User privacy risks and protection in WLAN-based indoor positioning

Using location-based services (LBS) is the new trend for mobile users. LBS mostly exploit GPS and WLAN infrastructures for outdoor and indoor environments, respectively, in order to determine a user's location. After a location is known to a LBS, the network can provide location related contextual information such as nearby events, places, or navigation for the mobile users. Currently, LBS have been specically growing rapidly in the domain of indoor positioning as more public places, e.g. schools, shopping centers, and airports are being equipped with WLAN networks. The aforementioned situation leads to the fact that huge amount of tracking data gets possessed by a wide variety of different LBS and it poses the risk of location privacy violation of citizens. The problem is not only that this information reveals the places that a person has visited, but that it can also expose their behaviors and habits to the LBS and associated third parties. The conditions exacerbate as there are no appropriate regulations on how the tracking data is used by the LBS. In addition, the LBS data servers are under constant attacks by third parties who seek to access this kind of valuable data. Furthermore, the private sector has initiated the tracking of their customers in such places as shopping malls by means of simply collecting their MAC addresses. The thesis is divided into two parts. In the literature part of this thesis, different indoor positioning techniques, location privacy leaks, and the solutions to tackle the problem will be explained. In the second part, we show practical implementation examples about how and at what extent a user may be positioned by the network, based simply on the mobile MAC address or using jointly MAC and signal strength information

Wearable Wireless Devices

No abstract available

User Experience of Proximity-based Social Networking

Social media is a growing phenomenon. Social network sites (SNS) are web services which are designed for supporting the communication between the users. One of the most famous SNSs is Facebook with over 500 million active users. This indicates that people are interested in using social media in their everyday lives. Social networking has gradually gained ground also in the mobile technology. Today, mobile phones are more sophisticated than earlier, enabling the use of various communication methods. Modern mobile devices contain technologies like Infrared (IR), Bluetooth and WLAN, which allow the interaction between the users in proximity. Social proximity applications (SPA) are mobile applications which can exploit these technologies and bring social networking to the mobile context. TWIN is a social proximity application developed in Tampere University of Technology. This thesis investigates the usage of TWIN and proximity-based communication from the viewpoint of user experience. The thesis is based on a large-scale user trial, called TWIN pilot and its results. Two months long trial with 250 participants made it possible to study user experience of proximity-based social networking in-depth and in a long term. The main aim of the user study was to find out how people use proximity-based technology for communication purposes. For achieving the aims that were set, various research methods were used during the trial. Results indicated that people are interested in using proximity-based technology, especially for communication with their existing social network. Also, meeting strangers with the help of the technology was seen useful and fun. The peer-to-peer technology contains some challenges, which are significant to solve in the future. The overall feedback of TWIN was positive and encouraging, and thus the further development of proximity-based applications can be seen significant. /Kir1

Wearable Wireless Devices

No abstract available

A Cloud-based Healthcare Framework for Security and Patients’ Data Privacy Using Wireless Body Area Networks

AbstractThe recent developments in remote healthcare systems have witnessed significant interests from IT industry (Microsoft, Google, VMware etc) that provide ubiquitous and easily deployable healthcare systems. These systems provide a platform to share medical information, applications, and infrastructure in a ubiquitous and fully automated manner. Communication security and patients’ data privacy are the aspects that would increase the confidence of users in such remote healthcare systems. This paper presents a secure cloud-based mobile healthcare framework using wireless body area networks (WBANs). The research work presented here is twofold: first, it attempts to secure the inter-sensor communication by multi-biometric based key generation scheme in WBANs; and secondly, the electronic medical records (EMRs) are securely stored in the hospital community cloud and privacy of the patients’ data is preserved. The evaluation and analysis shows that the proposed multi-biometric based mechanism provides significant security measures due to its highly efficient key generation mechanism

