Pethuru Raj

A secure Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) environment: An implementation view

T Subjects such as knowledge engineering, pervasive computing, unified communication, ubiquitous sensing and actuation and situation awareness are gaining the most critical and crucial attention from information technology (IT) professionals and pundits across the globe these days in order to accomplish the vision of ambient intelligence (AmI). It is all about effective and round-the-clock gleaning of data and information from different and distributed sources. Secondly whatever is gathered, transmitted, and stocked are being subjected to a cornucopia of tasks such as processing, mining, clustering, classification, and analysis for the real-time and elegant extraction of hidden actionable insights. Based on the knowledge extracted and the needs identified, the final tasks is decide and initiate the next course of actions in time. Not only information, interaction and transaction, but also physical services can be conceived, constructed and supplied to human users with the stability and maturity AmI technologies and instrumented, interconnected, and intelligent devices. This paper gives the detailed description of an AmI application which can provide impenetrable and unbreakable security, convenience, care and comfort for the needy. Our focus here is to develop a secure and safety-critical Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) environment which can monitor the patients situation and give timely updates. In order to fulfill all these needs, a smart environment has been created to effectively and insightfully control patients needs. The middleware standard preferred for the development and deployment a bevy of ambient and articulate services is Open Service Gateway Initiative (OSGi).

Enhancing the Security of Customer Data in Cloud Environments Using a Novel Digital Fingerprinting Technique

With the rapid rise of the Internet and electronics in people’s life, the data related to it has also undergone a mammoth increase in magnitude. The data which is stored in the cloud can be sensitive and at times needs a proper file storage system with a tough security algorithm. Whereas cloud is an open shareable elastic environment, it needs impenetrable and airtight security. This paper deals with furnishing a secure storage system for the above-mentioned purpose in the cloud. To become eligible to store data a user has to register with the cloud database. This prevents unauthorized access. The files stored in the cloud are encrypted with RSA algorithm and digital fingerprint for the same has been generated through MD5 message digest before storage. The RSA provides unreadability of data to anyone without the private key. MD5 makes it impossible for any changes on data to go unnoticed. After the application of RSA and MD5 before storage, the data becomes resistant to access or modifications by any third party and to intruders of cloud storage system. This application is tested in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud Web Services.

A performance analysis method for service-oriented cloud applications (SOCAs)

With the memorable start and massive adoption of cloud concepts, infrastructures and platforms, there is a paradigm shift in the IT landscape. That is, IT solutions and services are being developed, debugged, deployed and delivered from clouds to be conveniently consumed by global users via the open and public web. The point is that the web and the cloud resources are smartly combined and leveraged to ring in a series of delectable improvements and improvisations in the ways and means in which IT is being approached, analyzed, and articulated. With the availability of slim and sleek devices in our hands and pockets, the cloud idea is to enter into a totally exotic and eerie phase. One noteworthy derivative out of all these hot happenings in the cloud world is the eruption of service oriented cloud applications (SOCAs) due to the cool convergence of service orientation and cloud paradigms. In this paper, we have explained the performance bottlenecks of SOCAs by taking into account a number of diverse scenarios. Further on, we have presented a new performance calculation as well as enhancement mechanism for this type of flexible and futuristic cloud-based applications.

A Mobile Based Remote User Authentication Scheme without Verifier Table for Cloud Based Services

The emerging Cloud computing technology, offering computing resources as a service is gaining increasing attention of both the public and private sector. For the whole hearted adoption of Cloud, the service providers need to ensure that only valid users gain access to the services and data residing within the providers premises. Ensuring secure access to sensitive resources within the Cloud requires a strong user authentication mechanism using multiple authentication factors. The mechanisms should also consider the increasing needs of Internet access through smart phones and other mobile devices and facilitate access through a variety of devices.n Traditionally, a user needs to maintain separate user accounts for each Service Provider whose service he/she desires to use and this may cause inconvenience to users. Single Sign on (SSO) addresses this issue by permitting users to create one login credential and access multiple services hosted in different domains. In this scenario, a compromise of the single credential can result in account take over at many other sites. This points out to the requirement of strengthening the authentication mechanism by using more than one factor. This paper proposes a SSO based remote user authentication scheme for a Cloud environment. The proposed protocol uses password and mobile token and does not require the server to maintain a verifier table. The protocol is verified using automated security Protocol verification tool, Scyther and the results prove that the protocol provides protection against man-in-the-middle attack, replay attack and secrecy of the users credentials.

Enabling context-awareness: A service oriented architecture implementation for a hospital use case

The medical field is continuously flooded with newer technologies and tools for automating all kinds of medical care processes. There are a variety of software solutions and platforms for enabling smart healthcare and for assisting care providers such as doctors, nurses, surgeons and specialists with all kinds of timely insights to diagnose and decide the correct course of actions. There are patient monitoring and expert systems to simplify and streamline healthcare service design, development, and delivery. However there are concerns and challenges with the multiplicity and heterogeneity of technologies and solutions. The dense heterogeneous medical devices available in the intensive therapy units pose a challenge of medical device integration. Needless to say, lot of research work has gone in devising techniques in integrating these systems for exchange of data. However mere device integration does not exploit the modern technologies until meaningful and critical information is presented to doctors and patient care personals adapting to the changes in the patient condition. The goal of this research is to apply context aware computing using service oriented architecture in acquiring, analysing and assisting doctors and nurses with necessary information for easy and critical time saving decision making. This paper presents an implementation of the identified web services which can be consumed during a treatment at the Intensive Therapy Unit (ITU).

