Query Messages Research Articles

Anonymous and linkable ring signcryption scheme for location-based services in VANETs

In Location-Based Service (LBS), the vehicle user sends query messages, such as the nearest health centre, restaurant, etc., to the service provider for efficient and accurate service. The service provider gathers data regarding the received query, takes the service charge from the vehicle user, and provides these services efficiently and accurately. The service provider may reveal the vehicle user's privacy if the service provider is malicious. Similarly, if the vehicle user is malicious, he/she may also try to opt for the service from the service provider without paying the service charges. Therefore, vehicle users' queries and the service provider's data privacy are serious concerns in LBS. Some schemes, such as k-anonymity, cryptographic algorithms, etc., have been proposed to overcome these issues. The k-anonymity technique only offers vehicle users' query privacy. Cryptographic algorithms such as homomorphic encryption, oblivious transfer, etc., provide vehicle users' query and the service provider's data privacy at high communication and computation costs but reveal the vehicle user's identity. To overcome these problems, this work proposes an Anonymous and Linkable Ring Signcryption (ALRS) scheme for LBS in VANETs. It provides the service provider's data privacy and the vehicle user's query privacy, keeping the vehicle user's identity anonymous from the service provider. In addition, it maintains linkability (the number of times the same user requests a query) without revealing the identity of the vehicle user. Implementation and detailed results show that the ALRS scheme performed better than the current scheme regarding communication and computation costs and preserves all the privacy requirements.

E-MQTT: End-to-End Synchronous and Asynchronous Communication Mechanisms in MQTT Protocol

Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) enables asynchronous confirmation of message reception by brokers but lacks a way for publishers to know when subscribers receive their messages without adding additional communication overhead. This paper addresses this problem by improving MQTT to establish end-to-end communication between a publisher and subscribers, reducing message exchanges, using what is called End-to-End MQTT (E-MQTT). In E-MQTT, a publisher sets the number of responses that it will wait for when it sends a message. After the broker collects the response messages from subscribers, it sends one aggregated response back to the publisher. The publisher also can receive the response message synchronously or asynchronously. Experimental results consistently show that E-MQTT outperforms traditional MQTT in terms of delay, especially when the publisher needs to monitor when its query message is received by subscribers. Although E-MQTT packets are slightly larger due to additional fields, the difference in packet size compared to MQTT is not significant.

Attacks and Countermeasures on Privacy-Preserving Biometric Authentication Schemes

Based on the Threshold Predicate Encryption (TPE), the biometric authentication scheme <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">PassBio</i> aims to correctly authenticate genuine end-users without leaking their biometric privacy information. However, this article proposes two impersonation attacks to <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">PassBio</i> by merely sending very few query messages. Specifically, an attacker is able to cheat the authentication server with probability 50% by sending the server a random query, or almost 100% by sending the server a collusion of old genuine queries, without being identified. Moreover, in order to defeat the impersonation attacks, this article presents a Verifiable Threshold Predicate Encryption (VTPE) scheme which includes three components: (1) a multi-segment TPE for reducing the computational cost and communication overhead significantly; (2) a segment-wise watermarking for defeating the random attacks; and (3) a challenge-response mechanism for defeating the replay and collusion attacks. In addition, the watermarking also creates a secure channel between the querying user and the server. The experiments on both simulated feature vectors and real face images demonstrate that the present attacks and countermeasures are effective and efficient.

Managing in Writing: Recommendations from Textual Patterns in Managers’ Email Communication

This study draws from personality psychology and linguistics of written communication to explore the characteristics of self-selected well-written email communications (N=273) solicited from Polish managers who organized and supervised the (remote) work of their units during the COVID-19 period. The focus is on the writing of managers with above-average levels of conscientiousness and agreeableness, as these personality factors are predictors of efficacy in the completion of two work-related goals, Achievement and Communion, according to the Theory of Purposeful Work Behavior. The linguistic patterns responsible for effective email communication are identified through both automated and qualitative textual analyses of the email sample. The study has implications for management training via the assumption that linguistic patterns that a reflexive manager uses in writing are subjected to monitoring and can be modeled and adapted to. Specific recommendations for managerial writing styles concern informational, instructional, explanatory, feedback, and query messages.

