Ting Wei Hou

A hybrid public key infrastructure solution (HPKI) for HIPAA privacy/security regulations

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) has set privacy and security regulations for the US healthcare industry. HIPAA has also established principles for security standards that global e-health industry tends to follow. In this paper, a hybrid public key infrastructure solution (HPKI) is proposed to comply with the HIPAA regulations. The main contribution is the new e-health security architecture that is contract oriented instead of session oriented which exists in most literatures. The proposed HPKI has delegated the trust and security management to the medical service provider during the contract period, which is more realistic. It is much an analogy to existing paper based health care systems in terms of functional structure. The cryptographically strong PKI scheme is deployed for the mutual authentication and the distribution of sensitive yet computational non-intensive data while efficient symmetric cryptographic technology is used for the storage and transmission of high volume of medical data such as medical images. One advantage is that the proposed HPKI can be constructed from existing cryptographic technologies where various relevant security standards, tools and products are available. Discussion has been provided to illustrate how proposed schemes can address the HIPAA privacy and security regulations.

Coverage and connectivity guaranteed topology control algorithm for cluster‐based wireless sensor networks

One of the most challenging issues in wireless sensor networks is to meet the requirements of coverage and connectivity under given energy constraints. Most existing coverage and connectivity algorithms work to form tree networks when sensor nodes do not have location information of themselves. However, a tree topology network does not perform well in terms of energy efficiency and scalability if compared with a cluster network. In this paper, a novel topology control algorithm called Adaptive Random Clustering (ARC) is proposed to form a cluster network with required coverage and connectivity without location information. The performance of its coverage intensity and connectivity is analyzed based on the characteristics of cluster topology, and their proper parameters are determined. ARC inherits an excellent energy efficiency from cluster topology and avoids the collisions and overhearing of data packets. A good scalability can be achieved as only a limited number of channels are needed in ARC for a large-scale network. Furthermore, ARC can adjust the number of active nodes adaptively according to the required coverage to balance the energy consumption. Simulation results demonstrate that required coverage and connectivity can be satisfied and network lifetime is prolonged significantly. Copyright

Low Cost RFID Real Lightweight Binding Proof Protocol for Medication Errors and Patient Safety

An Institute of Medicine Report stated there are 98,000 people annually who die due to medication related errors in the United States, and hospitals and other medical institutions are thus being pressed to use technologies to reduce such errors. One approach is to provide a suitable protocol that can cooperate with low cost RFID tags in order to identify patients. However, existing low cost RFID tags lack computational power and it is almost impossible to equip them with security functions, such as keyed hash function. To address this issue, a so a real lightweight binding proof protocol is proposed in this paper. The proposed protocol uses only logic gates (e.g. AND, XOR, ADD) to achieve the goal of proving that two tags exist in the field simultaneously, without the need for any complicated security algorithms. In addition, various scenarios are provider to explain the process of adopting this binding proof protocol with regard to guarding patient safety and preventing medication errors.

Concurrent Error Detection and Correction in Gaussian Normal Basis Multiplier over GF(2^m)

Fault-based cryptanalysis has been developed to effectively break both private-key and public-key cryptosystems, making robust finite field multiplication a very important research topic in recent years. However, no robust normal basis multiplier has been proposed in the literature. Therefore, this investigation presents a semisystolic Gaussian normal basis multiplier. Based on the proposed Gaussian normal basis multiplier, both concurrent error detection and correction capabilities can be easily achieved using time redundancy technology with no hardware modification.

