A Cloud-based Intrusion Detection and Prevention System for Mobile Voting in South Africa

Publishe ThesisInformation and Communication Technology (ICT) has given rise to new technologies and solutions that were not possible a few years ago. One of these new technologies is electronic voting, also known as e-voting, which is the use of computerised equipment to cast a vote. One of the subsets of e-voting is mobile voting (m-voting). M-voting is the use of mobile phones to cast a vote outside the restricted electoral boundaries. Mobile phones are pervasive; they offer connection anywhere, at any time. However, utilising a fast-growing medium such as the mobile phone to cast a vote, poses various new security threats and challenges. Mobile phones utilise equivalent software design used by personal computers which makes them vulnerable or exposed to parallel security challenges like viruses, Trojans and worms. In the past, security solutions for mobile phones encountered several restrictions in practice. Several methods were used; however, these methods were developed to allow lightweight intrusion detection software to operate directly on the mobile phone. Nevertheless, such security solutions are bound to fail securing a device from intrusions as they are constrained by the restricted memory, storage, computational resources, and battery power of mobile phones. This study compared and evaluated two intrusion detection systems (IDSs), namely Snort and Suricata, in order to propose a cloud-based intrusion detection and prevention system (CIDPS) for m-voting in South Africa. It employed simulation as the primary research strategy to evaluate the IDSs. A quantitative research method was used to collect and analyse data. The researcher established that as much as Snort has been the preferred intrusion detection and prevention system (IDPS) in the past, Suricata presented more effective and accurate results close to what the researcher anticipated. The results also revealed that, though Suricata was proven effective enough to protect m-voting while saving the computational resources of mobile phones, more work needs to be done to alleviate the false-negative alerts caused by the anomaly detection method. This study adopted Suricata as a suitable cloud-based analysis engine to protect a mobile voting application like XaP

Developing a distributed electronic health-record store for India

The DIGHT project is addressing the problem of building a scalable and highly available information store for the Electronic Health Records (EHRs) of the over one billion citizens of India

Service Platform for Converged Interactive Broadband Broadcast and Cellular Wireless

A converged broadcast and telecommunication service platform is presented that is able to create, deliver, and manage interactive, multimedia content and services for consumption on three different terminal types. The motivations of service providers for designing converged interactive multimedia services, which are crafted for their individual requirements, are investigated. The overall design of the system is presented with particular emphasis placed on the operational features of each of the sub-systems, the flows of media and metadata through the sub-systems and the formats and protocols required for inter-communication between them. The key features of tools required for creating converged interactive multimedia content for a range of different end-user terminal types are examined. Finally possible enhancements to this system are discussed. This study is of particular interest to those organizations currently conducting trials and commercial launches of DVB-H services because it provides them with an insight of the various additional functions required in the service provisioning platforms to provide fully interactive services to a range of different mobile terminal types

Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Security in Mobile Multiagent Systems

This report contains the Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Security on Security of Mobile Multiagent Systems (SEMAS2002). The Workshop was held in Montreal, Canada as a satellite event to the 5th International Conference on Autonomous Agents in 2001. The far reaching influence of the Internet has resulted in an increased interest in agent technologies, which are poised to play a key role in the implementation of successful Internet and WWW-based applications in the future. While there is still considerable hype concerning agent technologies, there is also an increasing awareness of the problems involved. In particular, that these applications will not be successful unless security issues can be adequately handled. Although there is a large body of work on cryptographic techniques that provide basic building-blocks to solve specific security problems, relatively little work has been done in investigating security in the multiagent system context. Related problems are secure communication between agents, implementation of trust models/authentication procedures or even reflections of agents on security mechanisms. The introduction of mobile software agents significantly increases the risks involved in Internet and WWW-based applications. For example, if we allow agents to enter our hosts or private networks, we must offer the agents a platform so that they can execute correctly but at the same time ensure that they will not have deleterious effects on our hosts or any other agents / processes in our network. If we send out mobile agents, we should also be able to provide guarantees about specific aspects of their behaviour, i.e., we are not only interested in whether the agents carry out-out their intended task correctly. They must defend themselves against attacks initiated by other agents, and survive in potentially malicious environments. Agent technologies can also be used to support network security. For example in the context of intrusion detection, intelligent guardian agents may be used to analyse the behaviour of agents on a firewall or intelligent monitoring agents can be used to analyse the behaviour of agents migrating through a network. Part of the inspiration for such multi-agent systems comes from primitive animal behaviour, such as that of guardian ants protecting their hill or from biological immune systems

