Public Communication Infrastructure Research Articles

Quantum Key Distribution for Critical Infrastructures: Towards Cyber-Physical Security for Hydropower and Dams.

Hydropower facilities are often remotely monitored or controlled from a centralized remote control room. Additionally, major component manufacturers monitor the performance of installed components, increasingly via public communication infrastructures. While these communications enable efficiencies and increased reliability, they also expand the cyber-attack surface. Communications may use the internet to remote control a facility's control systems, or it may involve sending control commands over a network from a control room to a machine. The content could be encrypted and decrypted using a public key to protect the communicated information. These cryptographic encoding and decoding schemes become vulnerable as more advances are made in computer technologies, such as quantum computing. In contrast, quantum key distribution (QKD) and other quantum cryptographic protocols are not based upon a computational problem, and offer an alternative to symmetric cryptography in some scenarios. Although the underlying mechanism of quantum cryptogrpahic protocols such as QKD ensure that any attempt by an adversary to observe the quantum part of the protocol will result in a detectable signature as an increased error rate, potentially even preventing key generation, it serves as a warning for further investigation. In QKD, when the error rate is low enough and enough photons have been detected, a shared private key can be generated known only to the sender and receiver. We describe how this novel technology and its several modalities could benefit the critical infrastructures of dams or hydropower facilities. The presented discussions may be viewed as a precursor to a quantum cybersecurity roadmap for the identification of relevant threats and mitigation.

Regional innovation systems in tourism: The role of collaboration and competition

The paper explores the concept of Regional Innovation Systems (RIS) in the context of the tourism industry. It emphasizes the importance of collaboration and competition among companies within regional systems to foster innovation. It also discusses the role of social capital, relational assets, and social relationships in driving innovation within RIS. The Campania Region recognizes the importance of tourism for its development and supports the digital transition, modernization of public administration, communication infrastructure, and production system. In this vein, the paper proposes a theoretical framework that combines dynamic capabilities, relational view, and resource-based theory to explain the mechanisms and dynamics of RIS. The co-creation of innovation and strategic plans within a system of regional assets is highlighted as a key aspect of RIS. The paper concludes by emphasizing the need for collaboration, innovation, and the integration of various stakeholders' interests in the development of sustainable and innovative regional systems.

Towards a Secure and Computational Framework for Internet of Drones Enabled Aerial Computing

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are deployed in various mission-critical applications to collect sensitive data and disseminate it to the server placed on the ground station. Users mostly require real-time data from the drones, instead of the information stored by the server, in specific applications to perform timely actions. However, performing real-time communication with a drone through the public communication channel, which exposed to different security risks mandates an authenticated key exchange between users and drones in the Internet of Drones (IoD) networks for enabling users to communicate securely with the drone through the public communication infrastructure. This paper proffers a resource-efficient authentication scheme for the IoD networks, called REAS-IoD. The proposed REAS-IoD utilizes the lightweight hash function and authenticated encryption primitive, known as ACE to accomplish the AKE process securely. In REAS-IoD, a user's authentication is performed, followed by establishing a secure session key (SK) between a specific drone and the user, for future encrypted communication. The SK's security is established utilizing a random oracle model. A comparative study demonstrates that REAS-IoD requires fewer resource, without compromising security and privacy features than related eminent security schemes.

The Problem with “Most People”: Racism and Ableism in U.S. COVID-19 Public Health Communication

Public health communication related to COVID-19 does not typically address the needs of “high-risk” Americans. Rather, pandemic-era policy has prioritized those who have the lowest risks for complications and mortality—white, nondisabled, employed, housed, middle- to high-income American citizens with private health insurance. This article addresses whether commonly held definitions of misinformation and “health literacy” are useful when public health communication does not meaningfully address the needs of chronically ill and disabled individuals. It considers strategies used by marginalized people to assess and understand medical advice, workplace provisions, and education policies that typically assume low risk and ignore comorbidities. It argues that the U.S. should build a more equitable public health communication infrastructure that collects and reports on race- and disability-specific data, accounts for complexity in crisis communication, and targets the needs of communities that are most heavily impacted by public health threats.

INTEGRATING IEEE 802.11 AND LORAWAN FOR WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORK DATA TRANSACTION IN NON-INFRASTRUCTURE AREA


 
 
 
 This research aims to develop a system that integrates the IEEE 802.11 network and LoRa WAN in developing a wireless sensor network (WSN) in an area without public communication infrastructure. The sensor nodes were developed using ESP 8266 Node MCU with embedded IEEE 802.11 module and the sink was developed using Raspberry Pi minicomputer with LoRa module. The frames sent by sensor nodes were classified into regular data and critical data. The sensing data is forwarded by the sink to the nearest location with internet access using LoRaWAN according to their priority. Each node sent its regular frames with an interarrival time that varies from 30 seconds to 3 minutes and critical frames with an interarrival time of 1 to 5 seconds. The result shows that the delay of the network sending solely regular frames varies from 16.4 s to 602 and the delay of the network sending solely critical frames varies from 0.32 t0 1 s. When some nodes in the network send the regular frames and the other nodes send the critical frames, the delay of the regular frames drops to 1.25-1.75 s. The packet delivery rate of the system is 100%.
 
