Design and Implementation of S-MARKS: A Secure Middleware for Pervasive Computing Applications

As portable devices have become a part of our everyday life, more people are unknowingly participating in a pervasive computing environment. People engage with not a single device for a specific purpose but many devices interacting with each other in the course of ordinary activity. With such prevalence of pervasive technology, the interaction between portable devices needs to be continuous and imperceptible to device users. Pervasive computing requires a small, scalable and robust network which relies heavily on the middleware to resolve communication and security issues. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of S-MARKS which incorporates device validation, resource discovery and a privacy module

Investigating Security for Ubiquitous Sensor Networks

The availability of powerful and sensor-enabled mobile and Internet-connected devices have enabled the advent of the ubiquitous sensor network paradigm which is providing various types of solutions to the community and the individual user in various sectors including environmental monitoring, entertainment, transportation, security, and healthcare. We explore and compare the features of wireless sensor networks and ubiquitous sensor networks and based on the differences between these two types of systems, we classify the security-related challenges of ubiquitous sensor networks. We identify and discuss solutions available to address these challenges. Finally, we briefly discuss open challenges that need to be addressed to design more secure ubiquitous sensor networks in the future

An Approach for Ensuring Robust Support for Location Privacy and Identity Inference Protection

The challenge of preserving a user\u27s location privacy is more important now than ever before with the proliferation of handheld devices and the pervasive use of location based services. To protect location privacy, we must ensure k-anonymity so that the user remains indistinguishable among k-1 other users. There is no better way but to use a location anonymizer (LA) to achieve k-anonymity. However, its knowledge of each user\u27s current location makes it susceptible to be a single-point-of-failure. In this thesis, we propose a formal location privacy framework, termed SafeGrid that can work with or without an LA. In SafeGrid, LA is designed in such a way that it is no longer a single point of failure. In addition, it is resistant to known attacks and most significantly, the cloaking algorithm it employs meets reciprocity condition. Simulation results exhibit its better performance in query processing and cloaking region calculation compared with existing solutions. In this thesis, we also show that satisfying k-anonymity is not enough in preserving privacy. Especially in an environment where a group of colluded service providers collaborate with each other, a user\u27s privacy can be compromised through identity inference attacks. We present a detailed analysis of such attacks on privacy and propose a novel and powerful privacy definition called s-proximity. In addition to building a formal definition for s-proximity, we show that it is practical and it can be incorporated efficiently into existing systems to make them secure

Security in Distributed, Grid, Mobile, and Pervasive Computing

This book addresses the increasing demand to guarantee privacy, integrity, and availability of resources in networks and distributed systems. It first reviews security issues and challenges in content distribution networks, describes key agreement protocols based on the Diffie-Hellman key exchange and key management protocols for complex distributed systems like the Internet, and discusses securing design patterns for distributed systems. The next section focuses on security in mobile computing and wireless networks. After a section on grid computing security, the book presents an overview of security solutions for pervasive healthcare systems and surveys wireless sensor network security

KALwEN: a new practical and interoperable key management scheme for body sensor networks

Key management is the pillar of a security architecture. Body sensor networks (BSNs) pose several challenges–some inherited from wireless sensor networks (WSNs), some unique to themselves–that require a new key management scheme to be tailor-made. The challenge is taken on, and the result is KALwEN, a new parameterized key management scheme that combines the best-suited cryptographic techniques in a seamless framework. KALwEN is user-friendly in the sense that it requires no expert knowledge of a user, and instead only requires a user to follow a simple set of instructions when bootstrapping or extending a network. One of KALwEN's key features is that it allows sensor devices from different manufacturers, which expectedly do not have any pre-shared secret, to establish secure communications with each other. KALwEN is decentralized, such that it does not rely on the availability of a local processing unit (LPU). KALwEN supports secure global broadcast, local broadcast, and local (neighbor-to-neighbor) unicast, while preserving past key secrecy and future key secrecy (FKS). The fact that the cryptographic protocols of KALwEN have been formally verified also makes a convincing case. With both formal verification and experimental evaluation, our results should appeal to theorists and practitioners alike