CONCEPTUALIZATION AND ANALYSIS OF USING UNMANNED AERIAL VEHICLES AS COMMUNICATIONS RELAYS IN A GPS-DENIED ENVIRONMENT

Many armed forces are becoming network-centric and highly interconnected. This transformation, along with decentralized decision-making, has been enabled by technological advancements in the digital battlefield. As the battlefield evolves and missions require units to be mobile and support numerous tactical capabilities, the current concept of deploying static radio-relay nodes to extend the range of communication may no longer be suitable. Hence, this thesis aims to design an operational concept using unmanned aerial systems such as aerostats and tactical drones to provide beyond line-of-sight communication for tactical forces while overcoming the limitations in a GPS-denied environment. The proposed concept is divided into three phases to assess operational and communication system needs, given Federal Communications Commission regulations that set the maximum effective isotropic radiated power in the industrial, scientific, and medical band at 36 dBm. The maximum communication range between two nodes can be studied using the Friis propagation equation. In addition, Simulink software is used to study the effective application throughput with respect to distance. From the analysis, IEEE 802.11ax can provide a higher data throughput and support both 2.4 GHz and 5.0 GHz frequency bands. Using a simulated environment and operational scenario, the estimated number of aerial systems required to provide communication coverage for a 50 km by 50 km area is determined.Captain, Singapore ArmyApproved for public release. Distribution is unlimited

The survey on Near Field Communication

PubMed ID: 26057043Near Field Communication (NFC) is an emerging short-range wireless communication technology that offers great and varied promise in services such as payment, ticketing, gaming, crowd sourcing, voting, navigation, and many others. NFC technology enables the integration of services from a wide range of applications into one single smartphone. NFC technology has emerged recently, and consequently not much academic data are available yet, although the number of academic research studies carried out in the past two years has already surpassed the total number of the prior works combined. This paper presents the concept of NFC technology in a holistic approach from different perspectives, including hardware improvement and optimization, communication essentials and standards, applications, secure elements, privacy and security, usability analysis, and ecosystem and business issues. Further research opportunities in terms of the academic and business points of view are also explored and discussed at the end of each section. This comprehensive survey will be a valuable guide for researchers and academicians, as well as for business in the NFC technology and ecosystem.Publisher's Versio

Developing Local Social Applications on Mobile Devices

Recently online social services have began to utilize the location of a mobile device to find more relevant information for the user. Mobile devices have had capacity for inexpensive wireless communication between neighbor devices, but the technology has not been popular among users due to technical problems and missing applications. This thesis studies possibilities of using direct communication for local social networking. First, the requirements and use cases are derived for local social applications, and an application design is presented which fulfills the requirements. Secondly, a simulation model is described for testing applications that utilize direct communication. The simulation models the movement of a large population in an urban area. The design was evaluated in a user trial with 250 participants, and the trial participants named local conversations as the most important feature. The simulation model was compared to the user trial and it was found to match the behaviour of the people

Two-tier Intrusion Detection System for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Nowadays, a commonly used wireless network (i.e. Wi-Fi) operates with the aid of a fixed infrastructure (i.e. an access point) to facilitate communication between nodes when they roam from one location to another. The need for such a fixed supporting infrastructure limits the adaptability of the wireless network, especially in situations where the deployment of such an infrastructure is impractical. In addition, Wi-Fi limits nodes' communication as it only provides facility for mobile nodes to send and receive information, but not reroute the information across the network. Recent advancements in computer network introduced a new wireless network, known as a Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET), to overcome these limitations. MANET has a set of unique characteristics that make it different from other kind of wireless networks. Often referred as a peer to peer network, such a network does not have any fixed topology, thus nodes are free to roam anywhere, and could join or leave the network anytime they desire. Its ability to be setup without the need of any infrastructure is very useful, especially in geographically constrained environments such as in a military battlefield or a disaster relief operation. In addition, through its multi hop routing facility, each node could function as a router, thus communication between nodes could be made available without the need of a supporting fixed router or an access point. However, these handy facilities come with big challenges, especially in dealing with the security issues. This research aims to address MANET security issues by proposing a novel intrusion detection system that could be used to complement existing prevention mechanisms that have been proposed to secure such a network. A comprehensive analysis of attacks and the existing security measures proved that there is a need for an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) to protect MANETs against security threats. The analysis also suggested that the existing IDS proposed for MANET are not immune against a colluding blackmail attack due to the nature of such a network that comprises autonomous and anonymous nodes. The IDS architecture as proposed in this study utilises trust relationships between nodes to overcome this nodes' anonymity issue. Through a friendship mechanism, the problems of false accusations and false alarms caused by blackmail attackers in global detection and response mechanisms could be eliminated. The applicability of the friendship concept as well as other proposed mechanisms to solve MANET IDS related issues have been validated through a set of simulation experiments. Several MANET settings, which differ from each other based on the network's density level, the number of initial trusted friends owned by each node, and the duration of the simulation times, have been used to study the effects of such factors towards the overall performance of the proposed IDS framework. The results obtained from the experiments proved that the proposed concepts are capable to at least minimise i f not fully eliminate the problem currently faced in MANET IDS