9219349
Flexible Secure Multicasting in Active Networks
In this paper we describe an alternative, flexible approach to multicast security in active networks. Traditional schemes for securing multicast communication have key management and scalability problems for many typical applications. In addition, traditional mechanisms are not capable of expressing flexible, situational security policies for multicast sessions and participants. Our scheme exploits the computational power of active networks to provide dynamic, flexible security for multicast applications. One of the main advantages of our scheme is the low communication and key distribution overhead associated with multicast group management. Our approach is based on the Seraphim security architecture implementation, which uses active capabilities for access control. Seraphim is an extensible, reconfigurable security architecture that is flexible and accommodates a wide variety of security policies and mechanisms. It also provides applications and users the ability to create dynamically and enforce highly customized and situational policies. Using these policies we have developed several secure multicast applications that demonstrate the flexible nature and low overheads associated with our architecture.
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.
7088840
Communication protection in IP-based video surveillance systems
For decades, video surveillance systems have been crucial in protecting critical infrastructures. Currently the systems are adopting the emerging internetworking digital technology, changing from the traditional isolated analog technology. While there are several advantages of IP-based video surveillance systems, the systems are also exposed to additional new security threats. Security is a critical factor to make the IP-based video surveillance systems practical and usable. In this paper, we address the security threats to the data communications in IP-based video surveillance systems. We first analyze the current approaches, mainly naive and selective methods, to secure real-time video data, and identify their limitations to IP-based video surveillance systems. Then we propose a system design of secure internetworking video surveillance systems. Our proposed approach adopts a randomly adjustable encryption method to provide confidentiality to the data. Our implementation and performance study demonstrate that our approach achieves a good balance of cost-efficiency and security.
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.
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.
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.
17610722
A Relational Model for Object-Oriented Designs
This paper develops a mathematical characterisation of object-oriented concepts by defining an observation-oriented semantics for an object-oriented language (OOL) with a rich variety of features including subtypes, visibility, inheritance, dynamic binding and polymorphism. The language is expressive enough for the specification of object-oriented designs and programs. We also propose a calculus based on this model to support both structural and behavioural refinement of object-oriented designs. We take the approach of the development of the design calculus based on the standard predicate logic in Hoare and He’s Unifying Theories of Programming (UTP). We also consider object reference in terms of object identity as values and mutually dependent methods.
3137419
Subtle Facial Expression Modeling with Vector Field Decomposition
Facial expression means not only the feature motions but also the subtle appearance changes in the face. The details are important to facial expression synthesis. In this paper, a novel method based on vector field decomposition is presented to model subtle facial expressions. The intensity change of facial expression image is represented by Helmholtz-Hodge vector field decomposition. Based on this method, subtle facial expression mapping is carried out much faster and better. Experiment results show that our method is robust and convincible to model the subtle facial expression.
252821
Performance Analysis of Stochastic Timed Petri Nets Using Linear Programming Approach
Stochastic timed Petri nets are a useful tool in the performance analysis of concurrent systems such as parallel computers, communication networks and flexible manufacturing systems. In general, performance measures of stochastic timed Petri nets are difficult to obtain for practical problems due to their sizes. In this paper, we provide a method to efficiently compute upper and lower bounds for the throughputs and mean token numbers for a large class of stochastic timed Petri nets. Our approach is based on uniformization technique and linear programming.
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.
118203
Concealed weapon detection and visualization in a synthesized image
Images acquired by heterogeneous image sensors may provide complementary information about the scene, for instance, the visual image can provide personal identification information like the facial pattern while the infrared (IR) or millimeter wave image can detect the suspicious regions of concealed weapons. Usually, a technique, namely multiresolution pixel-level image fusion is applied to integrate the information from multi-sensor images. However, when the images are significantly different, the performance of the multiresolution fusion algorithms is not always satisfactory. In this study, a new strategy consisting of two steps is proposed. The first step is to use an unsupervised fuzzy k-means clustering to detect the concealed weapon from the IR image. The detected region is embedded in the visual image in the second step and this process is implemented with a multiresolution mosaic technique. Therefore, the synthesized image retains the quality comparable to the visual image while the region of the concealed weapon is highlighted and enhanced. The experimental results indicate the efficiency of the proposed approach.