 
 

Trust In US Federal, State, And Local Public Health Agencies During COVID-19: Responses And Policy Implications.

Public health agencies' ability to protect health in the wake of COVID-19 largely depends on public trust. In February 2022 we conducted a first-of-its-kind nationally representative survey of 4,208 US adults to learn the public's reported reasons for trust in federal, state, and local public health agencies. Among respondents who expressed a "great deal" of trust, that trust was not related primarily to agencies' ability to control the spread of COVID-19 but, rather, to beliefs that those agencies made clear, science-based recommendations and provided protective resources. Scientific expertise was a more commonly reported reason for "a great deal" of trust at the federal level, whereas perceptions of hard work, compassionate policy, and direct services were emphasized more at the state and local levels. Although trust in public health agencies was not especially high, few respondents indicated that they had no trust. Lower trust was related primarily to respondents' beliefs that health recommendations were politically influenced and inconsistent. The least trusting respondents also endorsed concerns about private-sector influence and excessive restrictions and had low trust in government overall. Our findings suggest the need to support a robust federal, state, and local public health communications infrastructure; ensure agencies' authority to make science-based recommendations; and develop strategies for engaging different segments of the public.

UAV Computing-Assisted Search and Rescue Mission Framework for Disaster and Harsh Environment Mitigation

Disasters are crisis circumstances that put human life in jeopardy. During disasters, public communication infrastructure is particularly damaged, obstructing Search And Rescue (SAR) efforts, and it takes significant time and effort to re-establish functioning communication infrastructure. SAR is a critical component of mitigating human and environmental risks in disasters and harsh environments. As a result, there is an urgent need to construct communication networks swiftly to help SAR efforts exchange emergency data. UAV technology has the potential to provide key solutions to mitigate such disaster situations. UAVs can be used to provide an adaptable and reliable emergency communication backbone and to resolve major issues in disasters for SAR operations. In this paper, we evaluate the network performance of UAV-assisted intelligent edge computing to expedite SAR missions and functionality, as this technology can be deployed within a short time and can help to rescue most people during a disaster. We have considered network parameters such as delay, throughput, and traffic sent and received, as well as path loss for the proposed network. It is also demonstrated that with the proposed parameter optimization, network performance improves significantly, eventually leading to far more efficient SAR missions in disasters and harsh environments.

Cognitive Long‐range: Towards efficient public communication infrastructure for Internet of Things

SummaryThe most common Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios entail devices with limited energy resources and need to be connected to the Internet via wireless networks. This has driven the recent development of low‐power wide‐area networks (LPWANs) and the rise of the Long Range (LoRa) technology. The LoRa protocol has a simple modulation scheme that ensures low power consumption, high convergence, and resistance against interference. In most LPWAN technologies, several physical layer challenges arise, such as low data rates, spectral inefficiency, and increased interference. As a physical layer solution, the cognitive radio (CR) offers a possible way of resolving these challenges. CR allows wireless networks to operate without the need for a dedicated spectrum. Regarding the variety of end‐user requirements, developing a public communication network that can support such diverse and heterogeneous applications is necessary to reduce the implementation costs than developing a dedicated communication network for each application. This paper proposes a Cognitive LoRa (C‐LoRa) protocol that utilizes unlicensed and licensed frequencies as well as interference mitigation to improve the QoS of LoRa. To extract the priority list of traffic patterns, C‐LoRa incorporates the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) algorithm. The priority list enables real‐time applications to receive optimal spectrum allocation. C‐LoRa can be efficiently implemented as a public communication infrastructure for heterogeneous IoT devices. The addition of licensed channels improves the overall QoS and decreases the average waiting time in queues. The platform layer of C‐LoRa consists of a cognitive engine that sends traffic priority lists to cognitive spectrum allocators. The IoT application servers are connected to the cloud platform layer via SNMP, HTTP, and other desired protocols. Access gateways equipped with a cognitive spectrum allocator are always connected to a power supply and serve as a transparent bridge to the cognitive engine at the platform layer, converting RF packets to IP packets and vice versa.

