Checking and Enforcing Security through Opacity in Healthcare Applications

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a paradigm that can tremendously revolutionize health care thus benefiting both hospitals, doctors and patients. In this context, protecting the IoT in health care against interference, including service attacks and malwares, is challenging. Opacity is a confidentiality property capturing a system's ability to keep a subset of its behavior hidden from passive observers. In this work, we seek to introduce an IoT-based heart attack detection system, that could be life-saving for patients without risking their need for privacy through the verification and enforcement of opacity. Our main contributions are the use of a tool to verify opacity in three of its forms, so as to detect privacy leaks in our system. Furthermore, we develop an efficient, Symbolic Observation Graph (SOG)-based algorithm for enforcing opacity

Do we all really know what a fog node is? Current trends towards an open definition

Fog computing has emerged as a promising technology that can bring cloud applications closer to the physical IoT devices at the network edge. While it is widely known what cloud computing is, how data centers can build the cloud infrastructure and how applications can make use of this infrastructure, there is no common picture on what fog computing and particularly a fog node, as its main building block, really is. One of the first attempts to define a fog node was made by Cisco, qualifying a fog computing system as a “mini-cloud” located at the edge of the network and implemented through a variety of edge devices, interconnected by a variety, mostly wireless, communication technologies. Thus, a fog node would be the infrastructure implementing the said mini-cloud. Other proposals have their own definition of what a fog node is, usually in relation to a specific edge device, a specific use case or an application. In this paper, we first survey the state of the art in technologies for fog computing nodes, paying special attention to the contributions that analyze the role edge devices play in the fog node definition. We summarize and compare the concepts, lessons learned from their implementation, and end up showing how a conceptual framework is emerging towards a unifying fog node definition. We focus on core functionalities of a fog node as well as in the accompanying opportunities and challenges towards their practical realization in the near future.Postprint (author's final draft

Averaging is probably not the optimum way of aggregating parameters in federated learning

Federated learning is a decentralized topology of deep learning, that trains a shared model through data distributed among each client (like mobile phones, wearable devices), in order to ensure data privacy by avoiding raw data exposed in data center (server). After each client computes a new model parameter by stochastic gradient descent (SGD) based on their own local data, these locally-computed parameters will be aggregated to generate an updated global model. Many current state-of-the-art studies aggregate different client-computed parameters by averaging them}, but {none theoretically explains} why averaging parameters is a good approach. In this paper, we treat each client computed parameter as a random vector because of the stochastic properties of SGD, and estimate mutual information between two client computed parameters at different training phases using two methods in two learning tasks. The results confirm the correlation between different clients and show an increasing trend of mutual information with training iteration. However, when we further compute the distance between client computed parameters, we find that parameters are getting more correlated while not getting closer. This phenomenon suggests that averaging parameters may not be the optimum way of aggregating trained parameters

Distributed Fog computing for Internet of Things (IoT) based Ambient Data Processing and Analysis

Urban centers across the globe are under immense environmental distress due to an increase in air pollution, industrialization, and elevated living standards. The unmanageable and mushroom growth of industries and an exponential soar in population has made the ascent of air pollution intractable. To this end, the solutions that are based on the latest technologies, such as the Internet of things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are becoming increasingly popular and they have capabilities to monitor the extent and scale of air contaminants and would be subsequently useful for containing them. With centralized cloud-based IoT platforms, the ubiquitous and continuous monitoring of air quality and data processing can be facilitated for the identification of air pollution hot spots. However, owing to the inherent characteristics of cloud, such as large end-to-end delay and bandwidth constraint, handling the high velocity and large volume of data that are generated by distributed IoT sensors would not be feasible in the longer run. To address these issues, fog computing is a powerful paradigm, where the data are processed and filtered near the end of the IoT nodes and it is useful for improving the quality of service (QoS) of IoT network. To further improve the QoS, a conceptual model of distributed fog computing and a machine learning based data processing and analysis model is proposed for the optimal utilization of cloud resources. The proposed model provides a classification accuracy of 99% while using a Support Vector Machines (SVM) classifier. This model is also simulated in iFogSim toolkit. It affords many advantages, such as reduced load on the central server by locally processing the data and reporting the quality of air. Additionally, it would offer the scalability of the system by integrating more air quality monitoring nodes in the IoT network

