Sheikh Iqbal Ahamed

A survey of middleware for sensor network and challenges

In recent years, wireless sensor network (WSN) has emerged as a highly important research area. Middleware for WSN facilitates development and deployment of a large number of applications such as smart environments, weather forecasting, bridge monitoring, health applications, etc. for sensor networks. But due to resource constraints, unreliability of wireless networks, and diversity in available sensor hardware, middleware for WSN presents a number of new challenges. In this paper, we try to find out and elaborate various challenges associated with the development of middleware for WSN. We present a comparative study of several existing middleware and how they address those challenges. In doing so, we point out the limitations of present generation middleware for sensor networks. We also illustrate how much more work needs to be done to make middleware for WSN suitable for general purpose usage in real world

Intelligent Mobile Health Monitoring System (IMHMS)

Health monitoring is repeatedly mentioned as one of the main application areas for Pervasive computing. Mobile Health Care is the integration of mobile computing and health monitoring. It is the application of mobile computing technologies for improving communication among patients, physicians, and other health care workers. As mobile devices have become an inseparable part of our life it can integrate health care more seamlessly to our everyday life. It enables the delivery of accurate medical information anytime anywhere by means of mobile devices. Recent technological advances in sensors, low-power integrated circuits, and wireless communications have enabled the design of low-cost, miniature, lightweight and intelligent bio-sensor nodes. These nodes, capable of sensing, processing, and communicating one or more vital signs, can be seamlessly integrated into wireless personal or body area networks for mobile health monitoring. In this paper we present Intelligent Mobile Health Monitoring System (IMHMS), which can provide medical feedback to the patients through mobile devices based on the biomedical and environmental data collected by deployed sensors.

MARKS (Middleware Adaptability for Resource Discovery, Knowledge Usability and Self-healing) for Mobile Devices of Pervasive Computing Environments

With the tremendous increase in the use of mobile handheld and wearable devices, the pervasive computing arena is becoming stronger and powerful day by day. Despite having various physical constraints, many of the resource-rich functionalities enjoyed by other devices have been incorporated in these tiny devices. This is why different fields of research have developed in this area. There are still some unexplored but crucial features like knowledge usability, resource discovery, and self-healing that deserve further attention. Besides exploration of these areas, implementation and evaluation of these features need to be considered from a security and privacy perspective. In this paper, we illustrate the design and implementation of a middleware MARKS, which incorporates these less-explored areas of pervasive computing, to guarantee optimum utilization of the physical capabilities and also to ensure security and privacy

CAT: a context-aware trust model for open and dynamic systems

The requirements for spontaneous interactions in open and dynamic systems create security issues and necessitate the incorporation of trust management into each software entity to make decisions. Trust encompasses various quality attributes (e.g., security, competence, honesty) and helps in making appropriate decisions. In this paper, we present CAT, an interaction-based Context-Aware Trust model for open and dynamic systems by considering services as contexts. We identify a number of trust properties including context and risk awareness and address those in the proposed model. A context-similarity parameter is proposed to make decisions in similar situations. A time-based ageing parameter is introduced to change trust values over time without any further interaction. We present direct and indirect recommendations and apply path-based ageing on indirect recommendations. A mechanism to calculate the accuracy of recommendations is described. This accuracy is used to differentiate between reliable and unreliable recommendations in the total trust calculation.

Enhancing Privacy and Security of RFID System with Serverless Authentication and Search Protocols in Pervasive Environments

One of the recent realms that gathered attention of researchers is the security issues of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems that have tradeoff between controlled costs and improved efficiency. Evolvement and benefits of RFID technology signifies that it can be low-cost, efficient and secured solution to many pervasive applications. But RFID technology will not intermingle into human lives until prevailing and flexible privacy mechanisms are conceived. However, ensuring strong privacy has been an enormous challenge due to extremely inadequate computational storage of typical RFID tags. So in order to relieve tags from responsibility, privacy protection and security assurance was guaranteed by central server. In this paper, we suggest serverless, forward secure and untraceable authentication protocol for RFID tags. This authentication protocol safeguards both tag and reader against almost all major attacks without the intervention of server. Though it is very critical to guarantee untraceability and scalability simultaneously, here we are proposing a scheme to make our protocol more scalable via ownership transfer. To the best of our knowledge this feature is incorporated in the serverless system for the first time in pervasive environments. One extension of RFID authentication is RFID tag searching, which has not been given much attention so far. But we firmly believe that in near future tag searching will be a significant issue RFID based pervasive systems. So in this paper we propose a serverless RFID tag searching protocol in pervasive environments. This protocol can search a particular tag efficiently without server’s intervention. Furthermore they are secured against major security threats.