A Single Sign on based secure remote user authentication scheme for Multi-Server Environments

A Multi-Server Architecture comprises of a server environment having many different servers which provides the user the flexibility of accessing resources from multiple Service Providing Servers using the same credential. The primary objective of a Multi Server Environment (MSE) is to provide services of different Service Providers (SPs) without repeating registration at each SP server, and to get a unique single credential for all the servers in MSE. However, the conventional MSEs, proposed by various researchers, proposes the individual authentication service by each SP on their respective server using the credential issued by the Registration Authority of MSE. The mechanism requires the user to access each SP by keying the same credentials for every SP separately. Single Sign On (SSO) is an authentication mechanism that enables a user to sign-on once and access the services of various SPs in the same session. SAML is generally used as a Single Sign-On protocol. This work analyzes the smart card based authentication scheme for Multi-Server Environment proposed by Li et al.s and discuss various security attacks on the said scheme. The paper also proposes a Secure Dynamic-ID based scheme using smart cards or crypto cards which do not require a verifier table and implements Single Sign On feature using SAML protocol, thus allowing the user to enjoy all the features of an MSE along with SSO.

A Smart Ambulance for the synchronized health care — A service oriented device architecture-based

With the advent of disappearing, dexterous and disposable devices in bigger volumes, industries across sun-shining segments such as communication, home automation, healthcare, supply chain, logistics, defense, and manufacturing are bound to reach next-level of their operations, outputs and offerings. These simple, yet powerful devices, on proper utilization in the field of healthcare can save valuable lives. The devices are quick, accurate; reduce manual-labor and are error free. In this paper, the main concentration is on developing a Smart Ambulance system by using OSGi as the middleware, using an open-source tool called Knopflerfish. By using a set of sensors, and other applications that, in the background, do most of the lifesaving work in an ambulance, ranging from directing the driver through the path with the least traffic in a short span of time, taking into account the severity of the condition of the patient. Implementation is done by developing services, applications and devices capable of running these to the concerned user groups.

An approach to improvise recognition rate from occluded and pose variant faces

Face recognition is increasingly gaining popularity in todays field mainly because one of the major applications of face recognition, surveillance cameras are being used in real world applications. At the same time, researchers are trying to increase the accuracy of recognition as recognizing face from an unconstrained faces is naturally difficult. In the case of real world application, during image capture there are high chances of faces appearing with different poses, face subjected to illumination and occlusion. In this paper we propose a model that can increase the recognition rate with faces of different pose and faces subjected to occlusion. We introduce the technique of in-painting to restore the occluded face in a frame of video. A dictionary set is created with restored occluded face and faces with varying inclination. In our proposed model, Discrete Curvelet Transform is used to extract features. Comparison with traditional method shows a better recognition rate.

A proof of concept implementation of a mobile based authentication scheme without password table for cloud environment

Cloud computing is a fast growing technology offering a wide range of software and infrastructure services on a pay-per-use basis. Many small and medium businesses (SMBs) have adopted this utility based Computing Model as it contributes to reduced operational and capital expenditure. Though the resource sharing feature adopted by Cloud service providers (CSPs) enables the organizations to invest less on infrastructure, it also raises concerns about the security of data stored at CSPs premises. The fact that data is prone to get accessed by the insiders or by other customers sharing the storage space is a matter of concern. Regulating access to protected resources requires reliable and secure authentication mechanism, which assures that only authorized users are provided access to the services and resources offered by CSP. This paper proposes a strong two-factor authentication mechanism using password and mobile token. The proposed model provides Single Sign-on (SSO) functionality and does not require a password table. Besides introducing the authentication scheme, the proof of concept implementation is also provided.

Fuzzy logic for decision-enablement: a novel context-awareness framework for smarter environments

With the emergence of pioneering technologies and tools in the information and communication technology (ICT) space, our everyday environments (personal, social, professional, etc.) are deeply ICT-enabled to be smarter in their operations and offerings. Smarter healthcare is one shining example. Provisioning real-time and precision-centric healthcare facilities for people especially those who are in disabled, debilitated, and diseased conditions is being made possible with the impressive advancements (the growing array of smart sensors, digitised entities, wearables, robots, controllers, and other disposable and diminutive actuators). The growing variety and volume of connected devices enable remote diagnostics, real-time monitoring, measuring, and management by transmitting various body health parameters for ensuring perfect decision-making and medication. In this paper, we have described an adaptive framework leveraging the pivotal power of fuzzy logic, which is famous for rule-based decision-making, for accelerating the systematic realisation of smarter environments especially for the healthcare segment.