SKIA-SH: A Symmetric Key-Based Improved Lightweight Authentication Scheme for Smart Homes

Being one of the finest applications of the IoT, smart homes (SHs) with an aim to improve quality of life are taking over the traditional lifestyles. The entities within a SH communicate with each other and with the environment including the users to transform daily life seamlessly enjoyable and easy. However, owing to the public communication infrastructure, the advantages of SH are subject to security and privacy issues. Recently, Yu et al. presented a privacy and security solution for SH environment. The scheme of Yu et al. is based on lightweight symmetric key functions. Although the scheme of Yu et al. exhibits the lightweight property, it is proven in this paper that their scheme cannot provide mutual authentication due to a crucial design fault. An improved scheme using symmetric key functions for SH (SKIA-SH) is proposed in this paper. The security of the proposed scheme is furnished through formal BAN logic followed by brief discussion on security attribute provision of the proposed SKIA-SH. The comparisons show that the proposed SKIA-SH provides the required security on the cost of slight increase in computation and communication costs. The simulation results show that the SKIA-SH completes an authentication round by exchanging 216 bytes in just 5.34 ms.

A new method for producing 320-bit modified hash towards tamper detection and restoration in colour images

Image sharing in open and public communication infrastructure is vulnerable. There are several solutions articulated by worldwide researchers for secure image transmission. However, with the increasing computing capacity and capability, the currently available security solutions are being breached. This yearns for more robust solutions. The significant contribution of the proposed work involves in the generation of a new hash algorithm for the entire RGB image of size 256 × 256 with no Region of Interest (RoI) restriction. This paper mainly focuses on integrity verification, tamper detection, localisation of the tampered area and its restoration. The whole image is considered as sensitive data for which one-way integrity verification code is generated block-wise to locate the areas of tampering. Integrity validation phase will compare the received digest and generated the digest from the received image. Blocks which are failed to pass in integrity validation will undergo the recovery process.

IoT based Smart Grid Attack Resistance in AC and DC State Estimation

Use of automation and intelligence in smart grids has led to implementation in a number of applications. When internet of things is incorporated it will result in the significant improvement a number of factors such as fault recovery, energy delivery efficiency, demand response and reliability. However, the collaboration of internet of things and smart grid gives rise to a number of security issues and threats. This is especially the case when using internet based protocols and public communication infrastructure. To address these issues we should ensure that the data stored is secure and critical information from the data is extracted in a careful manner. If any threat to its security is detective an early blackout warning should be issued immediately. In this paper we have proposed a geometric view point for big data attacks which is capable of bypassing bad data detection. We have created an environment where replay scheme is used launch blind energy big data attack. The defence mechanism of our proposed work is studied and found to be efficient. Experimental evidence supports our theory and we have found our methodology to efficiently improve error detection rate.

Generalised resilience models for power systems and dependent infrastructure during extreme events

This study presents a generalised critical infrastructures resilience model for extreme events with a focus on power grids. Infrastructures are modelled as three domains – physical, cyber, and human. Each domain is described with respect to the services it provides. Each domain is represented by geometric graphs for each service it provides. The resilience models use geometric graphs with each graph's nodes and edges characterised based on relevant attributes. This study also discusses various applied aspects related to resilience models including the impact of changing operating environment, human-driven processes, such as logistics, and service buffers. Due to their stated particular importance in the U.S. Presidential Policy Directive 21, particular attention is placed on the power infrastructure and its impact on the public communication infrastructures as a main critical load. This study focuses on the multi-time scale power system operation to capture cascading outages within, and subsequently to its dependent infrastructure – the public communication system (e.g. wireless or ‘cellular’ communication networks) as a main critical load. This study illustrates the merits of the proposed models in calculating resilience in extreme events and derives physical domain representation for electric and communication systems using cell tower and substation data from the USA.

Lightweight trusted security for emergency communication networks of small groups

Public communication infrastructures are susceptible to disasters. Thus, the Emergency Communication Networks (ECNs) of small groups are necessary to maintain real-time communication during disasters. Given that ECNs are self-built by users, the unavailability of infrastructures and the openness of wireless channels render them insecure. ECN security, however, is a rarely studied issue despite of its importance. Here, we propose a security scheme for the ECNs of small groups. Our scheme is based on the optimized Byzantine Generals' Problem combined with the analysis of trusted security problems in ECNs. Applying the Byzantine Generals' Problem to ECNs is a novel approach to realize two new functions, debugging and error correction, for ensuring system consistency and accuracy. Given the limitation of terminal devices, the lightweight fast ECDSA algorithm is introduced to guarantee the integrity and security of communication and the efficiency of the network. We implement a simulation to verify the feasibility of the algorithm after theoretical optimization.

Energy Big Data Security Threats in IoT-Based Smart Grid Communications

Increased intelligence and automation in smart grid results in many heterogeneous applications benefiting from the Internet of Things, such as demand response, energy delivery efficiency/reliability, and fault recovery. However, vulnerabilities in smart grid arise due to public communication infrastructure and Internet-based protocols. To deal with security threats, energy big data should be thoughtfully stored and processed to extract critical information, and security and blackout warnings should be given in an early stage. This work gives a comprehensive tutorial and survey to highlight research challenges on the aforementioned issues in the Internet-of-Things-based smart grid. We demonstrate that a stealthy and blind energy big data attack can be launched using a replay scheme. Also, we elucidate an intuitive geometric viewpoint for this type of attack. The proposed attack can bypass bad data detection successfully using either DC or AC state estimation.

