each person defended their own viewpoint.

The conversation primarily revolved around the first sub-project. Although the remaining issues lacked immediate solutions, analogous research existed in related fields, making potential breakthroughs relatively manageable.

"The core problem remains those legacy devices with limited computing power," Director Wang said, frowning as he tapped the notes scribbled in his notebook. "Although our company started in telecommunications, part of our business scope also touches upon industrial control. Smartphones and smart home appliances are easy enough—their processing power keeps pace with the times. But IoT devices in industrial control, such as water and electricity meters... leaving aside other considerations, these devices can barely run a lightweight MQTT protocol, let alone DTLS. I simply don't see it as realistic. Doing so would cause communication latency to skyrocket, completely failing to meet operational requirements."

Professor Li, another professor from a university, adjusted his glasses and shook his head. "We cannot compromise on the security baseline. These devices might transmit water consumption data or even valve control signals. Once subjected to a man-in-the-middle attack involving tampering or eavesdropping, the consequences could range from minor to catastrophic. We cannot simply abandon security just because the equipment is old and computationally constrained."

Director Wang sighed. "I understand that, but the reality is that many industrial control IoT devices simply fall short of these requirements. While I am not deeply versed in theoretical aspects, based on the existing technologies I know of, fulfilling the project proposal's demands is extremely difficult. At the very least, our company cannot do it, and to my knowledge, no other domestic company can either."

Deng Yonghua nodded. "Therefore, what we need right now is a secure yet extremely resource-efficient scheme for communication between legacy devices and high-security gateways. PSK is the most common approach, but key management remains a problem, and hardcoding keys is essentially planting time bombs for ourselves."

"What about using IBC? Devices would only need a public identifier, with private keys managed by the gateway or a PKG."

Professor Li shook his head. "That won't do. IBC key escrow inherently carries security risks, and the cryptographic operations involved are still too heavy for legacy microcontrollers. It's simply impractical."

Director Wang shrugged. "There you have it. Security schemes are either too heavy to run, or too lightweight to be secure. We can't possibly replace every water meter and electricity meter with high-performance chips like those used in smart home appliances, can we? That would multiply the costs more than two or three times."

The group frowned, flipping through their notes.

The other two students were also deep in thought, occasionally jotting things down in their notebooks. Clearly, they understood the technical difficulties involved, yet lacked any clear direction.

Although Zhou Yun was not as proficient in cybersecurity as they were, his experience told him that across many different fields, while implementation forms might vary, the underlying principles are often universal.

Following the discussion, the problem had effectively transformed into how to design an encryption method with high security performance under resource-constrained conditions.

This naturally brought to mind his paper, AgileEdge. Though from his current perspective, that work was far from perfect—he could think of several ways to optimize it now—if one looked purely at the problem-solving methodology, it shared an uncanny conceptual similarity with the current predicament.

Deng Yonghua glanced sideways at Zhou Yun, sensing that he had something to say. "Zhou Yun, do you have any thoughts?"

The moment he spoke, the two other professors, their students, and Director Wang all turned to look at Zhou Yun. The two students blinked with curiosity, wondering what kind of solution he might come up with, seeing as they hadn't been able to think of anything viable themselves.

"I do have a few thoughts."

"If you have ideas, share them. Don't be afraid of being wrong; this is just a brainstorming session, and anyone is free to speak their mind." Deng Yonghua felt a degree of anticipation toward Zhou Yun.

Zhou Yun nodded and opened his notebook, which contained notes he had just jotted down while listening. "After listening to everyone's discussion, I came up with some immature ideas. I hope you will all critique and correct them. Although my primary research direction is not cybersecurity, regarding the problem just raised, could we simplify it into: we need to study a communication scheme capable of functioning under extreme resource constraints? Simply put, achieving the maximum possible results with the minimum possible expenditure."

The professors chuckled. Zhou Yun's phrasing was blunt, but hit the nail on the head; it accurately captured the essence of the problem.

"Precisely, you could understand it that way."

"In that case, I think my perspective might offer some reference value. This is a classic problem in the field of AI: how to enable a model to achieve better performance under insufficient resources. A core philosophy for solving this kind of problem is—stratification! Transferring this concept to our current problem, I believe we can attempt to construct a layered security scheme. The core objective is to reduce the computational burden on the legacy device side to an absolute minimum, while leveraging the computational advantages of the gateway to compensate for and enhance overall security."

Professor Li nodded, raising a new question. "By your logic, how should we resolve the security between the edge devices and the gateway?"

"My understanding of cybersecurity is certainly not as deep as you seniors, but I imagine that attacking a network requires at least one entry point, doesn't it? If we can eliminate the creation of this entry point at the hardware level, we would only need to focus on encrypting the gateway. And compared to certain edge devices, a gateway possesses vastly superior computing power."

Listening to Zhou Yun's explanation, the professors nodded involuntarily. "Although the details still need to be discussed—such as the fact that implementing hardware entry point isolation on some legacy devices might be unrealistic—I feel that this general direction is viable."

"Indeed. Looked at this way, the resource issue is indirectly resolved, leaving us to focus solely on the security aspect."

"Professor Deng, this student of yours has truly rendered a great service!"

Director Wang also nodded. "I agree that this method is feasible. We engineering folks really can't match the flexible thinking of you researchers."

As for the two students sitting in the corner, they gazed at Zhou Yun with expressions of slight bewilderment.

Everyone else was here to learn, but you? You're practically here to lecture us!

The two professors glanced at their own students, then back at Zhou Yun, and couldn't help sighing inwardly.

As expected, the truly outstanding students always belonged to someone else.

Deng Yonghua naturally noticed their expressions, a trace of pride welling up in his heart. What is a teacher's greatest joy? Isn't it seeing their own students praised by other experts?