A Practical Set-Membership Proof for Privacy-Preserving NFC Mobile Ticketing

To ensure the privacy of users in transport systems, researchers are working on new protocols providing the best security guarantees while respecting functional requirements of transport operators. In this paper, we design a secure NFC m-ticketing protocol for public transport that preserves users' anonymity and prevents transport operators from tracing their customers' trips. To this end, we introduce a new practical set-membership proof that does not require provers nor verifiers (but in a specific scenario for verifiers) to perform pairing computations. It is therefore particularly suitable for our (ticketing) setting where provers hold SIM/UICC cards that do not support such costly computations. We also propose several optimizations of Boneh-Boyen type signature schemes, which are of independent interest, increasing their performance and efficiency during NFC transactions. Our m-ticketing protocol offers greater flexibility compared to previous solutions as it enables the post-payment and the off-line validation of m-tickets. By implementing a prototype using a standard NFC SIM card, we show that it fulfils the stringent functional requirement imposed by transport operators whilst using strong security parameters. In particular, a validation can be completed in 184.25 ms when the mobile is switched on, and in 266.52 ms when the mobile is switched off or its battery is flat

Biomechanics of foetal movement.

© 2015, AO Research Institute. All rights reserved.Foetal movements commence at seven weeks of gestation, with the foetal movement repertoire including twitches, whole body movements, stretches, isolated limb movements, breathing movements, head and neck movements, jaw movements (including yawning, sucking and swallowing) and hiccups by ten weeks of gestational age. There are two key biomechanical aspects to gross foetal movements; the first being that the foetus moves in a dynamically changing constrained physical environment in which the freedom to move becomes increasingly restricted with increasing foetal size and decreasing amniotic fluid. Therefore, the mechanical environment experienced by the foetus affects its ability to move freely. Secondly, the mechanical forces induced by foetal movements are crucial for normal skeletal development, as evidenced by a number of conditions and syndromes for which reduced or abnormal foetal movements are implicated, such as developmental dysplasia of the hip, arthrogryposis and foetal akinesia deformation sequence. This review examines both the biomechanical effects of the physical environment on foetal movements through discussion of intrauterine factors, such as space, foetal positioning and volume of amniotic fluid, and the biomechanical role of gross foetal movements in human skeletal development through investigation of the effects of abnormal movement on the bones and joints. This review also highlights computational simulations of foetal movements that attempt to determine the mechanical forces acting on the foetus as it moves. Finally, avenues for future research into foetal movement biomechanics are highlighted, which have potential impact for a diverse range of fields including foetal medicine, musculoskeletal disorders and tissue engineering

Cross-layer key establishment protocols for wireless devices

There are some problems in existing key establishment protocols. To alleviate these problems, in our thesis, we designed a few cross-layer key establishment protocols by cooperatively using the characteristics of higher layers and physical layer. Additionally, the security and performance analyses show that our protocols perform better than others.<br /

A novel MAC Protocol for Cognitive Radio Networks

In Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy from the University of BedfordshireThe scarcity of bandwidth in the radio spectrum has become more vital since the demand for wireless applications has increased. Most of the spectrum bands have been allocated although many studies have shown that these bands are significantly underutilized most of the time. The problem of unavailability of spectrum bands and the inefficiency in their utilization have been smartly addressed by the cognitive radio (CR) technology which is an opportunistic network that senses the environment, observes the network changes, and then uses knowledge gained from the prior interaction with the network to make intelligent decisions by dynamically adapting transmission characteristics. In this thesis, recent research and survey about the advances in theory and applications of cognitive radio technology has been reviewed. The thesis starts with the essential background on cognitive radio techniques and systems and discusses those characteristics of CR technology, such as standards, applications and challenges that all can help make software radio more personal. It then presents advanced level material by extensively reviewing the work done so far in the area of cognitive radio networks and more specifically in medium access control (MAC) protocol of CR. The list of references will be useful to both researchers and practitioners in this area. Also, it can be adopted as a graduate-level textbook for an advanced course on wireless communication networks. The development of new technologies such as Wi-Fi, cellular phones, Bluetooth, TV broadcasts and satellite has created immense demand for radio spectrum which is a limited natural resource ranging from 30KHz to 300GHz. For every wireless application, some portion of the radio spectrum needs to be purchased, and the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) allocates the spectrum for some fee for such services. This static allocation of the radio spectrum has led to various problems such as saturation in some bands, scarcity, and lack of radio resources to new wireless applications. Most of the frequencies in the radio spectrum have been allocated although many studies have shown that the allocated bands are not being used efficiently. The CR technology is one of the effective solutions to the shortage of spectrum and the inefficiency of its utilization. In this thesis, a detailed investigation on issues related to the protocol design for cognitive radio networks with particular emphasis on the MAC layer is presented. A novel Dynamic and Decentralized and Hybrid MAC (DDH-MAC) protocol that lies between the CR MAC protocol families of globally available common control channel (GCCC) and local control channel (non-GCCC). First, a multi-access channel MAC protocol, which integrates the best features of both GCCC and non-GCCC, is proposed. Second, an enhancement to the protocol is proposed by enabling it to access more than one control channel at the same time. The cognitive users/secondary users (SUs) always have access to one control channel and they can identify and exploit the vacant channels by dynamically switching across the different control channels. Third, rapid and efficient exchange of CR control information has been proposed to reduce delays due to the opportunistic nature of CR. We have calculated the pre-transmission time for CR and investigate how this time can have a significant effect on nodes holding a delay sensitive data. Fourth, an analytical model, including a Markov chain model, has been proposed. This analytical model will rigorously analyse the performance of our proposed DDH-MAC protocol in terms of aggregate throughput, access delay, and spectrum opportunities in both the saturated and non-saturated networks. Fifth, we develop a simulation model for the DDH-MAC protocol using OPNET Modeler and investigate its performance for queuing delays, bit error rates, backoff slots and throughput. It could be observed from both the numerical and simulation results that when compared with existing CR MAC protocols our proposed MAC protocol can significantly improve the spectrum utilization efficiency of wireless networks. Finally, we optimize the performance of our proposed MAC protocol by incorporating multi-level security and making it energy efficient

PRUB: A Privacy Protection Friend Recommendation System Based on User Behavior

The fast developing social network is a double-edged sword. It remains a serious problem to provide users with excellent mobile social network services as well as protecting privacy data. Most popular social applications utilize behavior of users to build connection with people having similar behavior, thus improving user experience. However, many users do not want to share their certain behavioral information to the recommendation system. In this paper, we aim to design a secure friend recommendation system based on the user behavior, called PRUB. The system proposed aims at achieving fine-grained recommendation to friends who share some same characteristics without exposing the actual user behavior. We utilized the anonymous data from a Chinese ISP, which records the user browsing behavior, for 3 months to test our system. The experiment result shows that our system can achieve a remarkable recommendation goal and, at the same time, protect the privacy of the user behavior information