Security in networks of unmanned aerial vehicles for surveillance with an agent-based approach inspired by the principles of blockchain

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can support surveillance even in areas without network infrastructure. However, UAV networks raise security challenges because of its dynamic topology. This paper proposes a technique for maintaining security in UAV networks in the context of surveillance, by corroborating information about events from different sources. In this way, UAV networks can conform peer-to-peer information inspired by the principles of blockchain, and detect compromised UAVs based on trust policies. The proposed technique uses a secure asymmetric encryption with a pre-shared list of official UAVs. Using this technique, the wrong information can be detected when an official UAV is physically hijacked. The novel agent based simulator ABS-SecurityUAV is used to validate the proposed approach. In our experiments, around 90% of UAVs were able to corroborate information about a person walking in a controlled area, while none of the UAVs corroborated fake information coming from a hijacked UAV

A Repository of Method Fragments for Agent-Oriented Development of Learning-Based Edge Computing Systems

[EN] The upcoming avenue of IoT, with its massive generated data, makes it really hard to train centralized systems with machine learning in real time. This problem can be addressed with learning-based edge computing systems where the learning is performed in a distributed way on the nodes. In particular, this work focuses on developing multi-agent systems for implementing learning-based edge computing systems. The diversity of methodologies in agent-oriented software engineering reflects the complexity of developing multi-agent systems. The division of the development processes into method fragments facilitates the application of agent-oriented methodologies and their study. In this line of research, this work proposes a database for implementing a repository of method fragments considering the development of learning-based edge computing systems and the information recommended by the FIPA technical committee. This repository makes method fragments available from different methodologies, and computerizes certain metrics and queries over the existing method fragments. This work compares the performance of several combinations of dimensionality reduction methods and machine learning techniques (i.e., support vector regression, k-nearest neighbors, and multi-layer perceptron neural networks) in a simulator of a learning-based edge computing system for estimating profits and customers.The authors acknowledge PSU Smart Systems Engineering Lab, project "Utilisation of IoT and sensors in smart cities for improving quality of life of impaired people" (ref. 52-2020), CYTED (ref. 518RT0558), and the Spanish Council of Science, Innovation and Universities (TIN2017-88327-R).García-Magariño, I.; Nasralla, MM.; Lloret, J. (2021). A Repository of Method Fragments for Agent-Oriented Development of Learning-Based Edge Computing Systems. IEEE Network. 35(1):156-162. https://doi.org/10.1109/MNET.011.2000296S15616235

Defenses Against Perception-Layer Attacks on IoT Smart Furniture for Impaired People

[EN] Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming highly supportive in innovative technological solutions for assisting impaired people. Some of these IoT solutions are still in a prototyping phase ignoring possible attacks and the corresponding security defenses. This article proposes a learning-based approach for defending against perception-layer attacks performed on specific sensor types in smart furniture for impaired people. This approach is based on the analysis of time series by means of dynamic time warping algorithm for calculating similarity and a novel detector for identifying anomalies. This approach has been illustrated by defending against simulated perception-layer magnetic attacks on a smart cupboard with door magnetic sensors. The results show the performance of the proposed approach for properly identifying these attacks. In particular, these results advocate an accuracy about 95.5% per day.This work was supported in part by the research project Utilisation of IoT and Sensors in Smart Cities for Improving Quality of Life of Impaired People under Grant 52-2020, in part by the Ciudades Inteligentes Totalmente Integrales, Eficientes Y Sotenibles (CITIES) funded by the Programa Iberoamericano de Ciencia y Tecnologia para el Desarrollo (CYTED) under Grant 518RT0558, in part by the Diseno Colaborativo Para La Promocion Del Bienestar En Ciudades Inteligentes Inclusivas under Grant TIN2017-88327-R funded by the Spanish Council of Science, Innovation and Universities from the Spanish Government, and in part by the Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad in the Programa Estatal de Fomento de la Investigacion Cientifica y Tecnica de Excelencia, Subprograma Estatal de Generacion de Conocimiento under Grant TIN2017-84802-C2-1-P.Nasralla, MM.; García-Magariño, I.; Lloret, J. (2020). Defenses Against Perception-Layer Attacks on IoT Smart Furniture for Impaired People. IEEE Access. 8:119795-119805. https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3004814S119795119805