Fog Computing in IoT Smart Environments via Named Data Networking: A Study on Service Orchestration Mechanisms

[EN] By offering low-latency and context-aware services, fog computing will have a peculiar role in the deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) applications for smart environments. Unlike the conventional remote cloud, for which consolidated architectures and deployment options exist, many design and implementation aspects remain open when considering the latest fog computing paradigm. In this paper, we focus on the problems of dynamically discovering the processing and storage resources distributed among fog nodes and, accordingly, orchestrating them for the provisioning of IoT services for smart environments. In particular, we show how these functionalities can be effectively supported by the revolutionary Named Data Networking (NDN) paradigm. Originally conceived to support named content delivery, NDN can be extended to request and provide named computation services, with NDN nodes acting as both content routers and in-network service executors. To substantiate our analysis, we present an NDN fog computing framework with focus on a smart campus scenario, where the execution of IoT services is dynamically orchestrated and performed by NDN nodes in a distributed fashion. A simulation campaign in ndnSIM, the reference network simulator of the NDN research community, is also presented to assess the performance of our proposal against state-of-the-art solutions. Results confirm the superiority of the proposal in terms of service provisioning time, paid at the expenses of a slightly higher amount of traffic exchanged among fog nodes.This research was partially funded by the Italian Government under grant PON ARS01_00836 for the COGITO (A COGnItive dynamic sysTem to allOw buildings to learn and adapt) PON Project.Amadeo, M.; Ruggeri, G.; Campolo, C.; Molinaro, A.; Loscri, V.; Tavares De Araujo Cesariny Calafate, CM. (2019). Fog Computing in IoT Smart Environments via Named Data Networking: A Study on Service Orchestration Mechanisms. Future Internet. 11(11):1-21. https://doi.org/10.3390/fi11110222S1211111Lee, I., & Lee, K. (2015). The Internet of Things (IoT): Applications, investments, and challenges for enterprises. Business Horizons, 58(4), 431-440. doi:10.1016/j.bushor.2015.03.008Cicirelli, F., Guerrieri, A., Spezzano, G., Vinci, A., Briante, O., Iera, A., & Ruggeri, G. (2018). Edge Computing and Social Internet of Things for Large-Scale Smart Environments Development. IEEE Internet of Things Journal, 5(4), 2557-2571. doi:10.1109/jiot.2017.2775739Chiang, M., & Zhang, T. (2016). Fog and IoT: An Overview of Research Opportunities. IEEE Internet of Things Journal, 3(6), 854-864. doi:10.1109/jiot.2016.2584538Openfog Consortiumhttp://www.openfogconsortium.org/Zhang, L., Afanasyev, A., Burke, J., Jacobson, V., claffy, kc, Crowley, P., … Zhang, B. (2014). Named data networking. ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, 44(3), 66-73. doi:10.1145/2656877.2656887Amadeo, M., Ruggeri, G., Campolo, C., & Molinaro, A. (2019). IoT Services Allocation at the Edge via Named Data Networking: From Optimal Bounds to Practical Design. IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management, 16(2), 661-674. doi:10.1109/tnsm.2019.2900274ndnSIM 2.0: A New Version of the NDN Simulator for NS-3https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Spyridon_Mastorakis/publication/281652451_ndnSIM_20_A_new_version_of_the_NDN_simulator_for_NS-3/links/5b196020a6fdcca67b63660d/ndnSIM-20-A-new-version-of-the-NDN-simulator-for-NS-3.pdfAhlgren, B., Dannewitz, C., Imbrenda, C., Kutscher, D., & Ohlman, B. (2012). A survey of information-centric networking. IEEE Communications Magazine, 50(7), 26-36. doi:10.1109/mcom.2012.6231276NFD Developer’s Guidehttps://named-data.