Modelling dynamic behaviour of agents in a multiagent world: Logical analysis of Wh-questions and answers

Abstract In a multiagent and multi-cultural world, the fine-grained analysis of agents’ dynamic behaviour, i.e. of their activities, is essential. Dynamic activities are actions that are characterized by an agent who executes the action and by other participants of the action. Wh-questions on the participants of the actions pose a difficult particular challenge because the variability of the types of possible answers to such questions is huge. To deal with the problem, we propose the analysis and classification of Wh-questions apt for agents’ communication in a multiagent system (MAS). Our proposal of such a system consists of agents who communicate with their fellow agents by messaging so that each autonomous agent, though resource-bounded, can make less or more rational decisions to meet its own and collective goals. In addition, by communicating with other fellow agents and their environment, agents can learn new concepts and enrich their ontology so that their behaviour is dynamic. We aim to make a general proposal of the system so that the ‘envelope’ of agents’ messages can be formalized in any MAS standard, be it The Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents - Agent Communication Language (FIPA-ACL) or Knowledge Query and Manipulation Language (KQML). Yet, the content of messages is encoded in a formalized natural language. To this end, we apply Transparent Intensional Logic (TIL) with its procedural semantics which is particularly apt for a fine-grained analysis in which all the semantically salient features of natural language can be plausibly formalized. In this paper, we concentrate on analysing the content of query messages, particularly the content of those that encode Wh-questions and the answers to them. We also summarize TIL deduction system that makes it possible to answer such questions in an intelligent way. Linguists distinguish several subtypes of Wh-questions. Though the linguistic classification is helpful, it is not always suitable for agents’ communication and reasoning. We need the classification based on a logical analysis of Wh-questions so that the agents can infer possible answers to such questions rather than only looking for them by keywords. This paper aims to apply an appropriate classification of the logical types of Wh-questions and the analysis of such questions; we concentrate in particular on questions concerning the participants of activities. The application of these results to the analysis of processes and events based on verb valency frames is another novelty of the paper.

An approach to email categorization and response generation

The creation of automatic e-mail responder systems with human-quality responses is challenging due to the ambiguity of meanings and difficulty in response modeling. In this paper, we present the Personal Email Responder (PER); a novel system for email categorization and semi-automatic response generation. The key novelty presented in this paper is an approach to email categorization that distinguishes query and non-query email messages using Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Neural Network (NN) methods. The second novelty is the use of Artificial Intelligence Markup Language (AIML)- based chatbot for semiautomatic response creation. The proposed methodology was implemented as a prototype mobile application, which was then used to conduct an experiment. Email messages logs collected in the experimental phase are used to evaluate the proposed methodology and estimate the accuracy of the presented system for email categorization and semi-automatic response generation.

Highly Efficient Privacy Preserving Location-Based Services with Enhanced One-Round Blind Filter

To take advantages of location-based services (LBS) while protecting user privacy against untrusted LBS providers, privacy preserving LBS have attracted increasing attention. Considering that users in an LBS system are often equipped with resource-constrained mobile devices, most existing privacy preserving LBS methods are based on anonymization techniques. However, these existing schemes still have some privacy and efficiency limitations. In this paper, we propose a novel privacy preserving LBS scheme, which simultaneously achieves user privacy protection and high query efficiency. Specifically, we utilize the k-anonymity technique and the pseudo random function to protect the location privacy and the query message privacy of users. We design an enhanced one-round blind filter protocol (ORBFe) based on the Paillier cryptosystem to securely filter out redundant records generated by the k-anonymity technique. Compared with existing solutions, our ORBFe protocol not only ensures that users receive exactly satisfying results but also incurs a low computation and communication cost on the server side. Through the theoretical analysis and extensive experiments, we demonstrate the security and efficiency of our proposed scheme.

Analytical Comparison of Resource Search Algorithms in Non-DHT Mobile Peer-to-Peer Networks

One of the key challenges in ad-hoc networks is the resource discovery problem. How efficiently & quickly the queried resource/object can be resolved in such a highly dynamic self-evolving network is the underlying question? Broadcasting is a basic technique in the Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs), and it refers to sending a packet from one node to every other node within the transmission range. Flooding is a type of broadcast where the received packet is retransmitted once by every node. The naive flooding technique floods the network with query messages, while the random walk scheme operates by contacting subsets of each node’s neighbors at every step, thereby restricting the search space. Many earlier works have mainly focused on the simulation-based analysis of flooding technique, and its variants, in a wired network scenario. Although, there have been some empirical studies in peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, the analytical results are still lacking, especially in the context of mobile P2P networks. In this article, we mathematically model different widely used existing search techniques, and compare with the proposed improved random walk method, a simple lightweight approach suitable for the non-DHT architecture. We provide analytical expressions to measure the performance of the different flooding-based search techniques, and our proposed technique. We analytically derive 3 relevant key performance measures, i.e., the avg. number of steps needed to find a resource, the probability of locating a resource, and the avg. number of messages generated during the entire search process.

