Biometric identity-based cryptography for e-Government environment

Government information is a vital asset that must be kept in a trusted environment and efficiently managed by authorised parties. Even though e-Government provides a number of advantages, it also introduces a range of new security risks. Sharing confidential and top-secret information in a secure manner among government sectors tend to be the main element that government agencies look for. Thus, developing an effective methodology is essential and it is a key factor for e-Government success. The proposed e-Government scheme in this paper is a combination of identity-based encryption and biometric technology. This new scheme can effectively improve the security in authentication systems, which provides a reliable identity with a high degree of assurance. In addition, this paper demonstrates the feasibility of using Finite-state machines as a formal method to analyse the proposed protocols

A 3D visualization approach to validate requirements

The importance of correctly determining the requirements of a system at the very beginning of the development process it is a well known fact. Experience shows that the incorrect definition of the requirements leads to the development of deficient systems, increases the cost of its development or even causes projects to fail. Therefore it is crucial for the clients to verify that the planned system satisfies their needs. In this context, visualization techniques appear as a useful tool to help the users in the process of requirements understanding and validation. This paper describes an approach to validate system requirements with the user using 3D visualization techniques. The use of these techniques could reduce the communication gap between the clients and the developers resulting in a much more effective process of requirements validation. The approach tries to take advantage of the benefits of 3D visualization, complementing this with the advantages of formal specifications. As well as a research prototype tool, called ReqViZ3D, that materializes the proposal was developed. The merits of applying ReqViZ3D for the validation of requirements are illustrated using several case studies.Eje: VisiónRed de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Taking Immersive VR Leap in Training of Landing Signal Officers

The article of record as published may be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2016.2518098A major training device used to train all Landing Signal Officers (LSOs) for several decades has been the Landing Signal Officer Trainer, Device 2H111. This simulator, located in Oceana, VA, is contained within a two story tall room; it consists of several large screens and a physical rendition of the actual instruments used by LSOs in their operational environment. The young officers who serve in this specialty will typically encounter this system for only a short period of formal instruction (six one-hour long sessions), leaving multiple gaps in training. While experience with 2H111 is extremely valuable for all LSO officers, the amount of time they can spend using this training device is undeniably too short. The need to provide LSOs with an unlimited number of training opportunities unrestricted by location and time, married with recent advancements in commercial off the shelf (COTS) immersive technologies, provided an ideal platform to create a lightweight training solution that would fill those gaps and extend beyond the capabilities currently offered in the 2H111 simulator. This paper details our efforts on task analysis, surveying of user domain, mapping of 2H111 training capabilities to new prototype system to ensure its support of major training objectives of 2H111, design and development of prototype training system, and a feasibility study that included tests of technical system performance and informal testing with trainees at the LSO Schoolhouse. The results achieved in this effort indicate that the time for LSO training to make the leap to immersive VR has decidedly come

Boundary Objects and their Use in Agile Systems Engineering

Agile methods are increasingly introduced in automotive companies in the attempt to become more efficient and flexible in the system development. The adoption of agile practices influences communication between stakeholders, but also makes companies rethink the management of artifacts and documentation like requirements, safety compliance documents, and architecture models. Practitioners aim to reduce irrelevant documentation, but face a lack of guidance to determine what artifacts are needed and how they should be managed. This paper presents artifacts, challenges, guidelines, and practices for the continuous management of systems engineering artifacts in automotive based on a theoretical and empirical understanding of the topic. In collaboration with 53 practitioners from six automotive companies, we conducted a design-science study involving interviews, a questionnaire, focus groups, and practical data analysis of a systems engineering tool. The guidelines suggest the distinction between artifacts that are shared among different actors in a company (boundary objects) and those that are used within a team (locally relevant artifacts). We propose an analysis approach to identify boundary objects and three practices to manage systems engineering artifacts in industry

An Efficient Authentication Protocol Based on Chebyshev Chaotic Map for Intelligent Transportation

For meeting the demands of safety, traffic management, and high mobility, vehicular adhoc network (VANET) has become a promising component for smart transportation systems. However, the wireless environment of vehicular network leads to various challenges in the communication security. Hence, several authentication schemes have previously been proposed to address VANET security issues but their procedures disregard the balance between effectiveness and security. Thus, this paper presents a new decentralized authentication protocol that relies on lightweight functions such as the Chebyshev chaotic map and logical shift operator to achieve the high mobility requirement. In order to reduce the number of messages transferred over the network, this protocol attempts to eliminate any redundant authentication steps during its authentication stage. Additionally, the new protocol solves key management problems by applying a little modification to the public key infrastructure to ignore certificates transmission over the network. The proposed design incorporates the self-authentication concept to safeguard the vehicle trip route on the road. Moreover, the performance evaluation is conducted to verify that the proposed protocol outperforms the most related scheme in terms of security and efficiency aspects. Finally, the Scyther simulation validates the security robustness of the new protocol