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/ndn-0021-diff-5..6-nfd-developer-guide.pdfPiro, G., Amadeo, M., Boggia, G., Campolo, C., Grieco, L. A., Molinaro, A., & Ruggeri, G. (2019). Gazing into the Crystal Ball: When the Future Internet Meets the Mobile Clouds. IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing, 7(1), 210-223. doi:10.1109/tcc.2016.2573307Zhang, G., Li, Y., & Lin, T. (2013). Caching in information centric networking: A survey. Computer Networks, 57(16), 3128-3141. doi:10.1016/j.comnet.2013.07.007Yi, C., Afanasyev, A., Moiseenko, I., Wang, L., Zhang, B., & Zhang, L. (2013). A case for stateful forwarding plane. Computer Communications, 36(7), 779-791. doi:10.1016/j.comcom.2013.01.005Amadeo, M., Briante, O., Campolo, C., Molinaro, A., & Ruggeri, G. (2016). Information-centric networking for M2M communications: Design and deployment. Computer Communications, 89-90, 105-116. doi:10.1016/j.comcom.2016.03.009Tourani, R., Misra, S., Mick, T., & Panwar, G. (2018). Security, Privacy, and Access Control in Information-Centric Networking: A Survey. IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, 20(1), 566-600. doi:10.1109/comst.2017.2749508Ndn-ace: Access Control for Constrained Environments over Named Data Networkinghttp://new.named-data.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/ndn-0036-1-ndn-ace.pdfZhang, Z., Yu, Y., Zhang, H., Newberry, E., Mastorakis, S., Li, Y., … Zhang, L. (2018). An Overview of Security Support in Named Data Networking. IEEE Communications Magazine, 56(11), 62-68. doi:10.1109/mcom.2018.1701147Cisco White Paperhttps://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en_us/solutions/trends/iot/docs/computing-overview.pdfAazam, M., Zeadally, S., & Harras, K. A. (2018). Deploying Fog Computing in Industrial Internet of Things and Industry 4.0. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, 14(10), 4674-4682. doi:10.1109/tii.2018.2855198Hou, X., Li, Y., Chen, M., Wu, D., Jin, D., & Chen, S. (2016). Vehicular Fog Computing: A Viewpoint of Vehicles as the Infrastructures. IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, 65(6), 3860-3873. doi:10.1109/tvt.2016.2532863Yousefpour, A., Fung, C., Nguyen, T., Kadiyala, K., Jalali, F., Niakanlahiji, A., … Jue, J. P. (2019). All one needs to know about fog computing and related edge computing paradigms: A complete survey. Journal of Systems Architecture, 98, 289-330. doi:10.1016/j.sysarc.2019.02.009Baktir, A. C., Ozgovde, A., & Ersoy, C. (2017). How Can Edge Computing Benefit From Software-Defined Networking: A Survey, Use Cases, and Future Directions. IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, 19(4), 2359-2391. doi:10.1109/comst.2017.2717482Duan, Q., Yan, Y., & Vasilakos, A. V. (2012). A Survey on Service-Oriented Network Virtualization Toward Convergence of Networking and Cloud Computing. IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management, 9(4), 373-392. doi:10.1109/tnsm.2012.113012.120310Amadeo, M., Campolo, C., & Molinaro, A. (2016). NDNe: Enhancing Named Data Networking to Support Cloudification at the Edge. IEEE Communications Letters, 20(11), 2264-2267. doi:10.1109/lcomm.2016.2597850Krol, M., Marxer, C., Grewe, D., Psaras, I., & Tschudin, C. (2018). Open Security Issues for Edge Named Function Environments. IEEE Communications Magazine, 56(11), 69-75. doi:10.1109/mcom.2018.170111711801-2:2017 Information Technology—Generic Cabling for Customer Premiseshttps://www.iso.org/standard/66183.htm

