Effects of Data Replication on Data Exfiltration in Mobile Ad hoc Networks Utilizing Reactive Protocols

A swarm of autonomous UAVs can provide a significant amount of ISR data where current UAV assets may not be feasible or practical. As such, the availability of the data the resides in the swarm is a topic that will benefit from further investigation. This thesis examines the impact of le replication and swarm characteristics such as node mobility, swarm size, and churn rate on data availability utilizing reactive protocols. This document examines the most prominent factors affecting the networking of nodes in a MANET. Factors include network routing protocols and peer-to-peer le protocols. It compares and contrasts several open source network simulator environments. Experiment implementation is documented, covering design considerations, assumptions, and software implementation, as well as detailing constant, response and variable factors. Collected data is presented and the results show that in swarms of sizes of 30, 45, and 60 nodes, le replication improves data availability until network saturation is reached, with the most significant benefit gained after only one copy is made. Mobility, churn rate, and swarm density all influence the replication impact

Towards Efficient File Sharing and Packet Routing in Mobile Opportunistic Networks

With the increasing popularity of portable digital devices (e.g., smartphones, laptops, and tablets), mobile opportunistic networks (MONs) [40, 90] consisting of portable devices have attracted much attention recently. MONs are also known as pocket switched networks (PSNs) [52]. MONs can be regarded as a special form of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) [7] or delay tolerant networks (DTNs) [35, 56]. In such networks, mobile nodes (devices) move continuously and meet opportunistically. Two mobile nodes can communicate with each other only when they are within the communication range of each other in a peer-to-peer (P2P) manner (i.e., without the need of infrastructures). Therefore, such a network structure can potentially provide file sharing or packet routing services among portable devices without the support of network infrastructures. On the other hand, mobile opportunistic networks often experience frequent network partition, and no end-to-end contemporaneous path can be ensured in the network. These distinctive properties make traditional file sharing or packet routing algorithms in Internet or mobile networks a formidable challenge in MONs. In summary, it is essential and important to achieve efficient file sharing and packet routing algorithms in MONs, which are the key for providing practical and novel services and applications over such networks. In this Dissertation, we develop several methods to resolve the aforementioned challenges. Firstly, we propose two methods to enhance file sharing efficiency in MONs by creating replicas and by leveraging social network properties, respectively. In the first method, we investigate how to create file replicas to optimize file availability for file sharing in MONs. We introduce a new concept of resource for file replication, which considers both node storage and meeting frequency with other nodes. We theoretically study the influence of resource allocation on the average file access delay and derive a resource allocation rule to minimize the average file access delay. We also propose a distributed file replication protocol to realize the deduced optimal file replication rule. In the second method, we leverage social network properties to improve the file searching efficiency in MONs. This method groups common-interest nodes that frequently meet with each other into a community. It takes advantage of node mobility by designating stable nodes, which have the most frequent contact with community members, as community coordinators for intra-community file request forwarding, and highly-mobile nodes that visit other communities frequently as community ambassadors for inter-community file request forwarding. Based on such a community structure, an interest-oriented file searching scheme is proposed to first search local community and then search the community that is most likely to contain the requested file, leading to highly efficient file sharing in MONs. Secondly, we propose two methods to realize efficient packet routing among mobile nodes and among different landmarks in MONs, respectively. The first method utilizes distributed social map to route packets to mobile nodes efficiently with a low-cost in MONs. Each node builds its own social map consisting of nodes it has met and their frequently encountered nodes in a distributed manner. Based on both encountering frequency and social closeness of two linked nodes in the social map, we decide the weight of each link to reflect the packet delivery ability between the two nodes. The social map enables more accurate forwarder selection through a broader view and reduces the cost on information exchange. The second method realizes high-throughput packet routing among different landmarks in MONs. It selects popular places that nodes visit frequently as landmarks and divides the entire MON area into sub-areas represented by landmarks. Nodes transiting between two landmarks relay packets between the two landmarks. The frequency of node transits between two landmarks is measured to represent the forwarding capacity between them, based on which routing tables are built on each landmark to guide packet routing. Finally, packets are routed landmark by landmark to reach their destination landmarks. Extensive analysis and real-trace based experiments are conducted to support the designs in this Dissertation and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods in comparison with the state-of-art methods. In the future, we plan to further enhance the file sharing and packet routing efficiency by considering more realistic scenarios or including more useful information. We will also investigate the security and privacy issues in the proposed methods

