Vijayaraghavan Varadharajan

Multi-user Attribute Based Searchable Encryption

Globalized services economy is increasingly adopting cloud computing in which applications, platforms, and infrastructure are available as services. Huge volume of data including sensitive data is outsourced and stored remotely in public clouds. There is a need for efficient protection of the privacy and security of users and their data without affecting its utility to authorized users. There needs to be a trade-off between data security and availability. Multi user encryption schemes provide partial solution by encrypting data and managing keys efficiently among the users but exposing the entire data accessible to all the users. But, in certain applications, the data need to be accessed by only specified users and they shall have access to only specified parts of the data on a need to know basis. Ciphertext policy attribute based encryption supports keyword based search but require large amount of data for a single keyword thereby increasing the size and hence the cost of storage on the cloud. In this paper, we have proposed an encryption scheme which requires less storage space on the cloud but provides fine grained access control to authorized users. This is a hybrid scheme that combines the strengths of both attribute based encryption and searchable encryption.

Anonymous Searchable Encryption Scheme for Multi-user Databases

With the ever advancing technology of fast information processing, protecting data with only access control mechanisms is becoming increasingly difficult. If someone breaks into a database, the entire data will be compromised if it is in plaintext form. One quick remedy is to keep the data in encrypted form. However, encryption will make it difficult to do any operations on the data. This has prompted considerable research in the last decade and has led to various schemes of searchable encryption. It allows search over the encrypted data. There are various techniques which support different levels of querying, making it suitable for variety of applications. However, almost all of them are either symmetric-key or single-user schemes or require key sharing. Here, we are proposing a new scheme which will allow multiple users to encrypt, store and decrypt their own data, along with support for doing data searches over all the data by other users.

Data Protection and Privacy Preservation Using Searchable Encryption on Outsourced Databases

With the increasing popularity of social networks in the globalized environment, the process of sharing data and information from anywhere at anytime has become easier and faster. Furthermore, cloud based computing and storage services have become mainstream. Unfortunately, if the information is on the Internet, it is susceptible to attacks leading to leakage and hence needs to be encrypted. Searchable encryption is a way to obtain efficient access to a large encrypted database, improving the data security even when it is stored on untrusted servers. We present few applications which can use and benefit from searchable encryption and explain how secrecy of the data is maintained without compromising usability.

Data Security and Privacy in the Internet of Things (IoT) Environment

Internet of Things (IoT) has already become an essential part of our daily lives, from mobile phones connected to fitness bands and software applications (apps) controlling the household appliances. Everyday objects like cameras, smart watches, home automation systems, and smartphones are connected to the Internet for sending and receiving data build an IoT network. The advent of IoT in our day-to-day lives has induced variety and volume of data to be present in the shared space. Notwithstanding the advantages of IoT, it also presents a range of potential security risks. Additionally, the traditional IT security models are unable to cope up with the diverse nature of “things” in the IoT. Enterprises are also looking for strategies to meet ever-increasing demands for dynamic, scalable, and adaptive security requirements of IoT. This chapter provides recommendations for leveraging the benefits of traditional secure data handling in the IoT networks with a flavor of dynamism and scalability. Analyzing the current security challenges and constraints posed by the IoT devices, illustration of how devices interchange the sensitive information securely is also provided. The chapter focuses, mainly, on the most relevant available solutions related to the IoT security, e.g., context-based data access control, user identity masking, OAuth authorization, and device-based certificates.

Disease management: clustering–based disease prediction

The latest trends in healthcare industry have made enormous data available which is useful for disease prediction. This may be utilised by provider/payer for disease management study (DMS) for judging the present health condition and analysing disease trends. The present approach depends upon objective analysis which is based on binary value of symptoms and health indicators and direct relation between them. We propose a framework based on analytics to diagnose and predict diseases using enhanced genetic clustering using patient history, symptoms, and existing medical condition. New patients profile is analysed against existing patterns and mapped to a particular cluster based on the patients medical parameters. After cluster formation, cohesion and adhesion between the clusters is determined, which helps to predict present medical condition and probability for being prone to a disease in future. This framework provides an efficient disease management based on the preliminary diagnosis of the patient.

On-the-fly Watermarking of Videos for Real-time Applications

In order to prevent piracy of digital media content, Digital Watermarking has emerged as a potential alternative to existing methods such as Digital Rights Management (DRM) based systems. For real-time watermarking applications, digital watermarking method should consume less time for embedding the watermark while remaining robust against attacks. This paper presents on-the-fly video watermarking method for the copyright protection of videos and also addresses implementation issues in real-time applications. Experimental results show that the proposed method requires less computational time for embedding the watermark and hence is suitable for real-time applications. The results also show that the method is robust against attacks. The proposed method is compared with other watermarking algorithms and it yields better results in terms of complexity and robustness.

Sensor based coaching for a fit and healthy society

With decreasing strenuosity and increasing sedentariness in todays life styles, combined with excessive food intake, the modern society is at a brink of major health concerns like obesity, diabetes and high blood pressure. An ageing society increases this further with millions worldwide forecasted to suffer from the health issues. The biggest challenge thus faced by the health industry is how to motivate people to not only start, but also stick to a healthy life style, including sufficient physical exercise or sports. Our research explores capturing and analyzing physical, psychological, and social health variables via smart phones, and providing feedback to improve adherence to a healthy life style. We also make the feedback personalized and real-time.

Robust transcoding resistant watermarking for H.264 standard

Content in the digital form can be easily copied and distributed without permission of the owner. As a result, it is of paramount importance to protect content and deter illegal distribution using content protection mechanisms like embedding an imperceptible watermark into the content. Given that consumers want access to content from anywhere using any device, it is necessary to transcode content keeping in mind the limitations of the devices in terms of processing power and network connectivity. However, it is important that the watermark embedded in the content is preserved even after transcoding. The proposed approach embeds in a video, an imperceptible yet robust watermark which is resistant to transcoding. This approach focuses on the H.264 codec because of its widespread use in the industry.

Securing Wireless Sensor Network based solutions

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) based systems are becoming mainstream and are getting deployed in critical business environments. Thus, any failure of such a system due to potential security attacks would have serious business implications for an enterprise. So far the community has looked into the security of WSN in isolation and to our knowledge there is no study looking into end-to-end security issues of a WSN based business solution, such as, datacenter monitoring. This paper provides an insight into the security issues in the deployment of WSN based solutions and briefly outlines the possible security measures that can be applied.

Tampering resistant self recoverable watermarking method using error correction codes

Recent advances in digital technologies have made alteration of digital multimedia content simple and unnoticeable by human beings. Although digital multimedia content offers numerous advantages such as easy to store, easy to transmit, etc., it has made illegal replication/distribution of digital content easier and highlights the need for digital rights management (DRM). Digital watermarking has emerged as a solution for the copyright protection of digital multimedia content. Digital watermarking hides the owners information inside the digital multimedia content which can be extracted in future to prove the owners copyright over the content. In this paper, self-recoverable digital watermarking method is presented to protect the digital images from tampering attacks. Experimental results show that the proposed method is robust against attacks such as cropping, blurring, noising, etc.