Understanding the Performance of Low Power Raspberry Pi Cloud for Big Data

Nowadays, Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices generate data at high speed and large volume. Often the data require real-time processing to support high system responsiveness which can be supported by localised Cloud and/or Fog computing paradigms. However, there are considerably large deployments of IoT such as sensor networks in remote areas where Internet connectivity is sparse, challenging the localised Cloud and/or Fog computing paradigms. With the advent of the Raspberry Pi, a credit card-sized single board computer, there is a great opportunity to construct low-cost, low-power portable cloud to support real-time data processing next to IoT deployments. In this paper, we extend our previous work on constructing Raspberry Pi Cloud to study its feasibility for real-time big data analytics under realistic application-level workload in both native and virtualised environments. We have extensively tested the performance of a single node Raspberry Pi 2 Model B with httperf and a cluster of 12 nodes with Apache Spark and HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System). Our results have demonstrated that our portable cloud is useful for supporting real-time big data analytics. On the other hand, our results have also unveiled that overhead for CPU-bound workload in virtualised environment is surprisingly high, at 67.2%. We have found that, for big data applications, the virtualisation overhead is fractional for small jobs but becomes more significant for large jobs, up to 28.6%

Activity Recognition for IoT Devices Using Fuzzy Spatio-Temporal Features as Environmental Sensor Fusion

The IoT describes a development field where new approaches and trends are in constant change. In this scenario, new devices and sensors are offering higher precision in everyday life in an increasingly less invasive way. In this work, we propose the use of spatial-temporal features by means of fuzzy logic as a general descriptor for heterogeneous sensors. This fuzzy sensor representation is highly efficient and enables devices with low computing power to develop learning and evaluation tasks in activity recognition using light and efficient classifiers. To show the methodology's potential in real applications, we deploy an intelligent environment where new UWB location devices, inertial objects, wearable devices, and binary sensors are connected with each other and describe daily human activities. We then apply the proposed fuzzy logic-based methodology to obtain spatial-temporal features to fuse the data from the heterogeneous sensor devices. A case study developed in the UJAmISmart Lab of the University of Jaen (Jaen, Spain) shows the encouraging performance of the methodology when recognizing the activity of an inhabitant using efficient classifiers

SmartHerd Management: A Microservices Based Fog Computing Assisted IoT Platform towards Data Driven Smart Dairy Farming

Internet of things (IoT), fog computing, cloud computing and data driven techniques together offer a great opportunity for verticals such as dairy industry to increase productivity by getting actionable insights to improve farming practices, thereby increasing efficiency and yield. In this paper, we present SmartHerd, a fog computing assisted end-to-end IoT platform for animal behaviour analysis and health monitoring in a dairy farming scenario. The platform follows a microservices oriented design to assist the distributed computing paradigm, and addresses the major issue of constrained Internet connectivity in remote farm locations. We present the implementation of the designed software system in a 6 month mature real-world deployment, wherein the data from wearables on cows is sent to a fog based platform for data classification and analysis, which includes decision making capabilities and provides actionable insights to farmer towards the welfare of animals. With fog based computational assistance in the SmartHerd setup, we see an 84\% reduction in amount of data transferred to the cloud as compared to the conventional cloud based approach

