12789585
A Secure Agent Architecture for Sensor Networks
Advances in sensor and wireless technologies will enable thousands, or even millions of small but smart sensors to be deployed for a wide range of monitoring applications. The sensor networks must be dynamically configurable and adaptive in order to response actively to events. Security must also be built into sensor networks at the very initial design stage to prevent any potential threats. This paper presents a design of a generic software architecture based on tiny active agents for sensor networks. The architecture has built-in security components. This architecture will significantly benefit the dynamic and secure deployment and configuration tasks of large sensor networks for various applications.
27151074
Integrated Support for Location Aware Security Services in Enterprise Wireless Networks
In wireless computing environments limiting network access to authorized users is paramount for the overall security of network. In addition to basic authentication framework, network access is also governed by the context in which it is being used. In this work, we address security issues based on one such context: location. Location sensitivity is increasingly becoming an integral aspect of wireless and pervasive applications. As user moves around in an ubiquitous environment, access rights and other security services provided to her need to be evaluated accordingly. For such purposes we need a security mechanism that controls the authentication and other security services based on location, in addition to basic identity information. In this paper, we present an architecture of location aware security services for enterprise wireless networks. Our implementation is integrated into the RADIUS system, an Authentication, Authorization and Accounting (AAA) framework. Performace evaluation shows that our implementation is efficient for location based security services.
20897828
A Formal Definition for Trust in Distributed Systems
Trust is an important concept in distributed computing environments and plays a critical role in ensuring and enhancing system security. Although various trust models have been proposed for distributed or pervasive computing systems, little research has been conducted to describe trust in precise and formal way. In this paper, we present a formal definition to express the meaning of trust in distributed computing systems. With this definition, we rigorously analyze the important properties of trust relation, such as reflexivity and conditional transitivity, and describe the trust relations in Role-Based Access Control. Our definition is comprehensive in that the semantic meaning of the trust definition is feasible to describe trust relations in both traditional distributed systems and dynamic pervasive computing environments. This research provides a solid base for formal trust reasoning and effective trust management implementation in distributed systems and pervasive computing environments.
242170
Active security support for active networks
Active networks aim to provide a software framework that enables network applications to customize the processing of their communication packets. Security is of critical importance to the success of active networking. This paper presents a design and a description of the implementation for securing the node of an active network using active networking principles. The secure node architecture includes an active node operating system security API, an active security guardian, and quality of protection (QoP) provisions. The architecture supports highly customized and situational policies created by users and applications dynamically. It permits active nodes to satisfy the application-specific dynamic security and protection requirements. The secure node architecture can provide a fundamental base for securing the active network infrastructure. We describe the integration of secure node architecture into an active network software system to demonstrate its flexible and innovative features.
34025553
Security as services in active networks
This paper discusses the design and implementation for supporting customized security services in active networks using active networking principles. The customized security services support is based on a secure node architecture that includes an active node operating system security API, an active security guardian, and quality of protection provisions. The support of highly customized security services permits active nodes to satisfy the application-specific dynamic security and protection requirements. It associates quality of protection with network software and application security. Applications can dynamically select the suitable security configurations and services at each active routing node, based on their security and performance requirements. The secure node architecture, together with the support of dynamically customized security services, can provide a fundamental base for securing the active network infrastructure and active applications.
11468499
Secure Information Flow in Mobile Bootstrapping Process
The security of bootstrapping is very important for mobile computing. In this paper, we present the bootstrapping process of the Cherubim security system which uses a smartcard to allow a mobile Cherubim client to universally access remote standard services. In order to prevent any leakage of sensitive information, we apply a type system for secure flows to the bootstrapping source codes. The type system guarantees that well-typed programs satisfy a noninterference security property. This means that the program does not ``leak'''' sensitive data. The type system also produces principal types for type-correct programs that characterize how programs can be called securely. The analysis demonstrates that the type system can ensure secure flow enforcement.
