A Multi-User, Single-Authentication Protocol for Smart Grid Architectures

open access articleIn a smart grid system, the utility server collects data from various smart grid devices. These data play an important role in the energy distribution and balancing between the energy providers and energy consumers. However, these data are prone to tampering attacks by an attacker, while traversing from the smart grid devices to the utility servers, which may result in energy disruption or imbalance. Thus, an authentication is mandatory to efficiently authenticate the devices and the utility servers and avoid tampering attacks. To this end, a group authentication algorithm is proposed for preserving demand–response security in a smart grid. The proposed mechanism also provides a fine-grained access control feature where the utility server can only access a limited number of smart grid devices. The initial authentication between the utility server and smart grid device in a group involves a single public key operation, while the subsequent authentications with the same device or other devices in the same group do not need a public key operation. This reduces the overall computation and communication overheads and takes less time to successfully establish a secret session key, which is used to exchange sensitive information over an unsecured wireless channel. The resilience of the proposed algorithm is tested against various attacks using formal and informal security analysis

Secure Communication Architecture for Dynamic Energy Management in Smart Grid

open access articleSmart grid takes advantage of communication technologies for efficient energy management and utilization. It entails sacrifice from consumers in terms of reducing load during peak hours by using a dynamic energy pricing model. To enable an active participation of consumers in load management, the concept of home energy gateway (HEG) has recently been proposed in the literature. However, the HEG concept is rather new, and the literature still lacks to address challenges related to data representation, seamless discovery, interoperability, security, and privacy. This paper presents the design of a communication framework that effectively copes with the interoperability and integration challenges between devices from different manufacturers. The proposed communication framework offers seamless auto-discovery and zero- con figuration-based networking between heterogeneous devices at consumer sites. It uses elliptic-curve-based security mechanism for protecting consumers' privacy and providing the best possible shield against different types of cyberattacks. Experiments in real networking environment validated that the proposed communication framework is lightweight, secure, portable with low-bandwidth requirement, and flexible to be adopted for dynamic energy management in smart grid

Microbiological Examination of some ImportedCanned and Frozen Foods

A number of juices, jams, canned foods and frozen fishes available in local markets were inspected with respect to microbial contamination. We have determined the total viable bacterial cell counts in these samples and the number of g(-) lactose fermentors as a bacterial indicator of food spoilage. The results indicated that most of the food items inspected, were contaminated with large numbers of different species of g(-) ,g(+), yeast and fungi and some were contained more than the maximum permissible number of pathogenic g(-) enteric E-coli, which render these food items unsafe for human consumption

Data Confidentiality in Mobile Ad hoc Networks

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are self-configuring infrastructure-less networks comprised of mobile nodes that communicate over wireless links without any central control on a peer-to-peer basis. These individual nodes act as routers to forward both their own data and also their neighbours' data by sending and receiving packets to and from other nodes in the network. The relatively easy configuration and the quick deployment make ad hoc networks suitable the emergency situations (such as human or natural disasters) and for military units in enemy territory. Securing data dissemination between these nodes in such networks, however, is a very challenging task. Exposing such information to anyone else other than the intended nodes could cause a privacy and confidentiality breach, particularly in military scenarios. In this paper we present a novel framework to enhance the privacy and data confidentiality in mobile ad hoc networks by attaching the originator policies to the messages as they are sent between nodes. We evaluate our framework using the Network Simulator (NS-2) to check whether the privacy and confidentiality of the originator are met. For this we implemented the Policy Enforcement Points (PEPs), as NS-2 agents that manage and enforce the policies attached to packets at every node in the MANET.Comment: 12 page

An Effective Hybrid Approach Based on Machine Learning Techniques for Auto-Translation: Japanese to English

