81,080 research outputs found
On Secure Workflow Decentralisation on the Internet
Decentralised workflow management systems are a new research area, where most
work to-date has focused on the system's overall architecture. As little
attention has been given to the security aspects in such systems, we follow a
security driven approach, and consider, from the perspective of available
security building blocks, how security can be implemented and what new
opportunities are presented when empowering the decentralised environment with
modern distributed security protocols. Our research is motivated by a more
general question of how to combine the positive enablers that email exchange
enjoys, with the general benefits of workflow systems, and more specifically
with the benefits that can be introduced in a decentralised environment. This
aims to equip email users with a set of tools to manage the semantics of a
message exchange, contents, participants and their roles in the exchange in an
environment that provides inherent assurances of security and privacy. This
work is based on a survey of contemporary distributed security protocols, and
considers how these protocols could be used in implementing a distributed
workflow management system with decentralised control . We review a set of
these protocols, focusing on the required message sequences in reviewing the
protocols, and discuss how these security protocols provide the foundations for
implementing core control-flow, data, and resource patterns in a distributed
workflow environment
Context-Awareness Enhances 5G Multi-Access Edge Computing Reliability
The fifth generation (5G) mobile telecommunication network is expected to
support Multi- Access Edge Computing (MEC), which intends to distribute
computation tasks and services from the central cloud to the edge clouds.
Towards ultra-responsive, ultra-reliable and ultra-low-latency MEC services,
the current mobile network security architecture should enable a more
decentralized approach for authentication and authorization processes. This
paper proposes a novel decentralized authentication architecture that supports
flexible and low-cost local authentication with the awareness of context
information of network elements such as user equipment and virtual network
functions. Based on a Markov model for backhaul link quality, as well as a
random walk mobility model with mixed mobility classes and traffic scenarios,
numerical simulations have demonstrated that the proposed approach is able to
achieve a flexible balance between the network operating cost and the MEC
reliability.Comment: Accepted by IEEE Access on Feb. 02, 201
Security and Privacy Issues in Wireless Mesh Networks: A Survey
This book chapter identifies various security threats in wireless mesh
network (WMN). Keeping in mind the critical requirement of security and user
privacy in WMNs, this chapter provides a comprehensive overview of various
possible attacks on different layers of the communication protocol stack for
WMNs and their corresponding defense mechanisms. First, it identifies the
security vulnerabilities in the physical, link, network, transport, application
layers. Furthermore, various possible attacks on the key management protocols,
user authentication and access control protocols, and user privacy preservation
protocols are presented. After enumerating various possible attacks, the
chapter provides a detailed discussion on various existing security mechanisms
and protocols to defend against and wherever possible prevent the possible
attacks. Comparative analyses are also presented on the security schemes with
regards to the cryptographic schemes used, key management strategies deployed,
use of any trusted third party, computation and communication overhead involved
etc. The chapter then presents a brief discussion on various trust management
approaches for WMNs since trust and reputation-based schemes are increasingly
becoming popular for enforcing security in wireless networks. A number of open
problems in security and privacy issues for WMNs are subsequently discussed
before the chapter is finally concluded.Comment: 62 pages, 12 figures, 6 tables. This chapter is an extension of the
author's previous submission in arXiv submission: arXiv:1102.1226. There are
some text overlaps with the previous submissio
Flat Cellular (UMTS) Networks
Traditionally, cellular systems have been built in a hierarchical manner: many specialized cellular access network elements that collectively form a hierarchical cellular system. When 2G and later 3G systems were designed there was a good reason to make system hierarchical: from a cost-perspective it was better to concentrate traffic and to share the cost of processing equipment over a large set of users while keeping the base stations relatively cheap. However, we believe the economic reasons for designing cellular systems in a hierarchical manner have disappeared: in fact, hierarchical architectures hinder future efficient deployments. In this paper, we argue for completely flat cellular wireless systems, which need just one type of specialized network element to provide radio access network (RAN) functionality, supplemented by standard IP-based network elements to form a cellular network. While the reason for building a cellular system in a hierarchical fashion has disappeared, there are other good reasons to make the system architecture flat: (1) as wireless transmission techniques evolve into hybrid ARQ systems, there is less need for a hierarchical cellular system to support spatial diversity; (2) we foresee that future cellular networks are part of the Internet, while hierarchical systems typically use interfaces between network elements that are specific to cellular standards or proprietary. At best such systems use IP as a transport medium, not as a core component; (3) a flat cellular system can be self scaling while a hierarchical system has inherent scaling issues; (4) moving all access technologies to the edge of the network enables ease of converging access technologies into a common packet core; and (5) using an IP common core makes the cellular network part of the Internet
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