La infección del tracto urinario como causa principal de ingreso en pacientes cistectomizados

Introducción y objetivos La cistectomía radical con derivación urinaria asociada a linfadenectomía pélvica ampliada continúa siendo el tratamiento de elección en el cáncer vesical musculoinvasivo. Un 64% de los pacientes presentan complicaciones postoperatorias, siendo la infección urinaria responsable en un 20-40% de los casos. El objetivo del presente proyecto es valorar la tasa de infección urinaria como causa de reingreso tras cistectomía, e identificar factores protectores y predisponentes de infección urinaria en nuestro medio. Por último, conocer los resultados obtenidos al aplicar el protocolo de profilaxis antibiótica tras la retirada de los catéteres ureterales. Material y métodos Estudio descriptivo retrospectivo de pacientes cistectomizados en el Servicio de Urología del Hospital Clínico Universitario desde enero de 2012 hasta diciembre de 2018. Desde octubre de 2017, de forma estandarizada, a todo paciente se le aplica un protocolo de prevención de infección del tracto urinario (ITU) tras la retirada de catéteres. Resultados La ITU es responsable del 54, 7% de los reingresos, siendo un 55, 1% de estos por causa de una ITU tras la retirada de los catéteres ureterales. El 9, 5% de los pacientes con profilaxis presenta ITU tras la retirada, frente a un 10, 6% en el grupo de pacientes sin profilaxis. El paciente que reingresa por ITU tras la retirada tiene un tiempo de catéteres medio de 24, 3 ± 7, 2 días, frente a los 24, 5 ± 7, 4 días en el grupo sin ITU (p = 0, 847). Conclusiones El tipo de derivación urinaria empleada no guarda relación con la tasa de infección urinaria. El modelo de regresión no identifica la profilaxis antibiótica, ni tampoco el tiempo de catéteres, como factores independientes de ITU tras la retirada de los catéteres. Introduction and objectives: Radical cystectomy with urinary diversion associated with extended pelvic lymphadenectomy continues to be the treatment of choice in muscle invasive bladder cancer. Sixty-four percent of patients submitted to this procedure present postoperative complications, with urinary infection being responsible in 20-40% of cases. The aim of this project is to assess the rate of urinary infection as a cause of re-admission after cystectomy, and to identify protective and predisposing factors for urinary infection in our environment. Finally, we will evaluate the outcomes after the establishment of a prophylactic antibiotic protocol after removal of ureteral catheters. Material and methods: Retrospective descriptive study of cystectomized patients in the Urology Service of the Hospital Clínico Universitario of Zaragoza, from January 2012 to December 2018. A urinary tract infection (UTI) prevention protocol after catheter removal is established for all patients since October 2017. Results: UTI is responsible for 54.7% of readmissions, with 55.1% of these being due to UTI after removal of ureteral catheters. Of the patients who received with prophylaxis, 9.5% presented UTIs after withdrawal, compared to 10.6% in the group of patients without prophylaxis. The patient who is re-admitted for UTI after withdrawal has a mean catheter time of 24.3 ± 7.2 days, compared to 24.5 ± 7.4 days for patients in the group without UTI (P =.847). Conclusions: The type of urinary diversion performed is not related to the rate of urinary infection. The regression model does not identify antibiotic prophylaxis, nor catheter time, as independent factors of UTI after catheter removal

Dynamical and statistical downscaling of a global seasonal hindcast in eastern Africa

