Divyashikha Sethia

NFC based secure mobile healthcare system

With the recent increase in usage of mobile devices especially in developing countries, they can be used for an efficient healthcare management. In this work, we have proposed a novel architecture for improving healthcare system with the help of Android based mobile devices with NFC [1] and Bluetooth interfaces, smartcard technology on tamper resistant secure element (SE) for storing credentials and secure data, and a HealthSecure service on a hybrid cloud for security and health record management. The main contribution of this paper is proposal of applications for i) Secure Medical Tags for reducing medical errors and ii) Secure Healthcard for storing Electronic Health Record (EHR) based on Secure NFC Tags, mobile device using NFC P2P Mode or Card Emulation Mode. We have also briefly mentioned a basic security framework requirement for the applications. Since NFC NDEF format is prone to security attacks [2], we have utilized low level APIs on Android based mobile devices, to securely access NFC tags such as MIFARE Classic tags with NFC-A (ISO 1443-3A) properties. Simple touch of NFC enabled mobile devices can benefit both the patient as well as the medical doctors by providing a robust and secure health flow. It can also provide portability of devices and usability for health management in emergency situation, overpopulated hospitals and remote locations.

Secure sensor node with Raspberry Pi

Information Technology, when implemented in healthcare, has the potential to radically improve the quality and efficiency of services being made available to patients. With the advent of mobile computing and wireless sensor networks, data acquisition and processing has become much faster and less expensive. Since there is an increase in possible software attacks on privacy and safety of health applications, safety and reliability of the sensor data is an important issue that needs to be addressed in this field. In this paper, a unique design of a secure sensor node prototype has been proposed and implemented, which communicates over Bluetooth using RC4 encryption algorithm between a mobile phone and their monitoring equipment. The design uses an accelerometer based sensor, which can be used as a prototype for a body sensor for fall detection in elderly people [1]. The data from the sensor is processed, encrypted and wirelessly communicated by Raspberry Pi (a Single Board Computer) to a mobile phone. The security issues have been addressed in two ways. Firstly, the loss of data is prevented by introducing a wired connection between the Raspberry Pi and the accelerometer based sensor. Secondly, a secure data communication is ensured by encrypting the sensor data using an encryption key sent from the mobile phone using Bluetooth. Our prototype, can be used to investigate and design several new sensor nodes with different interfaces, encryption and compression algorithms. The future work extends the application of this secure sensor node to the design of the body sensor module.

MRDMS-mobile replicated database management synchronization

We consider a mobile replicated database that consists of several mobile nodes, each containing a replicated copy of a common database. The nodes are interconnected through a wireless network along with a fixed server which retains the primary copy of the database. In this work, we have proposed an efficient database synchronization algorithm - Mobile Replicated Database Management Synchronization (MRDMS) for networks with low bandwidth and poor connectivity. The algorithm has been designed and implemented so that any updates on databases can be performed on mobile nodes, even when they are offline. They can be synchronized later with a fixed server on availability of a network connection. A case study of Livestock Database has been used in this work. Our proposed algorithm can provide an efficient management of replicated database using simple mobile devices in a disconnected network for proper consistency and synchronization along with network utilization.

Optimized CPU Frequency Scaling on Android Devices Based on Foreground Running Application

When it comes to portable devices, battery life is a very crucial aspect. Battery life of a mobile device can be improved by several techniques. One such technique is the effective management of the operating voltage and frequency of the processor. Linux provides a utility, named cpufreq, to dynamically scale CPU frequency on the fly. Since Android operating system is based on Linux, the cpufreq utility can be used to scale the CPU frequency of the portable devices. To decide when and how much frequency should be scaled, cpufreq governors are used. This paper proposes the basis for a new cpufreq governor called appspace, to improve battery life by considering not only instantaneous CPU usage, but also foreground running application on the device.

ABE Based Raspberry Pi Secure Health Sensor (SHS)

Electronic health data collected from bio-medical sensors is having a profound and increasing impact on mobile health services. When transferred over the air this data should be accessible only to legitimate users such as doctors, nurses etc. In this paper, we propose a unique Secure Health Sensor (SHS) node which provides fine access control mechanism such that only legitimate users can access sensitive medical data. Medical data security is achieved through ensuring a secure communication by encrypting sensor data, preventing loss of sensor data by using wired connection between Raspberry Pi and sensors and using Ciphertext Policy Based Attribute Based Encryption (CP-ABE) to provide access control in multi-user enviroment. We propose storage of cyrptogrphic credentials on Raspbery Pi on hardware tamper resistant area such as Secure Element on form factors such as Go Trust microSD card. It comprises of java card applets used to store credentials and can be accessed by special securely compiled applications on the Raspbery Pi.

