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• There is no collaborative multihop LoRa protocol. Users 'nodes cannot relay each-other's messages. • MauMe assumes users have a home-node with permanent power supply (base-node) acting as a relay for all users. • MauMe is single channel and designed for a controlled flooding of messages. • Messages are acknowledged. Acknowledgments kill lost messages. • Users can activate local Wi-Fi connection to allow sending free emergency SMS using a smartphone. • MauMe has a ready-to-use Github C++ library which allows immediate deployment on ESP32 microcontrollers. • The proposed implementation respects the legal duty-cycle. Low-cost low-power long-distance LoRa radio devices recently made available on the market allow the emerging of a new generation of networking paradigms on the Internet of Things. While the LoRaWan offers an efficient way of connecting LoRa end-point devices to the internet, LoRaWan nodes do not act as peers, but rather as terminals connected to gateways. As such, the current state of the art does not offer a public protocol for easily taking advantage of the fact that individuals and professionals wishing to aggregate data using LoRa devices are likely to run each a "base-node" on a continuous basis. Such permanently-powered base-nodes could potentially offer an increased cumulated area coverage to other nodes if they would behave as relays. In the present study, an Epidemic Delay Tolerant Network messaging protocol is proposed, which allows multi-hops between peer LoRa relay-nodes through a raw-LoRa controlled-flooding approach. This protocol has been implemented on low-cost LoRa-chip-equipped microcontrollers in the form of an open-source library acting as a network transport-layer. The design analysis concluded that MauMe is better suited for networks with reduced connectivity (≤ 9), and that a 4-connectivity redundant network could allow each user to send several tens of messages several tens of hops away. The proposed approach was tested on three different LoRa network topologies, and the totality of the packets and acknowledgments reached their destination. Furthermore, the network's activity ceased after delivery, confirming the ability of the protocol to return the network to rest after the flooding. The proposed library also offers to users a free emergency-messaging system implemented as an http server embedded in each node and accessible via Wi-fi. End-users can readily use our solution to easily deploy a network of sensors at a much lower cost than when using multiple gateways. The MauMe protocol is a first step towards the creation of collaborative and application-friendly extended-range LoRa-peers networks, and is intended for use in remote regions with scattered housings such as in the islands and atolls of Polynesia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the I/O bottleneck being mitigated by solid-state disk and in-memory computing, and the increase of network bandwidth, the packet processing of the traditional TCP/IP stack becomes a new bottleneck due to the large processing latency and CPU consumption. To reduce the processing latency and CPU consumption, it becomes popular to access the network interface cards directly via the kernel bypass and remote direct memory access (RDMA) technique. Accordingly, the congestion management is expected to be deployed at the link layer. On the other hand, it is more simple and efficient to deploy a unified link layer congestion management scheme to ensure low latency and zero packet loss for all of the block-based storage traffic, the InterProcess Communication traffic and the applications such as e-commerce platforms, in-memory key-value store, web object caching in datacenters and clusters. In this paper, we review the existing standard link layer congestion management mechanisms of lossless switching fabrics, including the enhanced Ethernet, InfiniBand and Fibre Channel. We focus on their history of evolution and enabling technologies, and discuss the current challenges and opportunities. The summary and comparison of these standard link layer congestion management mechanisms may serve as a foundation for future research in this area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A large number of certified email proposals have been published over the last thirty years. Many use a trusted third party (TTP) to guarantee the core security property: fairness; however, the verifiability of this TTP has not received enough attention. In fact, we have not been able to find a complete proposal for optimistic certified email with verifiable TTP, which meets the fairness and timeliness requirements. Moreover, only a few papers discuss the deployment of the solutions proposed. Here, we present an optimistic protocol for certified electronic mail with a verifiable TTP. We prove its feasibility by discussing an implementation of the proposal that does not modify the core network for Internet mail and operates using the current standardized email protocols. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobile wallet, also known as mobile payment, is becoming one of the most frequently used approach to provide payment services under financial regulation via mobile device and may redefine our lifestyle with the rapid popularity of mobile Internet. In this paper, we address the security of the mobile wallet by providing a detailed threat analysis and identifying some unique design requirements in terms of security and privacy protection for mobile wallet. We then provide a novel approach to secure the mobile wallet and protect the privacy of the mobile user by incorporating the digital signature and pseudo-identity techniques. In view of several advantages of cloud computing, the computation task on the client side, which is usually featured with limited computation resources, is outsourced to the untrusted cloud server securely. The performance of our approach is evaluated via both theoretic analysis and experimental simulations. Also, the security analysis demonstrate that our approach can achieve desirable security properties of mobile wallet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a distributed control system (DCS) for ship engines using a dual fieldbus. Communication among DCS entities is provided by considering the redundancy between Modbus and the controller area network (CAN) bus. The dual fieldbus consists of Modbus and an alternative CAN bus. Owing to its short time frame, CAN networks have the advantage of a short time latency. Moreover, Modbus is a simple protocol and is powerful in its support of many