An Efficient Authentication Protocol Based on Chebyshev Chaotic Map for Intelligent Transportation

For meeting the demands of safety, traffic management, and high mobility, vehicular adhoc network (VANET) has become a promising component for smart transportation systems. However, the wireless environment of vehicular network leads to various challenges in the communication security. Hence, several authentication schemes have previously been proposed to address VANET security issues but their procedures disregard the balance between effectiveness and security. Thus, this paper presents a new decentralized authentication protocol that relies on lightweight functions such as the Chebyshev chaotic map and logical shift operator to achieve the high mobility requirement. In order to reduce the number of messages transferred over the network, this protocol attempts to eliminate any redundant authentication steps during its authentication stage. Additionally, the new protocol solves key management problems by applying a little modification to the public key infrastructure to ignore certificates transmission over the network. The proposed design incorporates the self-authentication concept to safeguard the vehicle trip route on the road. Moreover, the performance evaluation is conducted to verify that the proposed protocol outperforms the most related scheme in terms of security and efficiency aspects. Finally, the Scyther simulation validates the security robustness of the new protocol

Science of Digital Libraries(SciDL)

Our purpose is to ensure that people and institutions better manage information through digital libraries (DLs). Thus we address a fundamental human and social need, which is particularly urgent in the modern Information (and Knowledge) Age. Our goal is to significantly advance both the theory and state-of-theart of DLs (and other advanced information systems) - thoroughly validating our approach using highly visible testbeds. Our research objective is to leverage our formal, theory-based approach to the problems of defining, understanding, modeling, building, personalizing, and evaluating DLs. We will construct models and tools based on that theory so organizations and individuals can easily create and maintain fully functional DLs, whose components can interoperate with corresponding components of related DLs. This research should be highly meritorious intellectually. We bring together a team of senior researchers with expertise in information retrieval, human-computer interaction, scenario-based design, personalization, and componentized system development and expect to make important contributions in each of those areas. Of crucial import, however, is that we will integrate our prior research and experience to achieve breakthrough advances in the field of DLs, regarding theory, methodology, systems, and evaluation. We will extend the 5S theory, which has identified five key dimensions or onstructs underlying effective DLs: Streams, Structures, Spaces, Scenarios, and Societies. We will use that theory to describe and develop metamodels, models, and systems, which can be tailored to disciplines and/or groups, as well as personalized. We will disseminate our findings as well as provide toolkits as open source software, encouraging wide use. We will validate our work using testbeds, ensuring broad impact. We will put powerful tools into the hands of digital librarians so they may easily plan and configure tailored systems, to support an extensible set of services, including publishing, discovery, searching, browsing, recommending, and access control, handling diverse types of collections, and varied genres and classes of digital objects. With these tools, end-users will for be able to design personal DLs. Testbeds are crucial to validate scientific theories and will be thoroughly integrated into SciDL research and evaluation. We will focus on two application domains, which together should allow comprehensive validation and increase the significance of SciDL's impact on scholarly communities. One is education (through CITIDEL); the other is libraries (through DLA and OCKHAM). CITIDEL deals with content from publishers (e.g, ACM Digital Library), corporate research efforts e.g., CiteSeer), volunteer initiatives (e.g., DBLP, based on the database and logic rogramming literature), CS departments (e.g., NCSTRL, mostly technical reports), educational initiatives (e.g., Computer Science Teaching Center), and universities (e.g., theses and dissertations). DLA is a unit of the Virginia Tech library that virtually publishes scholarly communication such as faculty-edited journals and rare and unique resources including image collections and finding aids from Special Collections. The OCKHAM initiative, calling for simplicity in the library world, emphasizes a three-part solution: lightweightprotocols, component-based development, and open reference models. It provides a framework to research the deployment of the SciDL approach in libraries. Thus our choice of testbeds also will nsure that our research will have additional benefit to and impact on the fields of computing and library and information science, supporting transformations in how we learn and deal with information