Hafiz Farooq Ahmad

A lightweight message authentication scheme for Smart Grid communications in power sector

Designed an authentication scheme for IoT based smart grid communication.Analyzed the scheme using automated tool ProVerif.The proposed scheme is more lightweight and secure than existing schemes. The Internet of Things (IoT) has plenty of applications including Smart Grid (SG). IoT enables smooth and efficient utilization of SG. It is assumed as the prevalent illustration of IoT at the moment. IP-based communication technologies are used for setting SG communication network, but they are challenged by huge volume of delay sensitive data and control information between consumers and utility providers. It is also challenged by numerous security attacks due to resource constraints in smart meters. Sundry schemes proposed for addressing these problems are inappropriate due to high communication, computation overhead and latency. In this paper, we propose a hybrid Diffie-Hellman based lightweight authentication scheme using AES and RSA for session key generation. To ensure message integrity, the advantages of hash based message authentication code are exploited. The scheme provides mutual authentication, thwarting replay and man-in-the-middle attacks and achieves message integrity, while reducing overall communication and computation overheads.

SEMREG-Pro: A Semantic based Registry for Proactive Web Service Discovery using Publish-Subscribe Model

Service discovery is vital for the expansion of Web services and is often identified as one of the most challenging problems for the wide-scale use of Web services. As the number of Web services is increasing on the Web, service discovery is becoming a major issue. To address this issue, UDDI registry has been developed by standard bodies. However, the challenge is no longer in providing information anytime, anywhere but in providing precise and accurate information to the users in real time. UDDI lacks in these characteristics because searching mechanism of UDDI is based on keyword matching. Service discovery is limited to service name and classification. Current registry-based approach for service discovery is a passive style registry, which essentially provides service information in response to a request. There is no way to push information towards service users. In this paper, we propose a proactive registry for efficient discovery that utilizes semantic-based publish-subscribe model. We use proactive push approach for providing service notifications to service requester and semantic based capability matching of OWL-S Web service descriptions. The algorithm assigns scores to individual concepts of the advertised service by concept matching with that of the requested one and then assigns overall ranking to advertisement on the basis of individual scores. The results show a significant increase in precision and recall of service discovery as compared to UDDI approach and other semantic based approaches.

Multi-agent systems: overview of a new paradigm for distributed systems

Novel opportunities and challenges are emerging in the near future, such as Electronic commerce (e-commerce), due to the convergence of computers and telecommunication. Successful e-commerce requires rapid adaptation and excellent timing for service providers and users with guaranteed quality of service. Agent based technologies represent one of the most promising technological paradigm for distributed service system to meet these requirements. The aim of the current paper is to briefly review the agent systems basic architecture, with emphasize on agent communication languages. Two most popular agent communication languages, namely FIPA ACL and KQML have been briefly reviewed. The paper summarizes standardization activity of the agent system from the perspective of FIPA and OMG reference models. The relationship between FIPA and OMG has been given with a short discussion.

Autonomous mapping of HL7 RIM and relational database schema

Healthcare systems need to share information within and across the boundaries in order to provide better care to the patients. For this purpose, they take advantage of the full potential of current state of the art in healthcare standards providing interoperable solutions. HL7 V3 specification is an international message exchange and interoperability standard. HL7 V3 messages exchanged between healthcare applications are ultimately recorded into local healthcare databases, mostly in relational databases. In order to bring these relational databases in compliance with HL7, mappings between HL7 RIM (Reference Information Model) and relational database schema are required. Currently, RIM and database mapping is largely performed manually, therefore it is tedious, time consuming, error prone and expensive process. It is a challenging task to determine all correspondences between RIM and schema automatically because of extreme heterogeneity issues in healthcare databases. To reduce the amount of manual efforts as much as possible, autonomous mapping approaches are required. This paper proposes a technique that addresses the aforementioned mapping issue and aligns healthcare databases to HL7 V3 RIM specifications. Furthermore, the proposed technique has been implemented as a working application and tested on real world healthcare systems. The application loads the target healthcare schema and then identifies the most appropriate match for tables and the associated fields in the schema by using domain knowledge and the matching rules defined in the Mapping Knowledge Repository. These rules are designed to handle the complexity of semantics found in healthcare databases. The GUI allows users to view and edit/re-map the correspondences. Once all the mappings are defined, the application generates Mapping Specification, which contains all the mapping information i.e. database tables and fields with associated RIM classes and attributes. In order to enable the transactions, the application is facilitated with the autonomous code generation from the Mapping Specification. The Code Generator component focuses primarily on generating custom classes and hibernate mapping files against the runtime system to retrieve and parse the data from the data source—thus allows bi-directional HL7 to database communication, with minimum programming required. Our experimental results show 35–65% accuracy on real laboratory systems, thus demonstrating the promise of the approach. The proposed scheme is an effective step in bringing the clinical databases in compliance with RIM, providing ease and flexibility.