Imagining a new public information and communication infrastructure

Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. Spoken by the Red Queen in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871) by Lewis Carroll

Open source system OpenVPN in a function of Virtual Private Network

Using of Virtual Private Networks (VPN) can establish high security level in network communication. VPN technology enables high security networking using distributed or public network infrastructure. VPN uses different security and managing rules inside networks. It can be set up using different communication channels like Internet or separate ISP communication infrastructure. VPN private network makes security communication channel over public network between two endpoints (computers). OpenVPN is an open source software product under GNU General Public License (GPL) that can be used to establish VPN communication between two computers inside business local network over public communication infrastructure. It uses special security protocols and 256-bit Encryption and it is capable of traversing network address translators (NATs) and firewalls. It allows computers to authenticate each other using a pre-shared secret key, certificates or username and password. This work gives review of VPN technology with a special accent on OpenVPN. This paper will also give comparison and financial benefits of using open source VPN software in business environment.

Information Systems at Northrop Grumman Ship Systems Sector: The Hurricane Katrina Recovery

On August 29th, 2005, Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast causing massive damage throughout Louisiana and Mississippi. Northrop Grumman's Ship Systems sector's facilities in New Orleans, Louisiana and Pascagoula, and Gulfport, Mississippi as well as most of the firms 20,000 employees located in the Gulf were directly impacted by the storm. One data center was destroyed and a second put out of commission for several days. Employees' homes were destroyed and those surviving the storm and their families scattered to safe harbors in neighboring states. Some would never return. Communication to and within the impacted areas was severely disrupted, and the near complete failure of other elements of public infrastructure further delayed the recovery and increased the chaos and suffering. This case looks at Katrina as a very real example of a business continuity disruption that far exceeded the assumptions built into the business continuity plan. It illustrates the essential role that public communication infrastructure plays in disasters such as these, and the risks associated with assuming that communication systems and other public infrastructure will be available in times of cataclysmic failure. The case also demonstrates the unique nature of leadership in a crisis, the problems of pulling together and providing resources to a work force necessary to respond to a crisis, and the unique problems of reassembling, almost from scratch, the necessary information technology infrastructure.

The communications and information economy: issues, tariffs and economics research areas

This survey paper analyses some of the fundamental economic issues concerning the communications and information economy. The first highlighted major trends are the balkanisation of the communications networks, and the advent of competitive tariffs. This leads to a move away from time- and distance-based charges to tariffs covering bandwidth, service, and contents use. It is noted that very few resources have gone into the analysis of that sector and its inter-relations with others. The paper advocates for more visibility and research into the unique aspects of the communications and information sector. It does so by making an inventory of key economics and computational economics research issues in need of contributions, selected from the following areas: • public communications infrastructure and tariffing principles, • sales of communications services, • public access and equal access policies, • competitive access pricing, • communications industry finance, • engineering-economic studies, • information contents, • macroeconomic issues. Finally, the specific aspects of models of the communications and media sector are addressed in view of modelling work. This includes variables, pricing and production models for both communications and information contents. The most unique contribution is here a formal model for quantifying and pricing knowledge, both for consumption and for assets building.

A Speakers' Corner Under the Sun

Advances in spread spectrum and other multiplexing techniques for wireless communications open the possibility that millions of users could use a wireless commons as their infrastructure of first and last resort for many of their communications. In such a wireless commons no organization, private or governmental, owns the infrastructure or clears competing uses, but rather end users coordinate their uses through equipment-embedded collision avoidance and congestion control protocols. This paper explores why a communications environment that includes a wireless commons would be normatively preferable, in liberal democracies, to an environment in which all infrastructure is owned and centrally managed by either private or government bodies. The paper focuses on a comparison of the relative susceptibility to centralization of control over information flows presented by three competing approaches to regulating infrastructure: a pure private property regime, common carriage, and open access spectrum. I suggest that just as public sidewalks, squares and parks served as important platforms for local political discourse, a widely accessible public domain communications infrastructure can play a vital role in a digitally networked, democratic, information society.

Redefining industry structure for the information age

We are entering a new competitive age in which the basis of competition is being fundamentally altered through the introduction of advanced information technologies and public communication infrastructures, such as the Internet. In these environments, the nature and locus of competition will radically alter, as information becomes an increasingly important resource. This paper develops ideas around the strategic characteristics of information—information separability and information specificity. Moreover, it attempts to redefine the nature of industry structure in such a competitive environment by examining what constitutes the real boundaries of competition, industry concentration, related diversification, and innovation for firms competing in the Information Age. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.