Abdul Razaque

Novel Architecture of Self-organized Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks

Self-organization of distributed wireless sensor nodes is a critical issue in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), since each sensor node has limited energy, bandwidth, and scalability. These issues prevent sensor nodes from actively collaborating with the other types of sensor nodes deployed in a typical heterogeneous and somewhat hostile environment. The automated self-organization of a WSN becomes more challenging as the number of sensor nodes increases in the network. In this paper, we propose a dynamic self-organized architecture that combines tree topology with a drawn-grid algorithm to automate the self-organization process for WSNs. In order to make our proposed architecture scalable, we assume that all participating active sensor nodes are unaware of their primary locations. In particular, this paper presents two algorithms called active-tree and drawn-grid. The proposed active-tree algorithm uses a tree topology to assign node IDs and define different roles to each participating sensor node. On the other hand, the drawn-grid algorithm divides the sensor nodes into cells with respect to the radio coverage area and the specific roles assigned by the active-tree algorithm. Thus, both proposed algorithms collaborate with each other to automate the self-organizing process for WSNs. The numerical and simulation results demonstrate that the proposed dynamic architecture performs much better than a static architecture in terms of the self-organization of wireless sensor nodes and energy consumption.

Secure and quality-of-service-supported service-oriented architecture for mobile cloud handoff process

Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) combines the features of mobile computing, cloud computing, and wireless networks to create the healthy computational resources to mobile cloud users. The aim of MCC is to execute the highly attractive mobile applications on a plethora of mobile cellular telephones, with highly rich user experience. From the perspective of mobile computing, Quality of Service (QoS) provisioning depends on the efficiency of the handoff process. Thus, it is highly important to introduce an energy efficient and secure handoff process to improve the performance. In this paper, we propose a Secure Seamless Fast Handoff (SSFH) scheme to improve the energy efficiency and the QoS in the MCC. The proposed scheme consists of four layers: application layer, service layer, infrastructure layer, and media layer. These four layers collectively handle the security, energy-efficiency, and the QoS. Existing service-oriented architectures designed for the MCC are based on the symmetric encryption protocols to support the application layer. However, it is much easier for an adversary to expose the symmetric key and gain access to the confidential data. The application layer is secured using a combination of both attribute-based encryption and an asymmetric encryption cryptography. To extend the mobile lifetime, energy detection (ED) model is deployed at the infrastructure layer to detect the energy level of the mobile devices prior to the pre-registration process. Furthermore, a dual authentication process is performed on the service and at the application layer to minimize the possibility of identity-high jacked or impersonation attack. The media layer supports the secure handoff process using policy enforcement module that allows only legitimate users to complete the re-registration process after initiating the handoff. Thus, a significant amount of the bandwidth and energy could be preserved. Finally, the secure service-oriented architecture is programmed using C++ platform and the results are compared with other well-known existing service-oriented architectures. The experimental results confirm the validity and the effectiveness of our proposed architecture.

Privacy preserving model: a new scheme for auditing cloud stakeholders

The Cloud computing paradigm provides numerous attractive services to customers such as the provision of the on-demand self-service, usage-based pricing, ubiquitous network access, transference of risk, and location independent resource sharing. However, the security of cloud computing, especially its data privacy, is a highly challengeable task. To address the data privacy issues, several mechanisms have been proposed that use the third party auditor (TPA) to ensure the integrity of outsourced data for the satisfaction of cloud users (CUs). However, the role of the TPA could be the potential security threat itself and can create new security vulnerabilities for the customer’s data. Moreover, the cloud service providers (CSPs) and the CUs could also be the adversaries while deteriorating the stored private data. As a result, the objective of this research is twofold. Our first research goal is to analyze the data privacy-preserving issues by identifying unique privacy requirements and presenting a supportable solution that eliminates the possible threats towards data privacy. Our second research goal is to develop the privacy-preserving model (PPM) to audit all the stakeholders in order to provide a relatively secure cloud computing environment. Specifically, the proposed model ensures the quality of service (QoS) of cloud services and detects potential malicious insiders in CSPs and TPAs. Furthermore, our proposed model provides a methodology to audit a TPA for minimizing any potential insider threats. In addition, CUs can use the proposed model to periodically audit the CSPs using the TPA to ensure the integrity of the outsourced data. For demonstrating and validating the performance, the proposed PPM is programmed in C++ and tested on GreenCloud with NS2 by applying merging processes. The experimental results help to identify the effectiveness, operational efficiency, and reliability of the CSPs. In addition, the results demonstrate the successful rate of handling the negative role of the TPA and determining the TPA’s malicious insider detection capabilities.

Secure data aggregation using access control and authentication for wireless sensor networks

Abstract The existing secure data aggregation approaches for wireless sensor networks were not designed for authorization, energy efficiency and proper security, leaving them prone to attacks. In this paper, we introduce the secure data aggregation using the access control and authentication (SDAACA) protocol. Using this protocol, we aim to detect sinkhole and Sybil attacks that are difficult to detect by existing cryptographic approaches. The proposed SDAACA protocol consists of two novel algorithms: the secure data fragmentation (SDF) and the node joining authorization (NJA). The SDF algorithm hides the data from the adversary by fragmenting it into small pieces. In the NJA algorithm, an authorization process is initiated before allowing any new node to join the network. Both algorithms help improve the Quality of Service (QoS) parameters. Moreover, we propose an access control scheme that supports accuracy, energy efficiency, freshness and authentication by reducing the communication overhead and guaranteeing the communication authenticity process. Furthermore, the proposed protocol is mapped on the oil-refinery plant to prevent and detect both sinkhole and Sybil attacks in the presence of static and mobile sensor nodes. Finally, we show the effectiveness of our proposed protocol through extensive simulations and a comparative study of other known secure data aggregation protocols.

Automatic Tampering Detection Paradigm to Support Personal Health Record

In this paper, we introduce automatic tampering detection (ATD) paradigm to support the personal health record (PHR). The personal health record (PHR) is an emerging model of patient-centric health information exchange system, which has been often outsourced to be stored at any third party locations, such as cloud service providers. However, there have been wide privacy concerns as the personal health information could be exposed to unauthorized parties and to those third party servers. To assure the patients control over accessing their own PHRs, it is required to encrypt the PHRs prior to outsourcing. In this paper we proposed a framework based on symmetric key algorithm, our goal is to achieve fine-grained, cryptographically enforced data access control to data owner.

Blackbox: Distributed peer to peer file storage and backup

With emergence of the latest technology, need for digital documents, images and medias has greatly increased. On the other hand, there has been great demand of protecting those documents. The researchers proposed several approaches to protect those valuable documents. The two most exciting available approaches are to remove the devices and online storage. However, there is problem occurring with those external devices because they are taking longer time for burning and copying the data files. In addition, there is huge possibility of data loss when burning and copy the files. Online storage provides the reasonable solution, but it is costly when storing the large amount of data. This paper introduces the novel idea of a back-up file system that allows users to store the files on extra disk space. Thus, the Black-box is safe idea to backup the secret and valuable documents. The Black-box approach is supported by redundancy mechanism that involves the erasure coding and replication. The redundancy mechanism also improves the storage and computational capacity. The proposed idea is validated using MATLAB simulation.