Autonomous Semantic Grid: Principles of Autonomous Decentralized Systems for Grid Computing

Grid computing is an open, heterogeneous and highly dynamic environment based on the principles of service oriented computing. It focuses on basic infrastructure for coordinated resource sharing among virtual organizations to achieve high performance and availability. However, use of existing Grid computing environment is quite complex and requires a lot of human intervention. In order to avoid this intervention, enhancements are required in bringing autonomy and semantics in existing Grid infrastructure. Semantics would act as glue for autonomy in the process of efficient resource discovery and utilization. Several ontologies and ontology languages have been proposed in this regard which not only have some shortcoming but also poses a sort of overhead for the Grid environment. On the other hand, agents are autonomous problem solving entities, and can negotiate semantically for interoperation with each other in dynamic environments. Inspired from the concept of Autonomous Decentralized Systems, we propose that the above mentioned goals can be achieved by integrating FIPA Multi Agent Systems with the Grid Service Architecture and hence to lay the foundation for Autonomous Semantic Grid. Autonomous Semantic Grid system architecture is aimed to provide an improved infrastructure by bringing autonomy, semantic interoperability and decentralization in the Grid computing for emerging applications. This paper then presents implementation details of first milestone toward Autonomous Semantic Grid realization based on a middleware, namely AgentWeb Gateway for integration of Multi Agent Systems and Grid Service Architecture. Evaluation of the system has also been performed over a number of application scenarios.

An Improved Remote User Authentication Scheme Using Elliptic Curve Cryptography

Internet of Things has drastically expanded the global network for information exchange, because thousands of communication devices are becoming part of the global network. Besides the numerous benefits of global network expansion, secure communication and authentication among the comprising elements of the global network is also posing great challenges. Recently, Huang et al. proposed a key agreement scheme in order to facilitate user authenticity using elliptic curve cryptography. Huang et al. further emphasized the scheme is secure. Nevertheless, comprehensive analysis in this paper, demonstrates that Huang et al. scheme has correctness issues and is prone to impersonation/forgery attack. Then an improved scheme is presented to tenacity the said glitches existent in Huang et al.’s scheme. The security analysis of proposed scheme is substantiated in random oracle model. Furthermore, a simulation of proposed scheme is carried out by automated formal tool ProVerif. The performance and security assessments show that the scheme presented in this paper withstand impersonation attack and offers adequate security while reducing significant computation cost as compared with Huang et al.’s scheme. Hence, due to better performance and security, the proposed scheme is the appropriate one for security sensitive and resource constrained environments.

Layered Memory Architecture for High IO Intensive Information Services to Achieve Timeliness

Storage systems need to provide high IO transactions in addition to their capacity and availability requirements to achieve high assurance characteristics, such as fault tolerance and timeliness. Caches built in large and medium size storage systems have not been very effective to improve the IO transactions and overall performance of the system. Caches at various layers of the memory hierarchy in computing systems are more fast but very small compared to the adjacent lower level of storage device. This paper proposes a novel concept to exploit local memory as a block device to improve the IO performance of storage systems called data transmission system (DTS) concept. This concept is based on hierarchical layered memory utilization and management in the information system. Data accessed frequently is maintained on the managed DTS cache device in close proximity to the CPU. The proposed concept is substantially different from the conventional unmanaged cache in the computing systems. System architecture and detailed system design are presented in this paper to realize the proposed concept. Performance evaluation of the system has been carried out through numerical as well as application scenario. The experimental results show improvement of the order of 10 to 100 times faster IO transactions and reduce CPU wait time significantly.

Ontology Services between Agents and OWL Based Web Services

Agents and grid services are distinct technologies which arose independent of each other, having their own standards and specifications. Introduction of semantics in grid services play a pivotal role in making them programmable by software agents. Different ontology languages have been proposed for semantic description of these technologies i.e. Ontology Web Language (OWL) is a W3C standard for emerging semantic web, while FIPA SL is FIPA standard for Multiagent systems. These semantic description languages have different underlying support for the terms, syntax, semantics and implementation constraints, which hinder semantic interoperability among these technologies. Therefore, our research focus has been on integrating agent technology with grid services without changing their standards and specifications. We have proposed a middleware known as middleware ontology service, which provide semantic interoperability between agents and grid services by providing translation of ontologies i.e. translation of OWL ontology to FIPA SL ontology for agents and translation of FIPA SL ontology to OWL for grid services. We describe how the proposed architecture registers the translated ontology on middleware and exposes it to grid and agent communities for further querying of concepts, properties and actions. We also describe the test bed configuration through which a software agent will invoke and use a grid service published in OWL and vice versa.

Digital health care ecosystem: SOA compliant HL7 based health care information interchange

Increasing demand for health care services pose a number of challenges to healthcare industry and one of them is sharing health care information among heterogeneous health care information systems. Digital health care ecosystem aims at providing continues treatment process requiring seamless information sharing across multiple healthcare providers/organizations. Different health care standards and technologies have been proposed to address this challenge. HL7 is one of the standards for information sharing involves object oriented modelling to the development and specification of information being interchanged. It also specifies transportation specification for message exchange named as web service profiles. We propose Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) compliant HL7 based system architecture for health care information interchange. The propose architecture comprises of Web Service Adapter, HL7 V3 message parsing/generation, V2 to V3 translation and database mapping to HL7 modelling elements. We describe in detail the WSDL construct document for the Result Query Filler application role in Laboratory domain.

A provably secure anonymous authentication scheme for Session Initiation Protocol

Recently, Lu et al. presented a mutual authentication scheme for Session Initiation Protocol. Lu et al. claimed their scheme provides safeguard against familiar attacks and offers efficient authentication facility. However, this paper divulges that the scheme of Lu et al. is prone to server and user impersonation attacks. Additionally, the scheme of Lu et al. implicates correctness concerns. Consequently, an enhanced scheme is proposed, not only to resolve correctness concerns but also to provide robustness against server and user impersonation attacks. The proposed scheme makes use of a user-specific secret parameter to deal with the security and correctness issues. The formal and informal security analysis proves the robustness and efficiency of the proposed scheme against all familiar attacks. Furthermore, security analysis is also substantiated through popular automated tool PROVERIF. Copyright