IEEE 2013: Privacy-Preserving Public Auditing for Secure Cloud Storage

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CLOUD COMPUTING YEAR 2013

Technology - Available in Java and Dot Net

Abstract—Using Cloud Storage, users can remotely store their data and enjoy the on-demand high quality applications and services from a shared pool of configurable computing resources, without the burden of local data storage and maintenance. However, the fact that users no longer have physical possession of the outsourced data makes the data integrity protection in Cloud Computing a formidable task, especially for users with constrained computing resources. Moreover, users should be able to just use the cloud storage as if it is local, without worrying about the need to verify its integrity. Thus, enabling public auditability for cloud storage is of critical importance so that users can resort to a third party auditor (TPA) to check the integrity of outsourced data and be worry-free. To securely introduce an effective TPA, the auditing process should bring in no new vulnerabilities towards user data privacy, and introduce no additional online burden to user. In this paper, we propose a secure cloud storage system supporting privacy-preserving public auditing. We further extend our result to enable the TPA to perform audits for multiple users simultaneously and efficiently. Extensive security and performance analysis show the proposed schemes are provably secure and highly efficient.

Index Terms—Data storage, privacy-preserving, public auditability, cryptographic protocols, cloud computing.

IEEE 2013: A Load Balancing Model Based on Cloud Partitioning for the Public Cloud

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CLOUD COMPUTING YEAR 2013

Technology - Available in J2EE and .NET

Abstract: Load balancing in the cloud computing environment has an important impact on the performance. Good load balancing makes cloud computing more efficient and improves user satisfaction. This article introduces a better load balance model for the public cloud based on the cloud partitioning concept with a switch mechanism to choose different strategies for different situations. The algorithm applies the game theory to the load balancing strategy to improve the efficiency in the public cloud environment. Key words: load balancing model; public cloud; cloud partition; game theory

 

IEEE 2013 SPOC: A Secure and Privacy-preserving Opportunistic Computing Framework for Mobile-Healthcare Emergency

IEEE  TRANSACTIONS ON PARALLEL AND DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS, VOL. 24, NO. 3, March 2013

Technology - Available in J2EE and Android

Abstract— With the pervasiveness of smart phones and the advance of wireless body sensor networks (BSNs), mobile Healthcare (m-Healthcare), which extends the operation of Healthcare provider into a pervasive environment for better health monitoring, has attracted considerable interest recently. However, the flourish of m-Healthcare still faces many challenges including information security and privacy preservation. In this paper, we propose a secure and privacy-preserving opportunistic computing framework, called SPOC for m-Healthcare emergency. With SPOC, smart phone resources including computing power and energy can be opportunistically gathered to process the computing-intensive personal health information (PHI) during m-Healthcare emergency with minimal privacy disclosure. In specific, to leverage the PHI privacy disclosure and the high reliability of PHI process and transmission in m-Healthcare emergency, we introduce an efficient user-centric privacy access control in SPOC framework, which is based on an attribute-based access control and a new privacy-preserving scalar product computation (PPSPC) technique, and allows a medical user to decide who can participate in the opportunistic computing to assist in processing his overwhelming PHI data. Detailed security analysis shows that the proposed SPOC framework can efficiently achieve user-centric privacy access control in m-Healthcare emergency. In addition, performance evaluations via extensive simulations demonstrate the SPOC’s effectiveness in term of providing high reliable PHI process and transmission while minimizing the privacy disclosure during m-Healthcare emergency.

Index Terms—Mobile-Healthcare emergency; opportunistic computing; user-centric privacy access control; PPSPC

IEEE 2013: Vampire Attacks: Draining Life from Wireless Ad Hoc Sensor Networks

IEEE 2013 Transaction on Mobile Computing

Technology - Available in Java & .Net

Abstract— Ad hoc low-power wireless networks are an exciting research direction in sensing and pervasive computing. Prior security work in this area has focused primarily on denial of communication at the routing or medium access control levels. This paper explores resource depletion attacks at the routing protocol layer, which permanently disable networks by quickly draining nodes' battery power. These "Vampire” attacks are not specific to any specific protocol, but rather rely on the properties of many popular classes of routing protocols. We find that all examined protocols are susceptible to Vampire attacks, which are devastating, difficult to detect, and are easy to carry out using as few as one malicious insider sending only protocol-compliant messages. In the worst case, a single Vampire can increase network-wide energy usage by a factor of O(N), where N in the number of network nodes. We discuss methods to mitigate these types of attacks, including a new proof-of-concept protocol that provably bounds the damage caused by Vampires during the packet forwarding phase.

