Mohamed Jamal Zemerly

Locating friends and family using mobile phones with global positioning system (GPS)

This paper presents a mobile application based on providing Location Based Services (LBS) using Global Positioning System (GPS) as a location provider. The main objective of this work is to design and implement a client server system that helps users to locate their family members and receive alerts when friends are nearby. The mobile application was implemented using J2ME where the most recent APIs and other older APIs were combined together in order to make the application reliable on all types of mobiles. The server was implemented using PHP since PHP guarantees that the server would not be overloaded. The type of the Database used in the system was MySQL. The average location accuracy of the application is about couple of meters.

Murshid: a mobile tourist companion

This paper describes Murshid, a context aware mobile application that provides guidance to tourists traveling to a country. The user context is a key element of our application as guidance to the tourist is provided after sensing the context and a fine analysis of its ingredients. Our focus in this research was to establish a tourist model and to instantiate it with a specific tourist for the United Arab Emirates (UAE) which is becoming one of the ideal tourist destinations nowadays. Murshid is designed as client-server architecture and it uses GPS based location to provide a visual aid using UAE map. Murshid is flexible, user-friendly, portable, and support dynamic information. The application provides a set of services to tourists through their mobile handsets, namely: special event notification, weather forecasting, currency exchange, language translation, and location bookmarking and sharing. Each of the services provides tourism guidance according to the users context that is dynamic by nature since we are dealing with nomadic users. The application utilizes different context information to adapt its functionality according to the surrounding environment. This information can be spatial, temporal, or related to the environment. The context model includes the user location, the user profile, the current date, events related information, and user interaction. The paper presents the context model, the architecture of the system and the services implemented. It describes also how the context is managed in order to adapt the system functionality to the changes that may occur in order to react accordingly at the right time, at the right place and for the right person.

Context aware mobile Muslim companion

This paper describes a context aware mobile application which helps the user with his daily commitments. The application senses the users current context and provides him with suitable information. The system is a mobile application which simulates a user companion aiming to inform him and remind him with his daily duties at the right time and location, and taking into account his personal profile. The application is a client-server architecture which deals with both the mobile environment and the users context. In this paper we focus on a specific user, the Muslim Companion, for which we have implemented a set of services. The Muslim Companion works like an advisor; it provides guidance and teaching and reminds any Muslim about his daily tasks. Our system has been developed to i) sense the context including the mobile devices environment, the user profile and the calendars related events; ii) process the suitable services to be required and the information to be displayed; iii) display the information in a user-friendly manner on the users mobile device. The system is portable and can operate on many platforms and a variety of mobile devices.

RFID lightweight mutual authentication using shrinking generator

The RFID technology is recently predicted to spread in most of our daily lives. However, it is very much vulnerable as it faces some major security challenges and threats. Thus, RFID technology also provides the solutions for the security threats concerned with security, privacy, and authentication. This paper not only addresses security privacy and authentication but also proposes a lightweight mutual authentication suitable to be implemented for passive RFID tag. The proposed protocol is simple, low cost and low power consumption as well as efficient computation since it uses the simple and low cost Shrinking Generator that can be considered an alternative for the use of the One Time Pad algorithm.

EDPEPPS: A Toolset for the Design and Performance Evaluation of Parallel Applications

This paper describes a performance-oriented environment for the design of portable parallel software. The environment consists of a graphical design tool based on the PVM communication library for building parallel algorithms, a state-of-the-art simulation engine, a CPU characteriser and a visualisation tool for animation of program execution and visualisation of platform and network performance measures and statistics. The toolset is used to model a virtual machine composed of a cluster of workstations interconnected by a local area network. The simulation model used is modular and its components are interchangeable which allows easy re-configuration of the platform. Both communication and CPU models are validated.

A Novel Hybrid Cellular Automata Based Cipher System for Internet of Things

High volume products for Internet of Things have a constricted cost that limit the cryptographic implementation in such devices. Thus, there is a need to design a lightweight cryptography stream cipher that can fit such low computation devices with low cost. This paper proposes a lightweight stream cipher that can enhance Linear Feedback Shift Register (LFSR), Feed Carry Shift Register (FCSR) within the Shrinking Generator stream cipher and used Cellular Automata (CA) to update the cipher stream.

A Novel Security Scheme for the Smart Grid and SCADA Networks

Supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) are applications that collect data from a system in order to automate the monitoring and controlling of its activities. Several industrial fields such as, electric utilities, water supplies and buildings’ facilities have already adopted SCADA systems to increase the efficiency and reduce cost. However, the IT community is concerned about the level of security that any applied SCADA system provides. This paper concentrates on the major security threats encountered in SCADA systems. In addition, it discusses a new proposed methodology in order to increase the system security with minimal impact on efficiency. The proposed scheme provides several security services which are mutual authentication, confidentiality, data integrity and accountability.

An Organic Architecture for Distributed Knowledge Management

The new breed of enterprise information systems is very complex in scope. They comprise multiple-component interactions on a variety of data models. New components have to be added to existing operational systems, in order for the enterprise to stay competitive by exploiting new sources for data capture. If new sources of data involve new Internet transaction components, for example, these should be integrated to the existing logistics and market components. This integration cannot be managed in an ad hoc way but requires a holistic architecture. This paper proposes a complex organic distributed architecture (CODA) to manage the integration of additional components to large distributed knowledge management systems. CODA achieves this through a layered architecture, dynamic adaptability, filtered information and role-based security. The layered architecture levels data knowledge according to cognitive complexity. The dynamic adaptability allows components to meet a variety of objectives by using critical success factors in each component. Filters are placed between the layers to ensure that each layer only receives relevant data. Finally, a security system based on roles and layers manages access to data. In this paper, we give an overview of CODA and present a simple case study, which illustrates the use of CODA.

Securing E-Seal real time tracking system for Internet of Things

High volume products such as RFID tags and Wireless Sensors (WS) have a constricted cost that limit the cryptographic implementation in such devices. Our work focuses on securing an E-Seal that can be used to secure the communication of the real time tracking communication by using a symmetric cryptosystem. Also, this paper addresses the use of the asymmetric cipher which is an Identity Based Cryptosystem (IBC) based with lightweight computation specification that can be used in low computation devices for locking and unlocking of the E-Seal.

Enhancing the Security of the Shrinking Generator Based Lightweight Mutual Authentication RFID Protocol

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a low computation power devices used to identify objects or subjects. Thus the low power devices suffer from major security issues, especially in the areas of privacy and authentication. Therefore, researchers tried to suggest lightweight cryptography protocols. This paper suggests an improvement for the lightweight mutual authentication proposed protocol using Shrinking Generator (SG) by Shemaili et al. since the protocol is vulnerable to a serious attack that can expose the tag data and compromise it. Also, the paper presents a scenario about securing the airport environment using the SG-Based protocol.