Within the FP7 EUPORIAS project we have assessed the utility of dynamical and statistical downscaling to provide seasonal forecast for impact modelling in eastern Africa. An ensemble of seasonal hindcasts was generated by the global climate model (GCM) EC-EARTH and then downscaled by four regional climate models and by two statistical methods over eastern Africa with focus on Ethiopia. The five-month hindcast includes 15 members, initialised on May 1?st covering 1991?2012. There are two sub-regions where the global hindcast has some skill in predicting June?September rainfall (northern Ethiopia ? northeast Sudan and southern Sudan - northern Uganda). The regional models are able to reproduce the predictive signal evident in the driving EC-EARTH hindcast over Ethiopia in June?September showing about the same performance as their driving GCM. Statistical downscaling, in general, loses a part of the EC-EARTH signal at grid box scale but shows some improvement after spatial aggregation. At the same time there are no clear evidences that the dynamical and statistical downscaling provide added value compared to the driving EC-EARTH if we define the added value as a higher forecast skill in the downscaled hindcast, although there is a tendency of improved reliability through the downscaling. The use of the global and downscaled hindcasts as input for the Livelihoods, Early Assessment and Protection (LEAP) platform of the World Food Programme in Ethiopia shows that the performance of the LEAP platform in predicting humanitarian needs at the national and sub-national levels is not improved by using downscaled seasonal forecasts.This work was done in the EUPORIAS project that received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) for Research, under grant agreement 308291. The authors thank the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), the Global Precipitation Climatology Centre (GPCC), the British Atmospheric Data Centre (BADC), the University of East Anglia (UEA), the University of Delaware, the University of Reading, the University of California, the Climate Prediction Center (CPC), the US Agency for International Development’s Famine Early Warning Network (FEWS NET) and the WATCH project for providing data. For the WRF simulations, the UCAN group acknowledges Santander Supercomputacion support group at the University of Cantabria, who provided access to the Altamira Supercomputer at the Institute of Physics of Cantabria (IFCA-CSIC), member of the Spanish Supercomputing Network. DWD wants to thank ECMWF for the support during the CCLM4 simulations which have been carried out at the ECMWF computing system. The SMHI RCA4 simulations were performed on resources provided by the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC) at National Supercomputer Centre (NSC) and the PDC Center for High Performance Computing (PDC-HPC)

Adaptation and Validation of QUick, Easy, New, CHEap, and Reproducible (QUENCHER) Antioxidant Capacity Assays in Model Products Obtained from Residual Wine Pomace

Evaluation of the total antioxidant capacity of solid matrices without extraction steps is a very interesting alternative for food researchers and also for food industries. These methodologies have been denominated QUENCHER from QUick, Easy, New, CHEap, and Reproducible assays. To demonstrate and highlight the validity of QUENCHER (Q) methods, values of Q-method validation were showed for the first time, and they were tested with products of well-known different chemical properties. Furthermore, new QUENCHER assays to measure scavenging capacity against superoxide, hydroxyl, and lipid peroxyl radicals were developed. Calibration models showed good linearity (R2 > 0.995), proportionality and precision (CV < 6.5%), and acceptable detection limits (<20.4 nmol Trolox equiv). The presence of ethanol in the reaction medium gave antioxidant capacity values significantly different from those obtained with water. The dilution of samples with powdered cellulose was discouraged because possible interferences with some of the matrices analyzed may take place.The autonomous government of Castilla y León (Project BU268A11-2

Effect of Skin Wine Pomace and Sulfite on Protein Oxidation in Beef Patties During High Oxygen Atmosphere Storage

Meat storage in high oxygen atmosphere has been reported to induce protein oxidation reactions decreasing meat quality. The incorporation of antioxidants has been proposed to reduce the extent of these reactions. In this study, the ability of red and white skin wine pomaces as well as sulfites to inhibit protein oxidation were tested in beef patties stored for up to 15 days at 4 °C in a high oxygen atmosphere (70 % O2 and 30 % CO2). SO2 (300 ppm) effectively protected against protein oxidation measured as radical formation by electron spin resonance (ESR) spectroscopy, as thiol loss by the DTNB assay and as myosin heavy chain (MHC) disulfide crosslinking by SDS-PAGE. Pomace from red wine production with a total phenol of 9.9 mg gallic acid equivalent/g protected against protein radical formation and against MHC crosslinking, but not against thiol loss by addition of 2.0 % (w/w) to the beef patties. Pomace from white wine production with a total phenol of 4.0 mg gallic acid equivalent/g only protected against MHC cross-linking. For both types of wine pomace, protein modifications not seen for sulfite addition were observed and were proposed to involve covalent phenol addition to proteins. Red wine pomace may be an alternative to sulfite as a meat additive for protection of beef patties against protein oxidation.Autonomous Government of Castilla y León through the research projects (BU268A11-2 and BU282U13) and the Danish Council for Independent Research |Technology and Production within the Danish Agency for Science Technology and Innovation for granting the project entitled: BAntioxidant mechanisms of natural phenolic compounds against protein cross-link formation in meat and meat systems^ (11-117033)