IEEE 2012 oPass: A User Authentication Protocol Resistant to Password Stealing and Password Reuse Attacks

IEEE 2012 TRANSACTIONS ON INFORMATION FORENSICS AND SECURITY

Technology - Available in Android

Abstract—Text password is the most popular form of user authentication on websites due to its convenience and simplicity. However, users’ passwords are prone to be stolen and compromised under different threats and vulnerabilities. Firstly, users often select weak passwords and reuse the same passwords across different websites. Routinely reusing passwords causes a domino effect; when an adversary compromises one password, she will exploit it to gain access to more websites. Second, typing passwords into untrusted computers suffers password thief threat. An adversary can launch several password stealing attacks to snatch passwords, such as phishing, key loggers and malware. In this paper, we design a user authentication protocol named oPass which leverages a user’s cell phone and short message service to thwart password stealing and password reuse attacks. oPass only requires each participating website possesses a unique phone number, and involves a telecommunication service provider in registration and recovery phases. Through oPass, users only need to remember a long-term password for login on all websites. After evaluating the oPass prototype, we believe oPass is efficient and affordable compared with the conventional web authentication mechanisms.

IEEE 2012 HASBE: A Hierarchical Attribute-Based Solution for Flexible and Scalable Access Control in Cloud Computing

IEEE 2012 HASBE: A Hierarchical Attribute-Based Solution for Flexible and Scalable Access Control in Cloud Computing

IEEE 2012 TRANSACTIONS ON INFORMATION FORENSICS AND SECURITY

Technology - Available in  J2EE 

Abstract— Cloud computing has emerged as one of the most influential paradigms in the IT industry in recent years. Since this new computing technology requires users to entrust their valuable data to cloud providers, there have been increasing security and privacy concerns on outsourced data. Several schemes employing attribute-based encryption (ABE) have been proposed for access control of outsourced data in cloud computing; however, most of them suffer from inflexibility in implementing complex access control policies. In order to realize scalable, flexible, and fine-grained access control of outsourced data in cloud computing, in this paper, we propose hierarchical attribute-set-based encryption (HASBE) by extending cipher text-policy attribute-set-based encryption (ASBE) with a hierarchical structure of users. The proposed scheme not only achieves scalability due to its hierarchical structure, but also inherits flexibility and fine-grained access control in supporting compound attributes of ASBE. In addition, HASBE employs multiple value assignments for access expiration time to deal with user revocation more efficiently than existing schemes. We formally prove the security of HASBE based on security of the cipher text-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) scheme by Bettencourt et al. and analyze its performance and computational complexity. We implement our scheme and show that it is both efficient and flexible in dealing with access control for outsourced data in cloud computing with comprehensive experiments.

IEEE 2012 : Separable Reversible Data Hiding in Encrypted Image

IEEE 2012 TRANSACTIONS ON INFORMATION FORENSICS AND SECURITY

Technology - Available in DotNet / J2EE 

Abstract— This work proposes a novel scheme for separable reversible data hiding in encrypted images. In the first phase, a content owner encrypts the original uncompressed image using an encryption key. Then, a data-hider may compress the least significant bits of the encrypted image using a data-hiding key to create a sparse space to accommodate some additional data. With an encrypted image containing additional data, if a receiver has the data-hiding key, he can extract the additional data though he does not know the image content. If the receiver has the encryption key, he can decrypt the received data to obtain an image similar to the original one, but cannot extract the additional data. If the receiver has both the data-hiding key and the encryption key, he can extract the additional data and recover the original content without any error by exploiting the spatial correlation in natural image when the amount of additional data is not too large.

IEEE 2012: Offloading Android Applications to the Cloud without Customizing Android

IEEE 2012 PerCom Workshop on Pervasive Wireless Networking,

Technology - Available in Android & J2EE Web Server

Abstract— Spreading more than twice as fast as PCs, smart phones are quickly becoming the primary mean for Internet access. However, smart phones today are still constrained by limited computation resources such as CPU, memory and battery. In this paper, we present a framework that automatically offloads heavy back-end tasks of a regular standalone Android application to an Android virtual machine in the cloud. This framework can be deployed in the application layer without modifying the underlying Android platform. It also features three metrics that consider total response time, energy consumption and remaining battery life in deciding whether a task should be offloaded.

IEEE 2012: Prediction of User’s Web-Browsing Behavior: Application of Markov Model

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SYSTEMS AUGUST 2012

 Technology - Available in JAVA /J2EE 

Abstract— Web prediction is a classification problem in which we attempt to predict the next set of Web pages that a user may visit based on the knowledge of the previously visited pages. Predicting user’s behavior while serving the Internet can be applied effectively in various critical applications. Such application has traditional tradeoffs between modeling complexity and prediction accuracy. In this paper, we analyze and study Markov model and all-Kth Markov model in Web prediction. We propose a new modified Markov model to alleviate the issue of scalability in the number of paths. In addition, we present a new two-tier prediction framework that creates an example classifier EC, based on the training examples and the generated classifiers. We show that such framework can improve the prediction time without compromising Prediction accuracy. We have used standard benchmark data sets to analyze, compare, and demonstrate the effectiveness of our techniques using variations of Markov models and association rule mining. Our experiments show the effectiveness of our modified Markov model in reducing the number of paths without compromising accuracy. Additionally, the results support our analysis conclusions that accuracy improves with higher orders of all-Kth model