ePet: when cellular phone learns to recognize its owner

In this paper an adaptive solution to secure the authentication process of cellular phones has been proposed. Gait and location tracks of the owner are used as the metrics for authentication. The cellular phone is envisioned to become as adaptive as a pet animal of the owner. The cellular phone learns various intrinsic attributes of the owner like his voice, face, hand and fingerprint geometry and interesting patterns in the owners daily life and remembers those to continually check against any anomalous behavior that may occur due to the stealing of the phone. The checking is done level wise. Higher level of authentication is more stringent. Only when the cellular phone recognizes significant anomaly in a lower level, it goes one level up in the security hierarchy. The iPhones accelerometer and A-GPS module have been utilized to record gait and location signatures. A fast and memory efficient variation of Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) algorithm called FastDTW has been used to compute the similarity score between gait samples.

An adaptive lightweight trust reliant secure resource discovery for pervasive computing environments

A secure resource discovery model for devices running in pervasive computing environments has become significant. Due to the constrained nature of these devices, the need for a model that allows discovery and sharing of resources without putting much overhead on the operation of devices is needed. The dependency on fixed powerful machines for ensuring security is not desired and also not feasible. In this paper, we present a resource discovery model that provides security whenever needed without degrading the performance of the device. We also propose a trust based service-oriented adaptive security mechanism named SSRD (simple and secure resource discovery)

ERAP: ECC Based RFID Authentication Protocol

RFID tags are a new generation of small devices used for identification in many applications today. RFID authentication plays an important role in applications where security and privacy is a major concern. As an example, RFID has gained appreciation as an emerging technology to thwart counterfeiting problems. Public key cryptography (PKC) provides an impeccable solution to the counterfeiting problem. One recent family of public key cryptosystem is elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) which is a better choice than RSA cryptographic system because of its shorter key length. In this paper, we propose a secure, mutual offline authentication protocol which is based on ECC. Finally, we present security analysis of our proposed authentication protocol.

An Omnipresent Formal Trust Model (FTM) for Pervasive Computing Environment

Mutual collaboration plays a vital role in sharing of resources in an ad hoc network of handheld devices in a pervasive computing environment. Effective sharing of resources is facilitating tiny pervasive devices to benefit from situations which otherwise would not have been possible due to several limitations (such as poor storage and computational capability). An unavoidable consequence of this aspect is opening the door for security breaches. Trust is the weapon which is used to fight against security violations by restricting malicious nodes from participating in any interaction. Here, we present a context specific and reputation based trust model along with a brief survey of current trust models. To the best of our knowledge, our model is the first formal omnipresent trust model for pervasive computing, which can be used universally. This paper presents a recommendation protocol that provides a multi-hop recommendation capability and a flexible behavioral model to handle interactions. This paper also illustrates the implementation and evaluation of the omnipresent formal trust model.

Design, analysis, and deployment of omnipresent Formal Trust Model (FTM) with trust bootstrapping for pervasive environments

The rapid decrease in the size of mobile devices, coupled with an increase in capability, has enabled a swift proliferation of small and very capable devices into our daily lives. With such a prevalence of pervasive computing, the interaction among portable devices needs to be continuous and invisible to device users. As these devices become better connected, collaboration among them will play a vital role in sharing resources in an ad-hoc manner. The sharing of resources works as a facilitator for pervasive devices. However, this ad hoc interaction among devices provides the potential for security breaches. Trust can fight against such security violations by restricting malicious nodes from participating in interactions. Therefore, we need a unified trust relationship model between entities, which captures both the needs of the traditional computing world and the world of pervasive computing where the continuum of trust is based on identity, physical context or a combination of both. Here, we present a context specific and reputation-based trust model along with a brief survey of trust models suitable for peer-to-peer and ad-hoc environments. This paper presents a multi-hop recommendation protocol and a flexible behavioral model to handle interactions. One other contribution of this paper is the integration of an initial trust model; this model categorizes services or contexts in different security levels based on their security needs, and these security needs are considered in trust bootstrapping. The other major contribution of this paper is a simple method of handling malicious recommendations. This paper also illustrates the implementation and evaluation of our proposed formal trust model.