Autenticación de contenidos y control de acceso en redes peer-to-peer puras

Esta tesis doctoral se enmarca dentro del área de investigación de la seguridad en entornos Peer-to-Peer (P2P) totalmente descentralizados (también denominados puros.) En particular, el objetivo principal de esta tesis doctoral es definir, analizar e implementar un esquema para la distribución segura de los contenidos compartidos. En este trabajo de tesis se han realizado importantes avances e innovadoras aportaciones enfocadas a garantizar que el contenido compartido es auténtico; es decir, que no ha sido alterado, incluso tratándose de una réplica del original. Además, se propone un mecanismo de control de acceso orientado a proporcionar servicios de autorización en un entorno que no cuenta con una jerarquía de autoridades de certificación. A continuación, se resume la metodología seguida, las principales aportaciones de esta tesis y, finalmente, se muestran las conclusiones más importantes. __________________________________________The study and analysis of the state-of-the-art on security in Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks gives us many important insights regarding the lack of practical security mechanisms in such fully decentralized and highly dynamic networks. The major problems range from the absence of content authentication mechanisms, which address and assure the authenticity and integrity of the resources shared by networking nodes, to access control proposals, which provide authorization services. In particular, the combination of both, authentication and access control, within well-known P2P file sharing systems may involve several advances in the content replication and distribution processes. The aim of this thesis is to define, develop and evaluate a secure P2P content distribution scheme for file sharing scenarios. The proposal will be based on the use of digital certificates, similar to those used in the provision of public key authenticity. To carry out this proposal in such an environment, which does not count on a hierarchy of certification authorities, we will explore the application of non-conventional techniques, such as Byzantine agreement protocols and schemes based on “proof-of-work.” We then propose a content authentication protocol for pure P2P file sharing systems. Under certain restrictions, our scheme provides guarantees that a content is authentic, i.e. it has not been altered, even if it is a replica of the original and the source has lost control over it. Moreover, we extend our initial work by showing how digital certificates can be modified to provide authorization capabilities for self-organizing peers. The entire scheme is first theoretically analyzed, and also implemented in C and Java in order to evaluate its performance. This document is presented as Ph.D. Thesis within the 2007–08 Ph.D. in Computer Science Program at Carlos III University of Madrid

Social distributed content caching in federated residential networks

This work addresses the need for content sharing and backup in household equipped with a home gateway that stores, tags and manages the data collected by the home users. Our solution leverages the interaction between remote gateways in a social way, i.e., by exploiting the users' social networking information, so that caching recipients are those gateways whose users are most likely to be interested in accessing the shared content. We formulate this problem as a Budgeted Maximum Coverage (BMC) problem and we numerically compute the optimal content caching solution. We then propose a low-complexity, distributed heuristic algorithm and use simulation in a synthetic social network scenario to show that the final content placement among "friendly" gateways well approximates the optimal solution under different network setting

Community computation

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Materials Science and Engineering, 2009.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 171-186).In this thesis we lay the foundations for a distributed, community-based computing environment to tap the resources of a community to better perform some tasks, either computationally hard or economically prohibitive, or physically inconvenient, that one individual is unable to accomplish efficiently. We introduce community coding, where information systems meet social networks, to tackle some of the challenges in this new paradigm of community computation. We design algorithms, protocols and build system prototypes to demonstrate the power of community computation to better deal with reliability, scalability and security issues, which are the main challenges in many emerging community-computing environments, in several application scenarios such as community storage, community sensing and community security. For example, we develop a community storage system that is based upon a distributed P2P (peer-to-peer) storage paradigm, where we take an array of small, periodically accessible, individual computers/peer nodes and create a secure, reliable and large distributed storage system. The goal is for each one of them to act as if they have immediate access to a pool of information that is larger than they could hold themselves, and into which they can contribute new stuff in a both open and secure manner. Such a contributory and self-scaling community storage system is particularly useful where reliable infrastructure is not readily available in that such a system facilitates easy ad-hoc construction and easy portability. In another application scenario, we develop a novel framework of community sensing with a group of image sensors. The goal is to present a set of novel tools in which software, rather than humans, examines the collection of images sensed by a group of image sensors to determine what is happening in the field of view. We also present several design principles in the aspects of community security. In one application example, we present community-based email spain detection approach to deal with email spams more efficiently.by Fulu Li.Ph.D

Design and Analysis of an Efficient Friend-to-Friend Content Dissemination System

International audienceOpportunistic communication, off-loading and decentrlaized distribution have been proposed as a means of cost efficient disseminating content when users are geographically clustered into communities. Despite its promise, none of the proposed systems have not been widely adopted due to unbounded high content delivery latency, security and privacy concerns. This paper, presents a novel hybrid content storage and distribution system addressing the trust and privacy concerns of users, lowering the cost of content distribution and storage, and shows how they can be combined uniquely to develop mobile social networking services. The system exploit the fact that users will trust their friends, and by replicating content on friends’ devices who are likely to consume that content it will be possible to disseminate it to other friends when connected to low cost networks. The paper provides a formal definition of this content replication problem, and show that it is NP hard. Then, it presents a community based greedy heuristic algorithm with novel dynamic centrality metrics that replicates the content on a minimum number of friends’ devices, to maximize availability. Then using both real world and synthetic datasets, the effectiveness of the proposed scheme is demonstrated. The practicality of the proposed system, is demonstrated through an implementation on Android smartphones

CHORUS Deliverable 2.1: State of the Art on Multimedia Search Engines

Based on the information provided by European projects and national initiatives related to multimedia search as well as domains experts that participated in the CHORUS Think-thanks and workshops, this document reports on the state of the art related to multimedia content search from, a technical, and socio-economic perspective. The technical perspective includes an up to date view on content based indexing and retrieval technologies, multimedia search in the context of mobile devices and peer-to-peer networks, and an overview of current evaluation and benchmark inititiatives to measure the performance of multimedia search engines. From a socio-economic perspective we inventorize the impact and legal consequences of these technical advances and point out future directions of research