A New Intrusion Prevention System for Protecting Smart Grids from ICMPv6 Vulnerabilities

Smart Grid is an integrated power grid with a reliable, communication network running in parallel towards providing two way communications in the grid. It’s trivial to mention that a network like this would connect a huge number of IP-enabled devices. IPv6 that offers 18-bit address space becomes an obvious choice in this context. In a smart grid, functionalities like neighborhood discovery, autonomic address configuration of a node or its router identification may often be invoked whenever newer equipments are introduced for capacity enhancement at some level of hierarchy. In IPv6, these basic functionalities like neighborhood discovery, autonomic address configuration of networking require to use Internet Control Message Protocol version 6 (ICMPv6). Such usage may lead to security breaches in the grid as a result of possible abuses of ICMPv6 protocol. In this paper, some potential newer attacks on Smart Grid have been discussed. Subsequently, intrusion prevention mechanisms for these attacks are proposed to plug-in the threats

Real-time Image-based Motion Detection Using Color and Structure

Motion detection is an important problem in computer vision and has multiple applications in the real world, including surveillance-related activities, gaming, and human-robot interactions. These systems need to be robust enough to handle fluctuations in light intensity and other external factors like noise and compression artifacts. In this thesis a method is proposed for detecting the regions of motion from a video sequence in real time. The main idea of this work is to detect motion based on both structure and color. Structure-based detection is carried out using information from the Census Transform computed on gradient images obtained with Sobel operators. The Census Transform characterizes local intensity patterns in an image. Color-based detection is done using color histograms, which allow efficient characterization without prior assumptions about color distribution in the scene. The probabilities obtained from the gradient-based Census Transform and Color Histograms are combined in a robust way to detect the active motion zones. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach. This thesis also presents an application for motion detection in foveal visual systems. Foveation reduces power and bandwidth requirements in a system. But the main challenge is to identify the region of interest that must be transmitted in high-resolution format while maintaining the rest in low resolution. In this work this issue is addressed, by proposing motion detection as a cue to select the region of interest in a given scene. Preliminary results are also presented to show the successful application of this approach

ETSeM: A Energy-Aware, Trust-Based, Selective Multi-path Routing Protocol

Part 6: NetworkingInternational audienceMulti-path routing protocols are used for different types of wireless networks primarily to enhance reliability of packet delivery. The frequency of route discovery is also less for multi-path routing protocols as these are more fault-tolerant. However, the overhead of route discovery in terms of congestion and energy requirement is much higher for multi-path routing as compared to single-path routing. In this paper, a restricted multi-path routing algorithm has been proposed that dynamically selects the number of neighboring nodes through which packets would be transmitted. The selection and degree of multi-path depends on multiple factors like the remaining energy of the node, trust value of that node, number of already existing paths through that node etc. The protocol is designed in such a way, that the burden of routing is lower on the weaker nodes and the nodes with more resources will have to perform more tasks. Consequently, the lifetime of the network would be higher as compared to multi-path routing protocols. Besides, the data reception rate, defined as the ratio of the total number of packets received by the sink node and the total number of packets sent by the source node, is much higher for the proposed protocol than any single path routing. While the routing load is balanced among the nodes, the multiple routes also increase the reliability

POMSec: Pseudo-Opportunistic, Multipath Secured Routing Protocol for Communications in Smart Grid

Part 4: Engineering of Enterprise Software ProductsInternational audienceTraffic engineering governs the operational performance of a network and its optimization. Splitting the network traffic using multipath routing is one of the standard techniques of traffic engineering. Multipath routing maximizes network resource utilization and throughput by giving nodes a choice of next hops for the same destination along with minimizing the delay. On the other hand, Opportunistic routing minimizes operational cost and the burden of redundant route maintenance by using a constrained redundancy in route selection. POMSec: Pseudo Opportunistic, Multipath Secure routing is one such algorithm that combines the advantages of both the routing methods and additionally implements an underlying trust model to secure the communication in Smart Grid

Rapid detection of the adulterants in milk using gamma radiation

Milk and dairy adulteration practice nowadays is becoming a global concern. The present study discloses the role of gamma irradiation as a cost-effective and rapid-detection approach to detect adulterants in milk instead of using expensive and time-consuming chemical-based methods. In the present study, synthetic milk samples were prepared using different common adulterants (vegetable oil, urea, water) and a comparative analysis has been done with market milk samples along with fresh milk based upon the attenuation property. The obtained linear attenuation coefficient decreases significantly (p < 0.05) with the increasing concentration of adulterants in sample. The recorded attenuation coefficient for fresh milk was 0.379 ± 0.04 and that of adulterated samples found to be in the range of 0.296–0.188. Moreover, different protein coagulation patterns of the heat-processed milk samples were detected. The coagulated protein of adulterated milk shows a granular texture. The attenuation coefficient of milk samples decreases with the gradual increase of adulterants. The correlation between the attenuation coefficient and adulterants in milk indicated the possible use of gamma radiation as a significant adulterant-detection method