Understanding Urban Human Mobility for Network Applications

Understanding urban human mobility is crucial for various mobile and network applications. This thesis addresses two key challenges presented by mobile applications, namely urban mobility modeling and its applications in Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs). First, we model urban human mobility with transportation mode information. Our research is based on two real-life GPS datasets containing approximately 20 and 10 million GPS samples. Previous research has suggested that the trajectories in human mobility have statistically similar features as Lévy Walks. We attempt to explain the Lévy Walks behavior by decomposing them into different classes according to the different transportation modes, such as Walk/Run, Bike, Train/ Subway or Car/Taxi/Bus. We show that human mobility can be modelled as a mixture of different transportation modes, and that these single movement patterns can be approximated by a lognormal distribution rather than a power-law distribution. Then, we demonstrate that the mixture of the decomposed lognormal flight distributions associated with each modality is a power-law distribution, providing an explanation for the emergence of Lévy Walks patterns that characterize human mobility patterns. Second, we find that urban human mobility exhibits strong spatial and temporal patterns. We leverage such human mobility patterns to derive an optimal routing algorithm that minimizes the hop count while maximizing the number of needed nodes in DTNs. We propose a solution framework, called Ameba, for timely data delivery in DTNs. Simulation results with experimental traces indicate that Ameba achieves a comparable delivery ratio to a Flooding-based algorithm, but with much lower overhead. Third, we infer the functions of the sub-areas in three cities by analyzing urban mobility patterns. The analysis is based on three large taxi GPS datasets in Rome, San Francisco and Beijing containing 21, 11 and 17 million GPS points, respectively. We categorize the city regions into four categories, workplaces, entertainment places, residential places and other places. We show that the identification of these functional sub-areas can be utilized to increase the efficiency of urban DTN applications. The three topics pertaining to urban mobility examined in the thesis support the design and implementation of network applications for urban environments.Ihmisen liikkumisen ymmärtäminen on erittäin tärkeää monille mobiiliverkkojen sovelluksille. Tämä väitöskirja käsittelee mobiilikäyttäjien liikkuvuuden mallintamista ja sen soveltamista viiveitä sietävään tiedonvälitykseen urbaanissa ympäristössä. Aloitamme mallintamalla mobiilikäyttäjien liikkuvuutta ottaen huomioon kulkumuodon. Tutkimuksemme perustuu kahteen laajaan GPS-data-aineistoon. Käytetyissä data-aineisto koostuu 10 ja 20 miljoonan havaintopisteen kulkuvälineet sisältävistä GPS-tiedoista. Aikaisemmat tutkimukset ovat ehdottaneet, että liikkuvuusmalleilla on samankaltaisia tilastollisia ominaisuuksia kuin Lévy-kävelyillä. Tutkimuksemme selittää Lévy-kävelyiden käyttäytymisen jakamalla ne erilaisiin kulkumuotoihin, kuten kävely/juoksu, polkupyöräily, juna/metro tai auto/taksi/bussi. Näytämme, että ihmisten liikkuvuus voidaan mallintaa eri kulkumuotojen yhdistelminä ja että yksittäiset liikkuvuusmallit voidaan arvioida logaritmisella normaalijakaumalla paremmin kuin potenssilakia noudattavalla jakaumalla. Lisäksi osoitamme, että yhdistelmä kävelyjen lavennetusta logaritmisesta normaalijakaumasta eri kulkumuotojen kanssa on potenssilakia noudattava jakauma, joka selittää ihmisten liikkuvuusmalleja luonnehtivien Lévy-kävelymallien esiintymisen. Toiseksi osoitamme, että urbaanin ihmisen liikkuvuuteen kuuluu vahvoja aikaan ja paikkaan liittyviä malleja. Johdamme näistä ihmisten liikkuvuusmalleista optimaalisen reititysalgoritmin, joka minimoi tarvittavien hyppyjen määrän ja maksimoi tarvittavien solmujen määrän viiveitä sietävissä verkoissa. Esitämme ratkaisuksi arkkitehtuurikehyksen nimeltä Ameba, joka takaa oikea-aikaisen viestien välityksen viiveitä sietävissä verkoissa. Simulointitulosten perusteella Ameba saavuttaa tulvitukseen perustuvien algoritmien kanssa vertailukelpoisen viestien kuljetussuhteen, mutta pienemmällä resurssikustannuksella. Kolmanneksi päättelemme maantieteellisten osa-alueiden funktiot analysoimalla kolmen kaupungin urbaaneja liikkumismalleja. Analyysi perustuu kolmeen laajaan taksien GPS-paikkatiedosta. GPS-data on kerätty Roomassa, San Franciscossa, ja Pekingissä ja koostuu 21, 11, ja 17 miljoonasta havaintopisteestä. Luokittelemme kaupunkien alueet neljään luokkaan: työpaikat, viihde-, asuin-, ja muut paikat. Näytämme, että näiden luokkien tunnistamista voidaan käyttää parantamaan viiveitä sietävien verkkojen sovellusten tehokkuutta. Kaikki tässä väitöskirjassa käsitellyt mobiilikäyttäjien liikkuvuuden mallintamisen aihepiirit edesauttavat urbaanien ympäristöjen verkkojen sovellusten suunnittelua ja toteutusta