Real-Time Analysis of Online Sources for Supporting Business Intelligence Illustrated with Bitcoin Investments and IoT Smart-Meter Sensors in Smart Cities

Real-time data management analytics involve capturing data in real-time and, at the same time, processing data in a light way to provide an effective real-time support. Real-time data management analytics are key for supporting decisions of business intelligence. The proposed approach covers all these phases by (a) monitoring online information from websites with Selenium-based software and incrementally conforming a database, and (b) incrementally updating summarized information to support real-time decisions. We have illustrated this approach for the investor–company field with the particular fields of Bitcoin cryptocurrency and Internet-of-Things (IoT) smart-meter sensors in smart cities. The results of 40 simulations on historic data showed that one of the proposed investor strategies achieved 7.96% of profits on average in less than two weeks. However, these simulations and other simulations of up to 69 days showed that the benefits were highly variable in these two sets of simulations (respective standard deviations were 24.6% and 19.2%)

MASEMUL: A Simulation Tool for Movement-Aware MANET Scheduling Strategies for Multimedia Communications

The last decade has witnessed a steep growth in multimedia traffic due to real-time content delivery such as in online games and video conferencing. In some contexts, MANETs play a key role in the hyperconnectivity of everything in multimedia services. In this context, this work proposes a new scheduling approach based on context-aware mobile nodes for their connectivity. The contribution relies on reporting not only the locations of devices in the network but also their movement identified by sensors. In order to illustrate this approach, we have developed a novel agent-based simulator called MASEMUL for illustrating the proposed approach. The results show that a movement-aware scheduling strategy defined with the proposed approach has decreased the ratio of channel interruptions over another common strategy in mobile networks

Quantum Diffie–Hellman Extended to Dynamic Quantum Group Key Agreement for e-Healthcare Multi-Agent Systems in Smart Cities

Multi-Agent Systems can support e-Healthcare applications for improving quality of life of citizens. In this direction, we propose a healthcare system architecture named smart healthcare city. First, we divide a given city into various zones and then we propose a zonal level three-layered system architecture. Further, for effectiveness we introduce a Multi-Agent System (MAS) in this three-layered architecture. Protecting sensitive health information of citizens is a major security concern. Group key agreement (GKA) is the corner stone for securely sharing the healthcare data among the healthcare stakeholders of the city. For establishing GKA, many efficient cryptosystems are available in the classical field. However, they are yet dependent on the supposition that some computational problems are infeasible. In light of quantum mechanics, a new field emerges to share a secret key among two or more members. The unbreakable and highly secure features of key agreement based on fundamental laws of physics allow us to propose a Quantum GKA (QGKA) technique based on renowned Quantum Diffie&ndash;Hellman (QDH). In this, a node acts as a Group Controller (GC) and forms 2-party groups with remaining nodes, establishing a QDH-style shared key per each two-party. It then joins these keys into a single group key by means of a XOR-operation, acting as a usual group node. Furthermore, we extend the QGKA to Dynamic QGKA (DQGKA) by adding join and leave protocol. Our protocol performance was compared with existing QGKA protocols in terms of Qubit efficiency (QE), unitary operation (UO), unitary operation efficiency (UOE), key consistency check (KCC), security against participants attack (SAP) and satisfactory results were obtained. The security analysis of the proposed technique is based on unconditional security of QDH. Moreover, it is secured against internal and external attack. In this way, e-healthcare Multi-Agent System can be robust against future quantum-based attacks