Jordi Cucurull

Secure Integration of Distributed Medical Data Using Mobile Agents

Healthcare is information driven and knowledge driven. Good healthcare depends on making decisions at the right time and place, using the right patient data and applicable knowledge. Communication is of utmost relevance in todays healthcare settings, in that delivery of care, research, and management all depend on sharing information. The proposed system can securely gather, integrate, and display distributed medical information using mobile-agent technology and agent-driven security

Providing early resource allocation during emergencies: The mobile triage tag

Quick response is critical during an emergency situation. This paper describes a system based on mobile electronic triage tags that makes victim information available at the base of operations as soon as possible, thus allowing an early medical resource allocation and immediate action. The cornerstone of the system is mobile agent technology, which allows information to be transported asynchronously and reliably from terminal to terminal and not requiring any network infrastructure at all. This novel approach is ready to be used in the worst case scenario, where only small handheld devices carried by the emergency personnel are available, but also integrates well when synchronous connections are possible, for instance when a mesh network can be created. The system has been successfully implemented, showing the feasibility of the proposal. By using this low-budget system, the number of casualties during the triage stage of an emergency is expected to drop off.

Anomaly detection and mitigation for disaster area networks

One of the most challenging applications of wireless networking are in disaster area networks where lack of infrastructure, limited energy resources, need for common operational picture and thereby reliable dissemination are prevalent. In this paper we address anomaly detection in intermittently connected mobile ad hoc networks in which there is little or no knowledge about the actors on the scene, and opportunistic contacts together with a store-and-forward mechanism are used to overcome temporary partitions. The approach uses a statistical method for detecting anomalies when running a manycast protocol for dissemination of important messages to k receivers. Simulation of the random walk gossip (RWG) protocol combined with detection and mitigation mechanisms is used to illustrate that resilience can be built into a network in a fully distributed and attack-agnostic manner, at a modest cost in terms of drop in delivery ratio and additional transmissions. The approach is evaluated with attacks by adversaries that behave in a similar manner to fair nodes when invoking protocol actions.

Agent mobility architecture based on IEEE-FIPA standards

Mobile agents are autonomous software entities driven by a set of goals and tasks. Reactivity, social ability, autonomy, the ability to move to different network locations, and the weak agent notion of proactiveness, allow for autonomous processing of distributed information according to their environment (context awareness).Although agent mobility has been devised for homogeneous environments, deployment of agent mobility in heterogeneous environments has been hindered by the absence of a common set of interoperation rules and ontologies for different agent middlewares.In this article, an agent migration model based on the communication standards of the IEEE-FIPA organisation is proposed. The approach described encompasses the definition of several specifications to achieve interoperability in the migration process in heterogeneous environments.The model provides a basic and extensible common migration process, which is flexible enough to support different kinds of migration methods and future upgrades. It is completely independent of any specific middleware implementation.

Full mobile agent interoperability in an IEEE-FIPA context

The existence of heterogeneous mobile agent systems hinders the interoperability of mobile agents. Several solutions exist, but they are limited in some aspects. This article proposes a full interoperability solution, in the context of the IEEE-FIPA agent standards, composed of three parts. The first part is a simple language-independent agent interface that enables agents to visit locations with different types of middlewares. The second part is a set of design models for the middlewares to support agents developed for different programming languages and architectures. And the third part is a method based on agents with multiple codes and a common agent data encoding mechanism to enable interoperability between middlewares that do not support the same programming languages. Furthermore two agent interoperability implementations, and its corresponding performance comparison, carried out over the JADE and AgentScape agent middlewares are presented.

FIPA-Based Interoperable Agent Mobility

This paper presents a proposal for a flexible agent mobility architecture based on IEEE-FIPA standards and intended to be one of them. This proposal is a first step towards interoperable mobility mechanisms, which are needed for future agent migration between different kinds of platforms. Our proposal is presented as a flexible and robust architecture that has been successfully implemented in the JADE and AgentScape platforms. It is based on an open set of protocols, allowing new protocols and future improvements to be supported. With this proposal we demonstrate that a standard architecture for agent mobility capable of supporting several agent platforms can be defined and implemented.

Modular anomaly detection for smartphone ad hoc communication

The capabilities of the modern smartphones make them the obvious platform for novel mobile applications. The open architectures, however, also create new vulnerabilities. Measures for prevention, detection, and reaction need to be explored with the peculiarities that resource-constrained devices impose. Smartphones, in addition to cellular broadband network capabilities, include WiFi interfaces that can even be deployed to set up a mobile ad hoc network (MANET). While intrusion detection in MANETs is typically evaluated with network simulators, we argue that it is important to implement and test the solutions in real devices to evaluate their resource footprint. This paper presents a modular implementation of an anomaly detection and mitigation mechanism on top of a dissemination protocol for intermittently-connected MANETs. The overhead of the security solution is evaluated in a small testbed based on three Android-based handsets and a laptop. The study shows the feasibility of the statistics-based anomaly detection regime, having low CPU usage, little added latency, and acceptable memory footprint.

Energy-based adaptation in simulations of survivability of ad hoc communication

Mobile wireless handheld devices can support ad hoc communication when infrastructure systems are overloaded or not available. Unfortunately, the constrained capacity of their batteries and the energy inefficiency inherent to the ad hoc communication poses a challenge causing a short lifetime. Protocols and application layer services, such as security, can be designed (offline) to do an efficient use of the resources. Realtime adaptation can further minimise their impact on the energy consumption, increasing the network lifetime thus extending the availability of network communication. In this paper, we propose an energy-aware adaption component for an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) in mobile ad hoc networks (MANET). The component is in charge of adjusting the parameters of the IDS based on the current energy level, using the trade-off between the nodes response to attacks and the energy consumption induced by the IDS. The approach is based on a model for accounting CPU energy consumption in network simulation, which has been implemented in an existing IDS in ns-3. Simulations demonstrate that the adaption has a positive impact on the battery life time, increasing it by 14%, without deteriorating the network-wide performance of the IDS.

Protecting mobile agent loops

A mobile agents itinerary describes the set of hosts visited during the agents travel, and must be protected against malicious entities trying to access and/or modify it for their own benefit. Protection mechanisms must be put in place, but we should avoid imposing unnecessary limitations on the agents ability to choose its itinerary in an as flexible as possible way. In this article, we extend previous work on itinerary protection protocols to include loops among the allowable protected itineraries for roaming agents. Our agents can thus traverse a whole new range of paths in a secure way.

Surviving Attacks in Challenged Networks

In the event of a disaster, telecommunication infrastructures can be severely damaged or overloaded. Hastily formed networks can provide communication services in an ad hoc manner. These networks are challenging due to the chaotic context where intermittent connection is the norm and the identity and number of participants cannot be assumed. In such environments malicious actors may try to disrupt the communications to create more chaos for their own benefit. This paper proposes a general security framework for monitoring and reacting to disruptive attacks. It includes a collection of functions to detect anomalies, diagnose them, and perform mitigation. The measures are deployed in each node in a fully distributed fashion, but their collective impact is a significant resilience to attacks, so that the actors can disseminate information under adverse conditions. The approach has been evaluated in the context of a simulated disaster area network with a manycast dissemination protocol, Random Walk Gossip, with a store-and-forward mechanism. A challenging threat model where adversaries may attempt to reduce message dissemination or drain network resources without spending much of their own energy has been adopted.