In recent years machine learning techniques have been able to perform tasks previously thought impossible or impractical such as image classification and natural language translation, as such this allows for the automation of tasks previously thought only possible by humans. This research work aims to test a naïve post processing grammar correction method using a Long Short Term Memory neural network to rearrange translated sentences from Subject Object Verb to Subject Verb Object. Here machine learning based techniques are used to successfully translate works in an automated fashion rather than manually and post processing translations to increase sentiment and grammar accuracy. The implementation of the proposed methodology uses a bounding box object detection model, optical character recognition model and a natural language processing model to fully translate manga without human intervention. The grammar correction experimentation tries to fix a common problem when machines translate between two natural languages that use different ordering, in this case from Japanese Subject Object Verb to English Subject Verb Object. For this experimentation 2 sequence to sequence Long Short Term Memory neural networks were developed, a character level and a word level model using word embedding to reorder English sentences from Subject Object Verb to Subject Verb Object. The results showed that the methodology works in practice and can automate the translation process successfully

Resource Efficient Authentication and Session Key Establishment Procedure for Low-Resource IoT Devices

open access journalThe Internet of Things (IoT) can includes many resource-constrained devices, with most usually needing to securely communicate with their network managers, which are more resource-rich devices in the IoT network. We propose a resource-efficient security scheme that includes authentication of devices with their network managers, authentication between devices on different networks, and an attack-resilient key establishment procedure. Using automated validation with internet security protocols and applications tool-set, we analyse several attack scenarios to determine the security soundness of the proposed solution, and then we evaluate its performance analytically and experimentally. The performance analysis shows that the proposed solution occupies little memory and consumes low energy during the authentication and key generation processes respectively. Moreover, it protects the network from well-known attacks (man-in-the-middle attacks, replay attacks, impersonation attacks, key compromission attacks and denial of service attacks)

Predicting the Standard and Deviant Patterns In EEG Signals Based On Deep Learning Model

In the recent years, there has been a significant growth in the area of brain computer interference. The main aim of such area is to read the brain activities, formulate a specific/desired output and power a specific approach using such output. Electroencephalography (EEG) may provide an insight into the analysis procedure of the human behavior and the level of the attention. Using the deep learning based neural network has a great success in different applications recently,such as making a decision, classifying a pattern and predicting an outcome by learning from a set of data and build the right weight matrices to represent the prediction outcome or the learning patterns. This research work proposes a novel model based on long short-term memory network to predict the standard and the deviant cases within EEG data sets. The EEG signals are acquired utilizing all the 128 electrodes that represent the 128 channels from infants aged between 5 and 7 months. Statistical approaches, principal component analysis (PCA) and autoregressive (AR) power spectral density estimate have been employed to extract the features from the EEG data sets. The proposed deep learning based model has shown great robustness dealing with different types of features extracted from the processed data sets. Very promising results have been achieved in predicting the standard and deviant cases. The standard case was presented with frequent, repetitive stimulus and the deviant case was presented with infrequent sounds

Developing a New Driver Assistance System for Overtaking on Two-Lane Roads using Predictive Models

The complexity of an overtaking maneuver on two-lane roads merits a thorough method for developing an assistance system to prevent accidents, thus reducing the number of fatalities and the associated economic costs. This research aims to introduce a new Driver Overtaking Assistance System (DOAS). This system is based on the proactive prediction of the possibility of overtaking any preceding vehicle(s) both accurately and safely. To provide a comprehensive system, different factors related to the driver, the vehicle, the road, and the environment which have an impact on the maneuver have been taken into consideration. In addition to considering the main overtaking strategies including accelerative, flying, piggybacking, and the 2+. The proposed system is a vehicle-based safety system based on the collection of contextual information from the driving vicinity through Hello beacon messages and a set of sensors that are used as part of the reasoning process of the context-aware architecture to safely initiate the overtaking maneuver. A classification model was implemented for both the Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) learning algorithms. A vehicle driving simulator STISIM Drive® was used to conduct driving experiments for 100 participants of different ages, gender, and levels of mental awareness. The results obtained from the DOAS show high accuracy in aiding a safe overtaking maneuver. The classification model shows promising results in the predictions, through perfect accuracy and a very low level of outcome errors