Dynamic Prefix Caching of videos with Lazy Update

Recently, there has been a tremendous growth in accessing media content like video for both mobile and computer platforms. This trend has resulted in increase in bandwidth requirement on client and server side. Many solutions like caching video have been suggested to reduce the backend bandwidth requirement, but none have been efficient enough to be implemented in real scenario. In this paper, we propose a Dynamic Prefix Caching (DPC) algorithm with Lazy Update mechanism that utilizes past request patterns of video to compute the length of prefix that should be cached on the proxy server. Our primary objective is to cache a video from starting till a calculated point, depending upon its popularity i.e. for a more popular video a larger Prefix length video will be cached on the proxy server. As the popularity of the video will change, the length of the cached video Prefix will be updated. Each time we are about to exhaust allotted Caching space, criteria of popularity is made more stringent. The experimental results indicate significant improvement in bandwidth requirements and clients waiting time.

Optimized MapFile based Storage of Small files in Hadoop

Hadoop is an open source software based on MapReduce framework. The Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) performs well while storing and managing data sets of very large size. However, the performance of HDFS suffers while handling a large number of small files since they put a lot of burden on the NameNode of HDFS both in terms of memory and access time. To overcome these defects, we merge small files into a large file and store the merged file on HDFS. Generally, when small files are merged, variation in the size distribution of files is not taken into consideration. We propose a new algorithm OMSS (Optimized MapFile based Storage of Small files) which merges the small files into a large file based on the Worst fit strategy. The strategy helps in reducing internal fragmentation in data blocks, which in turn leads to fewer data blocks consumed for the same number of small files. Less number of data blocks mean fewer memory overheads at major nodes of Hadoop cluster and hence increased efficiency of data processing. Our experimental results indicate that the time to process data on HDFS containing unprocessed small files reduces significantly to 590s when MapFile is used and it reduces further to 440s when OMSS is used. OMSS as compared to MapFile merging algorithm has a reduction of 34.7% in memory requirements.

Group authorization using threshold signatures for medical procedures

Digitalisation of the health sector is being adopted by many countries to deliver reliable healthcare services. In healthcare organisations, frauds are rampant possessing a serious threat to good governance. To control such malpractices we present the design of a system for group authorization in healthcare organisations. In this medical professionals are provided with some shares of a secret. To authorise any medical document at least threshold number of medical professionals have to offer their signatures shares. Only when enough number of valid signature shares get combined, the document gets authorised. Maintaining audit logs using the group signature can ensure non-repudiation. We implement threshold Gap Diffie-Hellman (GDH) signature scheme based on the concept of secret sharing for the proposed system. Also, we compare the results of our implementation with the basic RSA scheme. Our implementation has shorter key generation time as compared to a serial RSA scheme. Also, unlike RSA scheme supports the very idea of threshold signatures. Incorporating proposed group authorization system can prevent frauds and corruption in the healthcare sector by providing transparency and accountability.

Security framework for portable NFC mobile based health record system

A portable healthcard on the patient mobile device can integrate Patient Health Records (PHRs) dispersed on various Hospital Information Systems (HIS) to provide a highly available medical history for correct diagnosis and treatment. In this paper, we present a broad overview of the design issues for the security framework of a novel NFC and Secure Element-based healthcard on a mobile device known as S-MAPLE (Secure Mobility-Assisted PortabLE) healthcard. We provide detailed design for Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) with selective read and write access. Evaluation results on Android-based devices indicate satisfactory performance results for delays due to security overheads.

Automated Tool to Generate Parallel CUDA Code from a Serial C Code

the introduction of GPGPUs, parallel programming has become simple and affordable. APIs such as NVIDIAs CUDA have attracted many programmers to port their applications to GPGPUs. But writing CUDA codes still remains a challenging task. Moreover, the vast repositories of legacy serial C codes, which are still in wide use in the industry, are unable to take any advantage of this extra computing power available. Lot of attempts have thus been made at developing auto-parallelization techniques to convert a serial C code to a corresponding parallel CUDA code. Some parallelizes, allow programmers to add ―hints‖ to their serial programs, while another approach has been to build an interactive system between programmers and parallelizing tools/compilers. But none of these are really automatic techniques, since the programmer is fully involved in the process. In this paper, we present an automatic parallelization tool that completely relieves the programmer of any involvement in the parallelization process. Preliminary results with a basic set of usual C codes show that the tool is able to provide a significant speedup of ~10 times.