AMISEC: Leveraging Redundancy and Adaptability to Secure AmI Applications

Security in Ambient Intelligence (AmI) poses too many challenges due to the inherently insecure nature of wireless sensor nodes. However, there are two characteristics of these environments that can be used effectively to prevent, detect, and confine attacks: redundancy and continuous adaptation. In this article we propose a global strategy and a system architecture to cope with security issues in AmI applications at different levels. Unlike in previous approaches, we assume an individual wireless node is vulnerable. We present an agent-based architecture with supporting services that is proven to be adequate to detect and confine common attacks. Decisions at different levels are supported by a trust-based framework with good and bad reputation feedback while maintaining resistance to bad-mouthing attacks. We also propose a set of services that can be used to handle identification, authentication, and authorization in intelligent ambients. The resulting approach takes into account practical issues, such as resource limitation, bandwidth optimization, and scalability

Leveraging Coding Techniques for Speeding up Distributed Computing

Large scale clusters leveraging distributed computing frameworks such as MapReduce routinely process data that are on the orders of petabytes or more. The sheer size of the data precludes the processing of the data on a single computer. The philosophy in these methods is to partition the overall job into smaller tasks that are executed on different servers; this is called the map phase. This is followed by a data shuffling phase where appropriate data is exchanged between the servers. The final so-called reduce phase, completes the computation. One potential approach, explored in prior work for reducing the overall execution time is to operate on a natural tradeoff between computation and communication. Specifically, the idea is to run redundant copies of map tasks that are placed on judiciously chosen servers. The shuffle phase exploits the location of the nodes and utilizes coded transmission. The main drawback of this approach is that it requires the original job to be split into a number of map tasks that grows exponentially in the system parameters. This is problematic, as we demonstrate that splitting jobs too finely can in fact adversely affect the overall execution time. In this work we show that one can simultaneously obtain low communication loads while ensuring that jobs do not need to be split too finely. Our approach uncovers a deep relationship between this problem and a class of combinatorial structures called resolvable designs. Appropriate interpretation of resolvable designs can allow for the development of coded distributed computing schemes where the splitting levels are exponentially lower than prior work. We present experimental results obtained on Amazon EC2 clusters for a widely known distributed algorithm, namely TeraSort. We obtain over 4.69$\times$ improvement in speedup over the baseline approach and more than 2.6$\times$ over current state of the art

Privacy-Preserving Secret Shared Computations using MapReduce

Data outsourcing allows data owners to keep their data at \emph{untrusted} clouds that do not ensure the privacy of data and/or computations. One useful framework for fault-tolerant data processing in a distributed fashion is MapReduce, which was developed for \emph{trusted} private clouds. This paper presents algorithms for data outsourcing based on Shamir's secret-sharing scheme and for executing privacy-preserving SQL queries such as count, selection including range selection, projection, and join while using MapReduce as an underlying programming model. Our proposed algorithms prevent an adversary from knowing the database or the query while also preventing output-size and access-pattern attacks. Interestingly, our algorithms do not involve the database owner, which only creates and distributes secret-shares once, in answering any query, and hence, the database owner also cannot learn the query. Logically and experimentally, we evaluate the efficiency of the algorithms on the following parameters: (\textit{i}) the number of communication rounds (between a user and a server), (\textit{ii}) the total amount of bit flow (between a user and a server), and (\textit{iii}) the computational load at the user and the server.\BComment: IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, Accepted 01 Aug. 201

URL Recommender using Parallel Processing

The main purpose of this project is to section similar news and articles from a vast variety of news articles. Let’s say, you want to read about latest news related to particular topic like sports. Usually, user goes to a particular website and goes through some news but he won’t be able to cover all the news coverage in a single website. So, he would be going through some other news website to checking it out and this continues. Also, some news websites might be containing some old news and the user might be going through that. To solve this, I have developed a web application where in user can see all the latest news from different websites in a single place. Users are given choice to select the news websites from which they want to view the latest news. The articles which we get from news websites are very random and we will be applying the DBSCAN algorithm and place the news articles in the cluster form for each specific topic for user to view. If the user wants to see sports, he will be provided with sports news section. And this process of extracting random news articles and forming news clusters are done at run time and at all times we will get the latest news as we will be extracting the data from web at run time. This is an effective way to watch all news at single place. And in turn this can be used as articles (URL) recommender as the user has to just go through the specific cluster which interests him and not visit all news websites to find articles. This way the user does not have to visit different sites to view all latest news. This idea can be expanded to not just news articles but also in other areas like collecting statistics of financial information etc. As the processing is done at runtime, the performance has to be improved. To improve the performance, the distributed data mining is used and multiple servers are being used which communicate with each other

Observing the clouds : a survey and taxonomy of cloud monitoring

This research was supported by a Royal Society Industry Fellowship and an Amazon Web Services (AWS) grant. Date of Acceptance: 10/12/2014Monitoring is an important aspect of designing and maintaining large-scale systems. Cloud computing presents a unique set of challenges to monitoring including: on-demand infrastructure, unprecedented scalability, rapid elasticity and performance uncertainty. There are a wide range of monitoring tools originating from cluster and high-performance computing, grid computing and enterprise computing, as well as a series of newer bespoke tools, which have been designed exclusively for cloud monitoring. These tools express a number of common elements and designs, which address the demands of cloud monitoring to various degrees. This paper performs an exhaustive survey of contemporary monitoring tools from which we derive a taxonomy, which examines how effectively existing tools and designs meet the challenges of cloud monitoring. We conclude by examining the socio-technical aspects of monitoring, and investigate the engineering challenges and practices behind implementing monitoring strategies for cloud computing.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe