Cooperating broadcast and cellular conditional access system for digital television

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.The lack of interoperability between Pay‐TV service providers and a horizontally integrated business transaction model have compromised the competition in the Pay‐TV market. In addition, the lack of interactivity with customers has resulted in high churn rate and improper security measures have contributed into considerable business loss. These issues are the main cause of high operational costs and subscription fees in the Pay‐TV systems. This paper presents a novel end‐to‐end system architecture for Pay‐TV systems cooperating mobile and broadcasting technologies. It provides a cost‐effective, scalable, dynamic and secure access control mechanism supporting converged services and new business opportunities in Pay‐TV systems. It enhances interactivity, security and potentially reduces customer attrition and operational cost. In this platform, service providers can effectively interact with their customers, personalise their services and adopt appropriate security measures. It breaks up the rigid relationship between a viewer and set‐top box as imposed by traditional conditional access systems, thus, a viewer can fully enjoy his entitlements via an arbitrary set‐top box. Having thoroughly considered state‐of‐the‐art technologies currently being used across the world, the thesis highlights novel use cases and presents the full design and implementation aspects of the system. The design section is enriched by providing possible security structures supported thereby. A business collaboration structure is proposed, followed by a reference model for implementing the system. Finally, the security architectures are analysed to propose the best architecture on the basis of security, complexity and set‐top box production cost criteria

Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Guiding readers through the basics of these rapidly emerging networks to more advanced concepts and future expectations, Mobile Ad hoc Networks: Current Status and Future Trends identifies and examines the most pressing research issues in Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs). Containing the contributions of leading researchers, industry professionals, and academics, this forward-looking reference provides an authoritative perspective of the state of the art in MANETs. The book includes surveys of recent publications that investigate key areas of interest such as limited resources and the mobility of mobile nodes. It considers routing, multicast, energy, security, channel assignment, and ensuring quality of service. Also suitable as a text for graduate students, the book is organized into three sections: Fundamentals of MANET Modeling and Simulation—Describes how MANETs operate and perform through simulations and models Communication Protocols of MANETs—Presents cutting-edge research on key issues, including MAC layer issues and routing in high mobility Future Networks Inspired By MANETs—Tackles open research issues and emerging trends Illustrating the role MANETs are likely to play in future networks, this book supplies the foundation and insight you will need to make your own contributions to the field. It includes coverage of routing protocols, modeling and simulations tools, intelligent optimization techniques to multicriteria routing, security issues in FHAMIPv6, connecting moving smart objects to the Internet, underwater sensor networks, wireless mesh network architecture and protocols, adaptive routing provision using Bayesian inference, and adaptive flow control in transport layer using genetic algorithms

A Risk And Trust Security Framework For The Pervasive Mobile Environment

A pervasive mobile computing environment is typically composed of multiple fixed and mobile entities that interact autonomously with each other with very little central control. Many of these interactions may occur between entities that have not interacted with each other previously. Conventional security models are inadequate for regulating access to data and services, especially when the identities of a dynamic and growing community of entities are not known in advance. In order to cope with this drawback, entities may rely on context data to make security and trust decisions. However, risk is introduced in this process due to the variability and uncertainty of context information. Moreover, by the time the decisions are made, the context data may have already changed and, in which case, the security decisions could become invalid.With this in mind, our goal is to develop mechanisms or models, to aid trust decision-making by an entity or agent (the truster), when the consequences of its decisions depend on context information from other agents (the trustees). To achieve this, in this dissertation, we have developed ContextTrust a framework to not only compute the risk associated with a context variable, but also to derive a trust measure for context data producing agents. To compute the context data risk, ContextTrust uses Monte Carlo based method to model the behavior of a context variable. Moreover, ContextTrust makes use of time series classifiers and other simple statistical measures to derive an entity trust value.We conducted empirical analyses to evaluate the performance of ContextTrust using two real life data sets. The evaluation results show that ContextTrust can be effective in helping entities render security decisions