11689182
Decentralized Authentication Mechanisms for Object-based Storage Devices
Network-attached object-based storage separates data-path from control-path and enables direct interaction between clients and the storage devices. Clients interact with the file manager only to acquire the meta-data information and some cryptographic primitives, for example, access keys. Most of the current schemes rely on a centralized file manager to support these activities. This paper presents security mechanisms for decentralized authentication for object-based storage. The schemes are novel in several ways. First of all, they reduce the load on the file manager and free the system from central point of failure and denial of service attacks. We exploit Role-based Access Control (RBAC) to provide scalability and design authentication schemes that efficiently utilize RBAC. In most of the cases, the client needs to acquire only one access key from the file manager, which can be used by the client to further derive role-keys for the roles that he/she is permitted to play within an organization. Further, the number of cryptographic keys required for the purpose of authentication in these schemes is less as compared to the existing schemes. Finally, we also present two simple schemes that enable the clients to access objects stored on any device on the network using a single identity key.
6168983
Privacy Preserving Nearest Neighbor Search
Data mining is frequently obstructed by privacy concerns. In many cases data is distributed, and bringing the data together in one place for analysis is not possible due to privacy laws (e.g. HIPAA) or policies. Privacy preserving data mining techniques have been developed to address this issue by providing mechanisms to mine the data while giving certain privacy guarantees. In this work we address the issue of privacy preserving nearest neighbor search, which forms the kernel of many data mining applications. To this end, we present a novel algorithm based on secure multiparty computation primitives to compute the nearest neighbors of records in horizontally distributed data. We show how this algorithm can be used in three important data mining algorithms, namely LOF outlier detection, SNN clustering, and kNN classification
1232413
Secure group services for storage area networks
Storage Area Networks, with their ability to offer high data availability, reliability and scalability, are a promising solution for the large scale storage needs of many enterprises. As with any distributed storage system, a major design challenge for a Storage Area Network (SAN) is to provide data integrity and confidentiality. In this paper we propose a solution which addresses these core security requirements. In particular, we focus on mechanisms that enable efficient key distribution to allow scalable data sharing. Our scheme uses strong cryptographic techniques to achieve data security and integrity. Further, we delegate the bulk of the cryptographic processing to the SAN entities (e.g., switches, routers or other network elements), thereby removing bottlenecks at the disks and causing minimal inconvenience to the hosts. By recognizing the peer nature of the group of SAN entities, we propose efficient group key mechanisms that do not involve any centralized key distribution servers. This allows our scheme to be scalable and be free from any single point of failure or attack.
95258
Exploring robustness in group key agreement
Secure group communication is crucial for building distributed applications that work in dynamic environments and communicate over unsecured networks (e.g. the Internet). Key agreement is a critical part of providing security services for group communication systems. Most of the current contributory key agreement protocols are not designed to tolerate failures and membership changes during execution. In particular, nested or cascaded group membership events (such as partitions) are not accommodated. We present the first robust contributory key agreement protocols, resilient to any sequence of events while preserving the group communication membership and ordering guarantees.
260546
Realistic Sensing Area Modeling
Despite the well-known fact that sensing patterns in reality are highly irregular, researchers continue to develop protocols with simplifying assumptions about the sensing. For example, a circular 0/1 sensing model is widely used in most existing simulators and analysis. While this model provides high-level guidelines, it could cause wrong estimation of system performance in the real world. In this project, we design and implement a practical Sensing Area Modeling technique, called SAM. By injecting events through regular and hierarchical training, SAM estimates the sensing areas of individual sensor nodes accurately. Especially, this work is the first to investigate the impact of irregular sensing area on application performance, such as coverage scheduling. We evaluate SAM using outdoor experiments with XSM motes, indoor experiment with 40 MicaZ motes as well as an extensive 1000-node simulation. Our evaluation results reveal serious problems caused by circular sensing model, while demonstrating significant performance improvements in major applications when SAM is used.
18915158
Revisiting random key pre-distribution schemes for wireless sensor networks
Key management is one of the fundamental building blocks of security services. In a network with resource constrained nodes like sensor networks, traditional key management techniques, such as public key cryptography or key distribution center (e.g., Kerberos), are often not effective. To solve this problem, several key pre-distribution schemes have been proposed for sensor networks based on random graph theory. In these schemes, a set of randomly chosen keys or secret information is pre-distributed to each sensor node and a network is securely formed based on this information. Most of the schemes assumed that the underlying physical network is dense enough, that is, the degree of each node is hig.