Supporting Mobile Distributed Services

With sensors becoming increasingly ubiquitous, there is a tremendous potential for services which can take advantage of the data collected by these sensors, from the important -- such as detecting medical emergencies and imminent natural disasters -- to the mundane -- such as waiting times experienced by diners at restaurants. This information can then be used to offer useful services. For example, a busy professional could find a restaurant to go to for a quick lunch based on information available from smartphones of people already there having lunch, waiting to be seated, or even heading there; a government could conduct a census in real-time, or “sense” public opinion. I refer to such services as mobile distributed services. The barriers to offering mobile distributed services continue to be prohibitive for most: not only must these services be implemented, but they would also inevitably compete for resources on people's devices. This is in part because such services are poorly understood, and consequently, there is limited language support for programming them. In this thesis, I address practical challenges related to three important problems in mobile distributed services. In addition, I present my efforts towards a formal model for representing mobile distributed services. First, I address the challenge of enhancing the programmability of mobile distributed services. This thesis presents a set of core mechanisms underlying mobile distributed services. I interpret and implement these mechanisms for the domain of crowd-sourced services. A distributed runtime middleware, CSSWare, has been developed to simplify the burden of initiating and managing crowd-sourced services. CSSWare provides a set of domain-specific programming constructs for launching a new service. Service designers may launch novel services over CSSWare by simply plugging in small pieces of service specific code. Particularly, new services can be prototyped in fewer than 100 lines of code. This ease of programming promises to democratize the building of such services. Second, I address the challenge of efficiently supporting the sensing needs of mobile distributed services, and more generally sensor-based applications. I developed ShareSens, an approach to opportunistically merge sensing requirements of independent applications. When multiple applications make sensing requests, instead of serving each request independently, ShareSens opportunistically merges the requests, achieving significant power and energy savings. Custom filters are then used to extract the data required by each application. Third, I address the problem of programming the sensing requirements of mobile distributed services. In particular, ModeSens is presented to allow multi-modal sensing requirements of a service to be programmed separately from its function. Programmers can specify the modes in which a service can be, the sensing needs of each mode, and the sensed events which trigger mode transition. ModeSens then monitors for mode transition events, and dynamically adjusts the sensing frequencies to match the current mode's requirements. Separating the mode change logic from an application's functional logic leads to more modular code. In addition, I present MobDisS (Mobile Distributed Services), an early model for representing mobile distributed services, allowing them to be carefully studied. Services can be built by composing simpler services. I present the syntax and operational semantics of MobDisS. Although this work can be evaluated along multiple dimensions, my primary goal is to enhance programmability of mobile distributed services. This is illustrated by providing the actual code required for creating two realistic services using CSSWare. Each service demonstrates different facets of the middleware, ranging from the use of different sensors to the use of different facilities provided by CSSWare. Furthermore, experimental results are presented to demonstrate scalability, performance and data-contributor side energy efficiency of CSSWare and ShareSens. Finally, a set of experimental evaluation is carried out to measure the performance and energy costs of using ModeSens

Privacy in Mobile Agent Systems: Untraceability

Agent based Internet environments are an interesting alternative to existing approaches of building software systems. The enabling feature of agents is that they allow software development based on the abstraction (a "metaphor") of elements of the real world. In other words, they allow building software systems, which work as human societies, in which members share products and services, cooperate or compete with each other. Organisational, behavioural and functional models etc applied into the systems can be copied from the real world. The growing interest in agent technologies in the European Union was expressed through the foundation of the Coordination Action for Agent-Based Computing, funded under the European Commission's Sixth Framework Programme (FP6). The action, called AgentLink III is run by the Information Society Technologies (IST) programme. The long-term goal of AgentLink is to put Europe at the leading edge of international competitiveness in this increasingly important area. According to AgentLink "Roadmap for Agent Based Computing"; agent-based systems are perceived as "one of the most vibrant and important areas of research and development to have emerged in information technology in recent years, underpinning many aspects of broader information society technologies"; However, with the emergence of the new paradigm, came also new challenges. One of them is that agent environments, especially those which allow for mobility of agents, are much more difficult to protect from intruders than conventional systems. Agent environments still lack sufficient and effective solutions to assure their security. The problem which till now has not been addressed sufficiently in agent-based systems is privacy, and particularly the anonymity of agent users. Although anonymity was studied extensively for traditional message-based communication for which during the past twenty five years various techniques have been proposed, for agent systems this problem has never been directly addressed. The research presented in this report aimed at filling this gap. This report summarises results of studies aiming at the identification of threats to privacy in agent-based systems and the methods of their protection.JRC.G.6-Sensors, radar technologies and cybersecurit

The survey on Near Field Communication

PubMed ID: 26057043Near Field Communication (NFC) is an emerging short-range wireless communication technology that offers great and varied promise in services such as payment, ticketing, gaming, crowd sourcing, voting, navigation, and many others. NFC technology enables the integration of services from a wide range of applications into one single smartphone. NFC technology has emerged recently, and consequently not much academic data are available yet, although the number of academic research studies carried out in the past two years has already surpassed the total number of the prior works combined. This paper presents the concept of NFC technology in a holistic approach from different perspectives, including hardware improvement and optimization, communication essentials and standards, applications, secure elements, privacy and security, usability analysis, and ecosystem and business issues. Further research opportunities in terms of the academic and business points of view are also explored and discussed at the end of each section. This comprehensive survey will be a valuable guide for researchers and academicians, as well as for business in the NFC technology and ecosystem.Publisher's Versio