Multithreading in Java: Performance and Scalability on Multicore Systems

The performance and scalability issues of multithreaded Java programs on multicore systems are studied in this paper. First, we examine the performance scaling of benchmarks with various numbers of processor cores and application threads. Second, by correlating low-level hardware performance data to JVM threads and system components, the detail analyses of performance and scalability are presented, such as the hardware stall events and memory system latencies. Third, the usages of memory resource are detailed to observe the potential bottlenecks. Finally, the JVM tuning techniques are proposed to alleviate the bottlenecks, and improve the performance and scalability. Several key findings are revealed through this study. First, the lock contentions usually lead to a strong limitation of scalability. Second, in terms of memory access latencies, the most of memory stalls are produced by L2 cache misses and cache-to-cache transfers. Finally, the overhead of minor garbage collections could be an important factor of throughput reductions. Based on these findings, the appropriate Java Virtual Machine (JVM) tuning techniques are examined in this study. We observe that the use of a parallel garbage collector and an appropriate ratio of young to old generation can alleviate the overhead of minor collection and improve the efficiency of garbage collections. Moreover, the cache utilizations could be enhanced with the use of thread-local allocation buffer, and then leads to the performance improvements significantly.

A wrapper and broker model for collaboration between a set-top box and home service gateway

If interactive digital television (iDTV) and residential service gateway (RG) could converge, i.e. to share services and resources, add-on values could be created. We propose a wrapper (adaptor) and a broker model with cooperative interfaces and a communication mechanism to support the collaboration between instances of iDTV and RG. The proposed approach has a higher extensibility, and it is better suited to an object oriented approach. Our experimental target iDTV middleware is DVB/MHP Java Profile, and the Residential Gateway middleware is the open service gateway initiative (OSGi). The MHP and OSGi are implemented on a single Java virtual machine. The MHP application manager is wrapped as a bundle, and a broker is responsible for communication between the MHP and the OSGi. Hence, application developers do not need to know beforehand which services are on the iDTV or RG, and services are discovered dynamically.

Advanced OSGi Security Layer

This paper first discusses the inner security of OSGi and proposes an advanced OSGi security layer to prevent services from attacking the OSGi platform. We review the existing threats in Java security and we rephrase the threats within OSGi service level. A rule-based control list and a threat detector are introduced to the OSGi framework. A software sensor is deployed in our design which detects service behaviors. The behaviors can be analyzed by the detector, which notifies the response manager to perform pre-defined rules. Malicious services that are harmful to other services or OSGi framework can be stopped so that other services work safely in the open environment.

A knowledge-based inference multicast protocol using adaptive fuzzy Petri nets

Multicast routing protocols need a new path discovery algorithm for a newly joining node (receiver) in an ad hoc network. One issue of the approach to find the nearest forwarding node for a new node is that it may increase the distance between the source node and the new members, which results in an increase in latency time and packet loss, as compared with the shortest path algorithms. This issue is important in a high collision network. In this paper, we propose a knowledge-based inference approach for a new path discovery for multicasting. A fuzzy Petri net agent, which is a special expert system, is introduced at each node to learn and to adjust itself to fit the dynamic conditions in a multicast ad hoc network. The simulation results show that the proposed approach is up to 67.17% more efficient in the packet delivery ratio as compared with a bandwidth effective multicast routing protocol.

Automatic brightness control of the handheld device display with low illumination

The automatic brightness control is a common functionality on the smartphone. Either Android phones or iPhones enable this capability by using the light sensor which located on the front panel. Unfortunately, the automatic brightness control is unsatisfactory on these two types of smartphones where the user always struggles with the brightness setup to adapt to the ambient light with various intensities. In this paper, a novel automatic brightness control method which is suitable for low illumination is proposed. We take advantage of the front panel camera on the smartphone and face detection technics to capture the image of users face and background. With low ambient brightness, the proposed scheme calculates the contrast ratio between users face and background to determine the optimum screen brightness.

Design and implementation of augmented reality system collaborating with QR code

This work replaces conventional marker of augmented reality (AR) with Quick Response (QR) code, in which we take the advantages of QR code, i.e. the capability of error correction and the capability of carrying an abundant of information, to reinforce the occlusion immunity of AR and broaden the scale of AR applications. Basically, we combined QR code and the idea of AR together, designed and implemented a prototype system named QRAR. Meanwhile, we adopted Kalman filter to solve complete and temporary marker occlusion which the error correction can not cope with, in QRAR to gain the robustness.