types of real-time industrial applications. By considering the benefits of both Modbus and CAN bus, a DCS based on a dual fieldbus for monitoring and controlling the condition of a ship engine has been proposed. In the proposed scheme, Modbus has been used as a primary communication link for engine system. If link errors arise with Modbus, the system automatically switches to CAN in a reliable way. The performance of the proposed DCS has been tested and evaluated by a real implementation in a testbed. The experimental results show that the proposed DCS satisfies the redundancy time required by the International Association of Classification Societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SACM (Structured Assurance Case Metamodel) is a standard for assurance case specification and exchange. It consists of an argumentation metamodel and an evidence metamodel for justifying that a system satisfies certain requirements. For assurance of safety-critical systems, SACM can be used to manage safety evidence and to specify safety cases. The standard is a promising initiative towards harmonizing and improving system assurance practices, but its suitability for safety evidence management needs to be further studied. To this end, this paper studies how SACM 1.1 supports this activity according to requirements from industry and from prior work. We have analysed the notion of evidence in SACM, its evidence lifecycle, the classes and associations of the evidence metamodel, and the link of this metamodel with the argumentation one. As a result, we have identified several improvement opportunities and extension possibilities in SACM. The notions of evidence and evidence assertion should be clarified, the overlaps between metamodel elements should be reduced, and a wider support to the lifecycle of the artefacts used as safety evidence could be provided. Addressing these aspects will allow SACM to better fit safety evidence management needs and practices, especially beyond the scope of a safety case. The results and the conclusions drawn are especially valuable for practitioners interested in SACM adoption and vendors interested in developing tool support for SACM-based safety evidence management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the real-time systems and safety critical domains, software quality assurance adheres to protocols such as DO-178C standard. Regarding these issues, concolic testing generates test cases that can attain high coverage using an augmented approach based on Modified Condition/Decision Coverage (MC/DC). In this paper, we propose a framework to compute MC/DC percentage for test case generation. To achieve an increase in MC/DC, we transform the input Java program, J, into its transformed version, J ′ , using Java Program Code Transformer (JPCT). Then, we use JCUTE tool to generate test cases. At last, we use Java Coverage Analyzer (JCA) to compute MC/DC percentage. The Java program code transformer adds additional empty nested if-else conditional statements for each decision that causes variation in MC/DC percentage. In later step, these extra conditional statements get stripped-off. This approach resolves some of the bottleneck issues associated with traditional concolic testers. In our experimental study, we have experimented with forty Java programs. We have computed the difference of MC/DC%, for both the scenarios (i.e. with code transformation and without code transformation). Our approach (i.e. with code transformation achieves) 24.09% average increase in MC/DC% over the traditional approach (i.e. without code transformation). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider wireless nodes connected in an ad hoc network where recursion based localization is available and ad hoc routing is deployed. We are interested in studying the possibility to use ad hoc routing to help a mobile (sensor) node in a dense/sparse wireless network to estimate its position by first finding the closest two or three ad hoc reference nodes that are already known their positions then use the position value of the found reference nodes and add the estimated distance using the hop counts of the ad hoc routing to find the estimated position. Our protocol will control which are the nodes that will have to calculate their position using the recursive approach in order to serve as reference points to other nodes in the network. Our proposed algorithm basically includes the improved version of the OLSR protocol mostly about the MPR decision and utilization topics by introducing supplemental selection criteria which are also significant for the localization process. Besides, the first part of the localization is performed with this modified version but at the continuation part, two schemas are used: DV-hop and DV-distance. These two schemas are used in two ways, after finding three anchors to find the position of the related node and if three of the anchors could not be collected then in case of finding anchors. Furthermore, the localized node whose position is detected also assigned as an anchor node in the network. Additionally, we compare our schemas with a recursive position estimation (RPE) algorithm about density, position error and reference point numbers. And t-test is performed in our study for the reference points–densities with p-value of 0.05. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) has been widely adopted in practice for objects identification. The ownership of an object can be represented by the ownership of the RFID tag attached to the object. An ownership could be shared among different parties and should be transferable. Although many RFID ownership transfer protocols were proposed, a shared ownership transfer protocol remains as a daunting task with absence of a trusted party. In this paper, we propose the first provably secure shared ownership transfer protocol, which requires merely hashing computations and has a constant key size. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The practical deployment of vehicular networks is still a pending issue. In this paper we describe a new self-organized method of authentication for VANETs, which allows their widespread, fast and secure implementation. Our proposal does not involve any central certification authority because the nodes themselves certify the validity of public keys of the other nodes. On the one hand we propose an algorithm that each node must use to choose the public key certificates for its local store. On the other hand, we also describe a new node authentication method based on a cryptographic protocol including a zero-knowledge proof that each node must use to convince another node on the possession of certain secret without revealing anything about it, which allows non-encrypted communication during authentication. Thanks to the combination of the aforementioned tools, the cooperation among vehicles can be used for developing several practical applications of VANETs, such as detection and warning about abnormal traffic conditions. One of the most interesting aspects of our proposal is that it only requires existing devices such as smartphones, because the designed schemes are fully distributed and self-organized. In this work we include an analysis of both an NS-2 simulation and a real device implementation of the proposed algorithms, which enables us to extract promising conclusions and several possible improvements and open questions for further research. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Security and requirements engineering are two of the most important factors of success in the development of a software product line (SPL). Goal-driven security requirements engineering approaches, such as Secure Tropos, have been proposed as a suitable paradigm for elicitation of security requirements and their analysis on both a social and a technical dimension. Nevertheless, goal-driven security requirements engineering methodologies are not appropriately tailored to the specific demands of SPL, while on the other hand specific proposals of SPL engineering have traditionally ignored security requirements. This paper presents work that fills this gap by proposing “SecureTropos-SPL” framework. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In the near future, home networks are expected to become an important part of the user's ubiquitous environment. However, how to provide service discovery and multimedia services in such networks becomes a great challenge. In the paper, we propose an extension header, referred to as the “MediaService” header, into the Session Initiation Protocol to provide video streaming service. The streaming control and session mobility functions are also considered in the MediaService header. We also propose a peer to peer Service Location Protocol architecture for users to search for location of services across domains. We added a Substitute Request Message and cache policy into the Service Location Protocol to search for location of services across domains. A prototype implementation shows the performance of our prototype. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have emerged to leverage the power of modern communication technologies, applied to both vehicles and infrastructure. Allowing drivers to report traffic accidents and violations through the VANET may lead to substantial improvements in road safety. However, being able to do so anonymously in order to avoid personal and professional repercussions will undoubtedly translate into user acceptance. The main goal of this work is to propose a new collaborative protocol for enforcing anonymity in multi-hop VANETs, closely inspired by the well-known Crowds protocol. In a nutshell, our anonymous-reporting protocol depends on a forwarding probability that determines whether the next forwarding step in message routing is random, for better anonymity, or in accordance with the routing protocol on which our approach builds, for better quality of service (QoS). Different from Crowds, our protocol is specifically conceived for multi-hop lossy wireless networks. Simulations for residential and downtown areas support and quantify the usefulness of our collaborative strategy for better anonymity, when users are willing to pay an eminently reasonable price in QoS. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The CSMA/CD access method is no longer invoked in switched, full-duplex Ethernet, but the industrial protocols still take the presence of the method into account. The parallel processing producer–distributor–consumer network architecture (ppPDC) was designed specifically to actively utilize the frame queuing. The network nodes process frames in parallel, which shortens the time needed to perform a cycle of communication, especially in cases when frame processing times within the nodes are not uniform. The experiments show that the achievable cycle times of the ppPDC architecture are an order of magnitude shorter than in the well-known sequential PDC protocol. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Several IP mobility support protocols have been standardized. Each solution provides a specific functionality and/or requires operations of particular nodes. The current trend is towards the co-existence of these solutions, though the impact of doing so has not been yet fully understood. This article reviews key standards for providing IP mobility support, the functionality achieved by combining them, and the performance cost of each combination in terms of protocol overhead and handover latency. We show that combining different mobility mechanisms has a non-negligible cost. Finally we identify a strategy for combining mobility protocols and properties that facilitate this combination. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: A power-aware route maintenance protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) is introduced. Termed Dynamic Path Switching (DPS), the new protocol puts an overloaded node to sleep before a route link breaks because that node runs out of energy, and brings other suitable nodes into play instead. When the battery charge of a node reaches a stated level, the node can advance a request to change to a sleep state for a while. The request is honoured unless survival of some path rests on the forwarding activity of that very node. All nodes are assumed to be collaborative. The DPS protocol is fully backward compatible, as it can be implemented within existing routing protocols such as Dynamic Source Routing (DSR). The new protocol has been extensively simulated with the established network simulator NS2. The findings indicate a much improved power awareness of the updated routing protocol with respect to the unadorned one. Power saving is particularly effective during long-lived sessions. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: A large number of certified mail systems have been put into operation on the market over the last years. In contrast to standard mailing systems like e-Mail, certified mail systems provide the secure, reliable and evidential exchange of messages with the quality of traditional postal registered or certified mail. Most of these systems are tailored to national laws, policies, needs and technical requirements and are thus closed and only accessible by certain user groups. However, the ongoing globalization and opening of the markets, especially in the European Union, ask for global certified mailing as already known from e-Mail. Interoperability of certified mail systems is a new and challenging research field. This article presents a framework and standard to make arbitrary certified mail systems interoperable. The presented approach uses a federated trust network of so-called electronic delivery gateways for seamless certified mailing across systems. This is achieved by converting protocols and system specifics on different layers using a harmonized interoperability protocol. The presented framework has been standardized by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) as Registered Electronic Mail specification for interoperable certified mail systems. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Cooperative communications, in which a relay node helps the source node to deliver its packets to the destination node, are able to obtain significant benefits in terms of transmission reliability, coverage extension and energy efficiency. A Cooperative Automatic Repeat reQuest (C-ARQ) MAC protocol has been recently proposed to exploit cooperative diversity at the MAC layer. In this paper, we validate the integrity and the validity of the C-ARQ protocol using formal methods. The protocol logic is modeled in SDL and implemented in PROMELA. The functionality of the C-ARQ protocol is verified through simulations and verifications using SPIN. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In this paper, an approach of mutual authentication and key exchange for mobile access, based on the trust delegation and message authentication code, is developed, and a novel nonce-based authentication approach is presented. The proposed protocols can effectively defend all known attacks to mobile networks including the denial-of-service attacks and man-in-the-middle attacks. In particular, in contrast to some previous work, our design gives users a chance to set a session key according to users'' will, and does not require a mobile user to compute useless hash key chains in the face of HLR-online authentication failures or run the initial authentication protocol before HLR-offline authentication. Moreover, our design enjoys both computation efficiency and communication efficiency as compared to known mobile authentication schemes. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The KNX standard for home and building automation has been recently updated by the definition of KNXnet/IP system. It allows integration of different KNX networks through IP using the KNXnet/IP Router. Due to the limited transmission speeds of the KNX, the KNXnet/IP Router may represent a bottleneck. The aim of the paper is to analyse the effect of congestion of KNXnet/IP Router on the information flow exchanged between different KNX networks; furthermore, the analysis will focus on the impact of the two policies available inside the KNXnet/IP Router to forward telegrams coming from IP towards the relevant KNX network. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Differentiated Services architecture definition lacks control level functionalities. One of the solutions proposed to fill this gap is Bandwidth Brokers (BB). Bandwidth Brokers are autonomous entities inside a network which is responsible for bandwidth management of the network along with other tasks. There is a lack of protocol for Bandwidth Brokers to discover other Bandwidth Brokers automatically. This study introduces a new Secure Bandwidth Broker Discovery Protocol (BBDP), which allows Bandwidth Brokers to automatically discover other Bandwidth Brokers. In this paper design principles, protocol details, working scenarios and implementation details of the BBDP protocol are presented. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Performance analysis and verification of safety communication protocol are important techniques during protocol development process. In order to meet the requirement of safety, an advanced safety communication protocol is proposed to improve the protocol in EURORADIO. Among the improved protocol, the following two elements are added: (1) advanced scheme of establishment of safety connection. (2) double serial number replaces time stamp. The performance analysis related to safety of the advanced protocol and protocol in EURORADIO is given by Colored Petri Net (CPN) model through simulation. The analysis results verify that the advanced protocol has superior performance. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Kerberos is a well-known standard protocol which is becoming one of the most widely deployed for authentication and key distribution in application services. However, whereas service providers use the protocol to control their own subscribers, they do not widely deploy Kerberos infrastructures to handle subscribers coming from foreign domains, as happens in network federations. Instead, the deployment of Authentication, Authorization and Accounting (AAA) infrastructures has been preferred for that operation. Thus, the lack of a correct integration between these infrastructures and Kerberos limits the service access only to service provider''s subscribers. To avoid this limitation, we design an architecture which integrates a Kerberos pre-authentication mechanism, based on the use of the Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP), and advanced authorization, based on the standards SAML and XACML, to link the end user authentication and authorization performed through an AAA infrastructure with the delivery of Kerberos tickets in the service provider''s domain. We detail the interfaces, protocols, operation and extensions required for our solution. Moreover, we discuss important aspects such as the implications on existing standards. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper reports a feasibility analysis of the use of a hybrid control network based on the Common Industrial Protocol (CIP). For this feasibility analysis, the message service time between DeviceNet and the wireless devices is investigated. The feasibility of hybrid control networks is analyzed using a mathematical analysis and experimental tests. The experimental results show the feasibility of the hybrid control networks in terms of the polling/COS service time and the average end-to-end delays. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The performance of a focused, or topic-specific Web robot can be improved by taking into consideration the structure of the documents downloaded by the robot. In the case of HTML, document structure is tree-like, defined by nested document elements (tags) and their attributes. By analysing this structure, a robot may use the text of certain HTML elements to prioritise documents for downloading and thus significantly improve the speed of convergence to a topic. Clear separation of the structure-aware document parser from the download scheduler provides flexibility but requires a standard interface and protocol between the two. The paper discusses such an interface in the context of an experimental Web robot, whose speed of convergence to a topic was observed to increase by a factor of 3 to 8, as measured by the number of documents downloaded to reach a given average relevance score. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In this paper we propose a generic simulation model, named XSM, with which researchers can construct standard platforms and evaluate their proposed concurrency control protocols for native XDBMSs. The system environment, the performance metrics, and the protocol rules of various types of XML protocols are all considered by the model. To facilitate the implementation of XSM, the state diagrams, the sequence diagrams, the component diagram, and the class diagram of XSM are depicted using UML 2.0 notations. We also show a simulation platform constructed from XSM to fairly and comprehensively evaluate the performance of various XML protocols. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper describes the service discovery and interaction for home network devices using heterogeneous standards and protocols. OSGi was proposed to allow several kinds of services coming from different providers to be loaded and run on a gateway. We present a residential gateway based on the OSGi architecture for a smart home network. We combine the SLP SA/DA, the UPnP control point and the SIP UA into the gateway to achieve automated device discovery, registry, and management. Application examples are introduced and the implementation results show that our gateway can provide automatic heterogeneous service or device discovery, registry, and management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Web services are among the applications involving closely the customers'' private informations. In order to take into account the privacy concerns of the individuals, organizations provide privacy policies as promises describing how they will handle personal data of the individual. However, privacy policies do not convince potential individuals to disclose their personal data, do not guarantee the protection of personal information, and do not provide how to tackle the evolution of the policies. In this paper, we introduce a framework based on an agreement as a solution to these problems. It contains a privacy model defined in the policy level of the agreement. We provide upon it a reasoning mechanism for the evolution. The framework supports in the negotiation level of the agreement a lifecycle management which is an important deal of a dynamic environment that characterizes Web services. A negotiation protocol is proposed to enable ongoing privacy negotiation to be translated into a new privacy agreement. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Password-based authentication is widely used for systems that control remote access to computer networks. In order to address some of the security and management problems that occur in traditional password authentication protocols, research in recent decades has focused on smart card based password authentication. In this paper, we show that the improved smart card authentication scheme proposed by Xu-Zhu-Feng is vulnerable to internal and impersonation attacks. We propose an improvement of their solution, present a new efficient strong smart card authentication protocol, and demonstrate that the new protocol satisfies the requirements of strong smart card authentication and is more efficient. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP) has been standardized within the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in order to provide flexible mechanisms for authentication and key management for network access control. However, some deficiencies have been revealed and recognized as a major obstacle to achieving secure and seamless handover in mobile scenarios. HOKEY (Handover Keying) Working Group in IETF is standardizing low-latency EAP re-authentication and key distribution protocols to address these deficiencies. This paper provides a critical analysis of the on-going work. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) 61131-3 standard defines several programming languages which may be used to develop industrial control applications. These applications typically execute on industrial PLCs (Programmable Logic Controller). PLC vendors have embraced the first version of this standard [3], with each vendor adopting it at its own pace. As the standard is implemented, several deficiencies have been uncovered. In this paper deficiencies identified by the authors during the implementation of a compiler, compliant with the second version of the standard [4], are explained and analysed. Other deficiencies identified by other authors have also been aggregated and explained. For each deficiency, one or more suggestions (including changes to the formal syntax definition) are made as to how the standard could be changed in order to rectify the deficiency. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Many authenticated key agreement protocols based on identity information were published in recent years. Hsieh et al. presented their protocol in 2002. However, Tseng et al. found a flaw in the protocol which resulted in a key compromise impersonation attack. Later, Tseng proposed his protocol conforming which conforms to all desirable security properties and is efficient. In this paper we propose two new two-party identity-based authenticated key agreement protocols. The first is based on Hsieh et al.''s protocol and makes it immune against Tseng et al.''s attack, while the second is an efficiently improved protocol based on Tseng''s protocol. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper considers the issue on authenticated group key agreement protocol among n users broadcasting communication over an insecure public network. Many authenticated group Diffie-Hellman key agreement protocols have been proposed to meet the challenges. However, existing protocols are either limited by the use of public key infrastructure or by their scalability, requiring O(n) rounds. To overcome these disadvantages, we propose an efficient password-based group key agreement protocol resistant to the dictionary attacks by adding password-authentication services to a non-authenticated multi-party key agreement protocol proposed by Horng. The proposed protocol is very efficient since it only requires constant rounds to agree upon a session key, and each user broadcasts a constant number of messages and only requires four exponentiations. Under the Decisional Diffie-Hellman assumption, we will show the proposed protocol is provably secure in both the ideal-cipher model and the random-oracle model. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: With the ever-increasing demand for wireless real-time services and continuing emergence of new multimedia applications especially for mobile users, it is necessary for the network to support various levels of quality of service (QoS) while maximizing the utilization of scarce and expensive wireless channel resources. Considering this fact, a new TDMA/FDD MAC protocol integrating a novel QoS management algorithm and multi-beam Directional Antennas (DAs) to efficiently exploit wireless resources has been developed and presented in this paper. It supports all ATM CBR, VBR, ABR and UBR service classes by adopting a well-managed dynamic guarantee-based QoS scheduling algorithm. The work mainly aims at increasing the wireless system throughput as well as improving the call-blocking ratios and end-to-end delays for real-time applications. This seamless communication enables both handling real-time multimedia traffics in a fair manner and granting call requests on the basis of the connection types. The system has been developed, modeled and simulated using OPNET Modeler. The simulation results show that the QoS-aware TDMA/FDD MAC with multi-beam DAs has substantially increased the system throughput and that the call-blocking ratio has been reduced from 86% to 18%, when the proposed MAC with 8-Beam antennas is employed instead of the regular MAC. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper presents research results from the field of automated generation of verification model from real-life SDL (Specification and Description Language) specification of the system. An award winning model checker Simple Promela Interpreter (Spin) was used for formal verification. Preparing a verification model from real-life specification is a hard task. We implement most of our research results in the tool named sdl2pml (SDL to Promela) in order to avoid human errors while building the verification model. This tool is used for automated generation of the model. We present its architecture and compare the implemented features with other existing tools. Additionally, we demonstrate its use on a real-life specification of an IUA (ISDN User Adaptation) protocol which is part of the SI3000 softswitch. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Recently, Chien et al. proposed an RFID authentication protocol, which consists of only the cyclic redundancy code (CRC) and the pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) [H. Chien, C. Chen, Mutual Authentication Protocol for RFID Conforming to EPC Class 1 Generation 2 Standards, Computer Standards & Interfaces, vol. 29, Elsevier, 2007, pp. 254–259]. They claimed that the protocol conforms to current EPC tags, and would be secure against all attacks on RFID systems. However, in this paper, we show that the protocol is not secure; firstly an attacker can impersonate a valid tag temporarily by a single eavesdropping. Secondly the attacker can forge a tag permanently by eavesdropping two consecutive sessions. Finally he can make a valid tag useless (DoS attack) by modifying the second attack slightly. The computational complexities of the attacks are so practicable that Chien et al.''s protocol cannot enhance the RFID security any more than the original EPC standard. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Robust continuity should be paid much more attention in sensor network key management protocols, especially in privacy-vital environment. However, to our best of knowledge, few papers on key management have addressed the robust continuity in sensor networks. Therefore, in this paper, we present a new key management protocol with robust continuity for sensor networks. The purpose is to minimize the key management redesign effort as well as to make the node flexible and adaptable to many different applications. Compared to existing key management protocols, our proposed protocol has the following merits: First, our protocol addresses the continuity between the pairwise key and group key, it can establish the pairwise key and group key with the same pre-distributed secrets. Second, our protocol can deal with the continuity of the pairwise key and the group key themselves; it can update both of them to support the changes in the size of the network. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Due to the popularity of Wireless LAN, the deployment of a flexible WLAN with IP services is a new trend for wireless Internet. The Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) can easily be set up in any environment without any base station. In this paper, we propose a root-based mechanism for constructing a clustered MANET in all-IP networks. To support all-IP networks, the integration of Mobile IP and the root-based clustering MANET will be presented. The routing strategy of the root-based constructing strategy, denoted as Modified Cluster head Gateway Switch Routing (MCGSR), is based on the virtual backbone of the clustered MANET. In this routing strategy, the maintenance cost of the routing information in the virtual backbone will be smaller than that of CGSR. The simulation results show that the root-based strategy with MCGSR routing significantly outperforms both the DSDV and LCC with CGSR routing in terms of the stability of virtual backbones, memory overheads, and control messages overheads. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The study deals with the analysis of latency introduced by the media access control algorithm of LonTalk protocol registered as ANSI/CEA-709.1 standard and used in LonWorks control networking technology. The LonTalk protocol provides multicast communication which is a distinctive feature among control network protocols. The predictive p-persistent CSMA protocol built in the MAC sublayer uses the memoryless backoff, additive increase/additive decrease contention window adjustments, provides collision avoidance and optional collision detection. The behavior of the LonTalk MAC protocol, unlike of the other CSMA schemes, is forced not only by the traffic rate but also by the structure of the workload transmitted through the channel. Therefore, the predictive p-persistent CSMA performance depends on the load scenario defined as the specification of the input traffic generated to the network. In the study, a unified method of load scenario definition integrating various addressing and message service types, is used. The contribution of the paper is the adaptation of the analytical approach based on Markov chains to the evaluation of mean access delay of LonTalk protocol for any load scenario. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: A proxy signature scheme enables an original signer to delegate his signing capability to a proxy signer and then the proxy signer can sign a message on behalf of the original signer. Recently, several ID-based proxy signature schemes have been proposed. ID-based Cryptosystems (ID-Cs) are advantageous than the traditional Public Key Cryptosystems (PKCs), as the key distribution is not required. But, an inherent problem of ID-Cs is the key escrow. Hu and Huang also proposed an ID-based proxy signature scheme with proxy key generation protocol. In Hu–Huang''s scheme, whenever the original signer requests the Public Key Generation Center (PKG) to generate a proxy derivation key for a designated proxy signer, it generates a proxy key using the proxy signer''s private key without his agreement. Thus, the PKG gets to infringe general privacy laws and regulations. Also, this is an example of PKG''s misuse of the user''s private key due to ID-C''s key escrow problem. To solve these problems we propose an improvement of Hu–Huang''s scheme. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Free roaming mobile agent [D. Xu, L. Harn, M. Narasimhan, J. Luo. “An Improved Free-Roaming Mobile Agent Security Protocol against Colluded Truncation Attacks.” In Proceedings of the 30th Annual international Computer Software and Applications Conference(COMPSAC,06), Volume 2, Page(s):309–314,Chigago, Sept. 2006, IEEE Computer Society Press.; S. Venkatesan, C. Chellappan, “Protecting free roaming mobile agent against multiple colluded truncation attacks”, In proceedings of the 3rd International conference on Mobile Multimedia Communication (Mobimedia''07), page(s): 293–297, August 2007.] is to collect information from more number of remote host using the shortest route. The routing table available in the router is not applicable for the free roaming mobile agent to roam around the network, so each and every server must have the routing information. This paper proposes a model to generate the routing table for the free roaming mobile agent to roam around the network by calculating the link cost between the nodes. Link cost between the servers is measured by the energy consumed to reach the destination. Link cost is measured by the transmission of agent instead of sending the message because here the route is calculated for agent roaming. The cost for transferring the message and the agent differs because of the migration and transfer. In agent transmission, the whole thing will be migrated to the remote host. But in the message transmission, the particular message is transmitted. Routing table in the destination will be generated automatically by the mobile agent while it visits the destination host and the routing table of the source host will be generated after the agent returns to its home (source host). [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Secure communication is of utmost importance to participants of Internet conferences. Secure communication thwarts eavesdropping. In an Internet conference, all conference participants together establish a common conference key to enable multi-party and secure exchange of messages. However, malicious conference participants may try to obtain the conference key through unfair means, and this could result in the generation of different conference keys. This paper is intended as a proposal of a new form of conference key agreement protocol. It emphasizes the filtering of malicious participants at the beginning of the conference to ensure that all participants obtain the same conference key. The proposed method also has fault-tolerant capability. Efficiency and security of a protocol is important in practice. The security of the proposed protocol is based on discrete logarithm problem assumption. The protocol is executed in computationally secure environment. The secret information of a user cannot be determined from its corresponding public information and therefore ensures privacy. Since efficiency of a protocol depends on low computation cost, the protocol attempts to achieve lower computation cost without compromising on security. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In the last years the amount of information being transmitted through communication networks has increased, and this has lead to an increased use of security protocols. The implementations of security protocols do not accurately follow the standards and this causes many malfunctions and security flaws. In this paper we will analyze the different approaches followed by the scientific community to evaluate security protocols'' implementations, and will also analyze the special characteristics of security protocols, in order to deduce which are the key points for such an evaluation, how they can be evaluated and also if existing evaluation techniques can be used. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In many network applications, including distant learning, audio webcasting, video streaming, and online gaming, often a source has to send data to many receivers. IP multicasts and application-layer multicasts provide efficient and scalable one-to-many or many-to-many communications. A common secret key, the group key, shared by multiple users can be used to secure the information transmitted in the multicast communication channel. In this paper, a new group key management protocol is proposed to reduce the communication and computation overhead of group key rekeying caused by membership changes. With shared key derivation, new keys derivable by members themselves do not have to be encrypted or delivered by the server, and the performance of synchronous and asynchronous rekeying operations, including single join, single leave, and batch update, is thus improved. The proposed protocol is shown to be secure and immune to collusion attacks, and it outperforms the other comparable protocols from our analysis and simulation. The protocol is particularly efficient with binary key trees and asynchronous rekeying, and it can be tuned to meet different rekeying delay or key size requirements. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Due to the rapid growth in popularity of Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN), wireless security has become one of many important research issues. For the WLAN security, the IEEE 802.1X standard provides an authentication framework that is based on the Extensible Authentication Protocols (EAP). In the EAP framework, there are many authentication protocols that have been proposed, in which each authentication protocol has some strengths and weaknesses, respectively. Most EAP authentication protocols lack two features: identity protection and withstanding man-in-the-middle attacks. In this paper, we first propose a novel symmetric-key based certificate distribution scheme based on Universal Subscriber Identity Module (USIM) cards in a cellular network. The symmetric-key based certificate distribution scheme allows mobile subscribers to obtain temporary certificates from the corresponding cellular network. Combining the proposed certificate distribution scheme with the EAP-TLS (Transport Layer Security) protocol, we present a new EAP authentication protocol called USIM-based EAP authentication protocol. The new EAP authentication protocol combining with USIM cards is an extension of the EAP-TLS protocol and also follows the EAP framework in the IEEE 802.1X standard. Compared to other EAP authentication protocols, the proposed protocol provides mutual authentication, strong identity protection and roaming capability between the cellular network and the WLAN networks. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Recently, various home network systems, such as LonWorks, Echonet, and LnCP, etc., are developed to enhance customer''s comfort and convenience. However, it is not known that performance of any protocol is superior. Hence, this paper evaluates performance of LnCP (Living network Control Protocol) by LG Electronics and LonWorks by Echelon. For this purpose, we have developed simulation model using state diagram of LonWorks and LnCP, and simulation conditions through analysis of message to be generated in the smart home. Also, we evaluate performance, such as maximum transmission delay and mean transmission delay, of both protocols. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper presents fundamental aspects of MPLS over ATM method, IP over ATM method and multimedia application traffics with different quality of service (QoS) requirements. Using a simulation tool, the MPLS over ATM method providing ABR, CBR and VBR QoS support, and the IP over ATM method providing a primitive UBR QoS support for transferring data, voice and video traffics are modeled. Having simulated the models under varying offered loads, obtained simulation results are presented. Comparing the average end-to-end delay and delay variation graphs, not only does the MPLS over ATM method provide improved results for all of the multimedia traffics but also overcomes the worst disadvantage of the IP over ATM method producing similar and erratic results for the data, voice and video application traffics. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper proposes a new approach, named Card-Aided Firewall (CAF) that combines the simplified firewall and the state-oriented smart card technologies to construct a controllable and accountable Internet access framework. The idea suggests that a client computer, protected by a light-weight firewall, could establish diversified authenticated communication channels, controlled and accounted by “legal” states of the smart card. The program of a smart card is state-oriented or a state machine, which defines a chain of events involving various state transitions. The “legal” states of a smart card program are defined to be legal to communicate with surfing targets. A predefined Access Control List (ACL), stored in the same card, is necessary. An ACL is a sequential list of permit or deny statements that apply to addresses or upper-layer protocols. The proposed firewall decides acceptance or rejection messages by matching the current state of the card program and the ACL. In addition, a complete surfing account for tracing back is recorded. It is a by-product of the smart card authentication. The proposed Card-Aided Firewall framework is implemented to demonstrate its effectiveness. The implementation is done at the driver level. It keeps up with the high line speed. The driver takes 39K bytes and works well with other firewalls. The average packet processing time of the CAF driver is 31.74 μs. On the premise of secure authentication within the smart card, the Card-Aided Firewall would facilitate various rapidly growing applications in campus cards, family cards, and employee cards, etc. that require accurate controllability and accountability in the surfing boundary. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Since the number of server providing the facilities for the user is usually more than one, the authentication protocols for multi-server environment are required for practical applications. Most of password authentication schemes for multi-server environment are based on static ID, so the adversary can use this information to trace and identify the user''s requests. It is unfavorable to be applied to special applications, such as e-commerce. In this paper, we develop a secure dynamic ID based remote user authentication scheme to achieve user''s anonymity. The proposed scheme only uses hashing functions to implement a robust authentication scheme for the multi-server environment. It provides a secure method to update password without the help of third trusted party. The proposed scheme does not only satisfy all requirements for multi-server environment but also achieve efficient computation. Besides, our scheme provides complete functionality to suit with the real applications. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The rights of an Internet user acting anonymously conflicts with the rights of a Server victim identifying the malicious user. The ERPINA protocol, introduced in this paper, allows an honest user communicating anonymously with a Server through a PET, while the identity of a dishonest user is revealed. Prior research failed to distinguish objectively between an honest user and an attacker; and a reliable and objective distinguishing technique is lacking. The ERPINA protocol addresses the reliability issue efficiently by defining from the beginning of the communication what is considered as malicious and what is not. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]