 In this paper, we revisit the random graph theory and use giant component theory by Erdos and Renyi to show that even if the node degree is small, most of the nodes in the network can be connected. Further, we use this fact to analyze the Eschenhauer et. al's, Du et. al's, and Chan et. al's key pre-distribution schemes and evaluate the relation between connectivity, memory size, and security. We show that we can reduce the amount of memory required or improve security by trading-off a very small number of isolated nodes. Our simulation results show that the communication overhead does not increase significantly even after reducing the node degree. In addition, we present an approach by which nodes can dynamically adjust their transmission power to establish secure links with the targeted networked neighbors. Finally, we propose an effcient path-key identification algorithm and compare it with the existing scheme.
20557981
3-D Pose Tracking of the Car Occupant
Although airbags in the car play an important role for the safety of occupants, in fact, many peoples have been injured or killed by the deployment of airbags themselves. Such conventional airbags are deployed by the shock sensors. As an alternative approach, a vision-based smart airbag system could be promising. This paper describes a new method by which 3-D pose of the car occupant can be recognized. We combine 2-D head tracking information with a disparity map of the occupant for 3-D pose tracking. Result shows that the system can locate the head position around the passenger's seat with a real-time basis.
2304269
Lightweight logging and recovery for distributed shared memory over virtual interface architecture
As software Distributed Shared Memory(DSM) systems become attractive on larger clusters, the focus of attention moves toward improving the reliability of systems. In this paper, we propose a lightweight logging scheme, called remote logging, and a recovery protocol for home-based DSM. Remote logging stores coherence-related data to the volatile memory of a remote node. The logging overhead can be moderated with high-speed system area network and user-level DMA operations supported by modern communication protocols. Remote logging tolerates multiple failures if the backup nodes of failed nodes are alive. It makes the reliability of DSM grow much higher. Experimental results show that our fault-tolerant DSM has low overhead compared to conventional stable logging and it can be effectively recovered from some concurrent failures.
14647313
Energy-efficient disk replacement and file placement techniques for mobile systems with hard disks
Mobile systems have usually used hard disks as the secondary storage devices because of their high capacity per cost and high I/O throughput. However, their high power consumption is the main limiting factor for extending their adoptions in mobile systems. In this paper, we propose enhanced file placement techniques for mobile platforms with multiple smaller disks (instead of a single large disk). We investigate that how many smaller disks are necessary to obtain energy saving while maintaining the required performance using both a simplified energy model and a realistic trace-based simulator under the proposed multiple disk configurations. We also propose energy-efficient file placement techniques, which aggregate files with common attributes the same set of disks. By skewing I/O operations, the proposed techniques achieve additional energy saving. Experimental results show that the proposed techniques can reduce the energy consumption by up to 43% when eight 1" disks are used instead of a single 2.5" disk with an acceptable increase in the average response time.
10542004
Investigation of the Fitness Landscapes and Multi-parent Crossover for Graph Bipartitioning
An empirical study is performed on the local-optimum space of graph bipartitioning. We examine some statistical features of the fitness landscape. They include the cost-distance correlations and the properties around the central area of local optima. The study revealed some new notable results about the properties of the fitness landscape; e.g., the central area yielded fairly good quality in the local-optimum space. We performed an experiment on a spectrum of different exploitation strengths of the central areas. From the results, it seems attractive to exploit the central area, but excessive or insufficient exploitation is not desirable.
12500430
Energy-efficient file placement techniques for heterogeneous mobile storage systems
While hard disk drives are the most common secondary storage devices, their high power consumption and low shock-resistance limit them as an ideal mobile storage solution. On the other hand, flash memory devices overcome the main problems of hard disk drives, but they are still more expensive in the cost per bit over hard disk drives and can only support a limited number of erase cycles. In this paper, we show that combining the merits of a hard disk and a flash memory device can produce an energy-efficient secondary storage solution for mobile platforms. We propose an energy-efficient file placement technique for such heterogeneous storage systems. The proposed technique adapts an existing data concentration technique by separating read and write I/O requests. Experimental results show that the proposed technique reduces the energy consumption by up to 74.5% when the combination of a 1.8" disk and a flash memory is used instead of a single 2.5" disk, at the cost of small increase in the average response time.