11533242
Multi-robot mobility enhanced hop-count based localization in ad hoc networks
The localization problem is important in mobile robots and wireless sensor network and has been studied for many years. Among many localization methods, the hop-count based approach is simple and scalable; however, the localization accuracy is not satisfactory if the node density is low. To solve this problem, in this paper a multi-robot approach is proposed to utilize the cooperation and mobility of the robots to improve the node distribution (density), thus enhancing the hop-count based localization. By an auction-based task allocation scheme, the robots can negotiate with the static sensor nodes and then select the most suitable robots to move to the area of sparse node density, thus increasing the localization accuracy for the static sensor nodes. On the other hand, the robots also can localize themselves with the help of the static sensor nodes. The efficacy of this approach is shown by simulation.
1313086
Image-based surface detail transfer
Changing an object's appearance by adding geometric details is desirable in many real-world applications. Bump mapping has acted as an alternative to adding geometrical details, to an otherwise smooth object. But constructing visually interesting bump maps requires practice and artistic skills. Computer vision techniques have helped for modeling real-world objects and their surface details. In our approach, for cases where we only want to transfer geometrical details from one object to another, we might not need to explicitly compute 3D structures. In particular, our novel technique captures the geometrical details of an object from a single image in a way that is independent of the object's reflectance property. We can then transfer geometrical details to another surface, producing the appearance of a new surface with added geometrical details while preserving the object's reflectance property. Our method's advantages are that it's simple to implement, requires only a single image for each object, and produces effective results.
34215309
Jini-enabled high performance computing
The vision of computational grids promises an exciting future for high performance computing (HPC). In the project presented we make a small but practical step toward the grand vision of pervasive HPC by using some of the prevailing Internet technologies to enable access of HPC anytime and anywhere. Specifically, the project focuses on HPC that could be accessed by using the World Wide Web. We have conducted experiments based on engineering/scientific applications. Examples include simulations of automated guided vehicles (hereafter AGVs for short) in container port operations, N-body and molecular simulations. We initially build systems based on an ad-hoc approach, whose merits and demerits are identified. Then, we employ Jini technology to reconstruct the system architecture and present a more efficient and robust model. Performance studies are also presented. The objectives are to explore and address relevant issues, evaluate various approaches, demonstrate a workable version and conduct experiments with actual Web-enabled applications. The result is that now we are able to partially realize the dream of using the HPCs anytime and anywhere through devices such as a wireless/mobile computer, as long as they are armed with a common Web browser.
17293889
Complexity of Task Graph Scheduling with Fixed Communication Capacity
Consider a scheduling problem of parallel computations in multiprocessor systems. Let a parallel program be modeled by a task graph, where vertices represent tasks and arcs the communications between tasks. An interprocessor communication time incurs when two tasks assigned to two different processors have to communicate. Such a scheduling problem has recently been studied in the literature, mostly for the case where interprocessor communication times are fully determined. In this paper, we consider the scheduling problem with communication resource constraints. More specifically, we consider the case where all interprocessor communications take place on a network of bounded capacity. We consider two variants of the problem: communications with independent-data semantics and common-data semantics. We show that even for very specific subproblems, viz. scheduling of general graphs on two processors and scheduling of binary trees on an infinite number of processors, the minimization of the makespan of parallel programs in such a multiprocessor system is strongly -hard. We first establish the results for the case of capacity 1, referred to as the single-bus system. We then extend the results to the more general case of fixed communication capacities. As a consequence, the general scheduling problem of parallel programs with communication resource constraints is strongly -hard. These results are to be contrasted with the corresponding scheduling problems without contraint on the communication capacity, where the two-processor case has unknown time complexity and the infinite-processor case is polynomial. Our results are also extended to the case of broadcasting communications, and can be applied to multiprocessor systems with shared memory.
6908345
A swarm intelligence routing algorithm for MANETs
This paper presents a novel swarm intelligence inspired routing algorithm (EARA) for mobile ad hoc networks. Based on the understanding of the evolutionary cooperation in the biological swarm, which provides an alternative solution resilient against changes in the dynamic environment, We use the principle of swarm intelligence for the reinforcement of optimal routes with only local communication (here, local communication is defined as neighbourto-neighbour one only). The data traffic is influenced at each node, and the communicating nodes observe this influence to update their tables. We also include an evaluation, and the simulation results show that this routing algorithm scales well to a variety of network conditions.