Advanced Service Search Model for Higher Network Navigation Using Small World Networks

Social Internet of Things (SIoT) is a new standard resulting from the integration of the Internet of Things (IoT) and social networking. IoT is a visionary, one-paradigm, whereas social networks are platforms where voluminous collaborations between humans exist. The SIoT is defined as a social network of objects that are not only smarter but also socially conscious. Fundamental requirements of both IoT and SIoT networks include efficient service search and the discovery of object mechanisms. Therefore, our paper proposes a simple model for social networks to discover the object or services by using a small-world network. Our proposed model comprised a set of objects, and where each object is looking for a service. The service search is initiated in different hops by an object using a service query message to the nearest object. If the requested object is identified immediately or at the first hop, a permanent link is established between the service requester and the service provider otherwise the search process is repeated until the service is discovered. In this study, we integrate the SIoT with the small world concept for the building of our model. Our proposed model guarantees that the object containing the information is in a bounded path length and is treatable owing to the structure of small-world networks. The process of search is efficient because it is initiated only when an object asks for another object or service. Our intention here is to increase the navigability of the network. We carefully performed numerical analyses for our model and presented the simulation results based on efficiencies such as average path length, clustering coefficient, service execution time, and the giant component. After conducting various experiments, we conclude that our proposed model is efficient and reflects the real network structures of small-world networks, therefore, it can be suitable for social networks.

VANET: A novel service for predicting and disseminating vehicle traffic information

SummaryThe arrival of cloud computing technology promises innovative solutions to the problems inherent in existing vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) networks. Because of the highly dynamic nature of these networks in crowded conditions, some network performance improvements are needed to anticipate and disseminate reliable traffic information. Although several approaches have been proposed for the dissemination of data in the vehicular clouds, these approaches rely on the dissemination of data from conventional clouds to vehicles, or vice versa. However, anticipating and delivering data, in a proactive way, based on query message or an event driven has not been defined so far by these approaches. Therefore, in this paper, a VANET‐Cloud layer is proposed for traffic management and network performance improvements during congested conditions. For the traffic management, the proposed layer integrates the benefits of the connected sensor network (CSN) to collect traffic data and the cloud infrastructure to provide on‐demand and automatic cloud services. In this work, traffic services use a data exchange mechanism to propagate the predicted data using a fuzzy aggregation technique. In the evaluation phase, simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed VANET‐Cloud layer to dramatically improve traffic safety and network performance as compared with recent works.

Priority Based Time-Division Multiple Access Algorithm for Medium Range Data Communication in Very High Frequency Radios

In this paper, A novel and efficient time division multiple access (TDMA) algorithm for military last-mile data communication is designed. A dynamic slot assignment method coupled with an out-of-band control mechanism is used for the proposed design. In out-of-band, there is a well-defined control segment along with the data segment. So, if a new node specifically a high priority node arrives at the network, it can signal its arrival by a response in the designated mini-slots and can also check the slot in the network, if no idle slots are available. Assigning priority to the nodes would also ensure the delivery of the important messages first. Query messages are broadcasted by the Central node in order to detect new nodes. This reduces nodes working time and also ensures that the nodes don’t interrupt any existing communication. Furthermore, we describe the feasibility and the reliability of this algorithm for military’s last-mile (end user) data communication.

Using Collaborative Edge-Cloud Cache for Search in Internet of Things

With the Internet of Things (IoT) becoming the infrastructure to support domain applications, IoT search engines have attracted increasing attention from users, industry, and research community, since they are capable of crawling heterogeneous data sources in a highly dynamic environment. IoT search engines have to be able to process tens of thousands of spatial–time–keyword queries per second, making query throughput a critical issue. To achieve this heavy workload, caching mechanisms in collaborative edge-cloud computing architecture, which can implement the caching paradigm in cloud for frequent $n$ -hop neighbor activity regions, is first proposed in this article. With our design, the frequent query result can be gained quickly from the spatial–time–keyword filtering index of $n$ -hop neighbor regions by modeling keywords relevance and uncertain traveling time. In addition, we use STK-tree proposed previously to directly answer nonfrequent queries. Extensive experiments on real-life and synthetic data sets demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches with respect to query time and message number.

Energy-efficient and privacy-preserving spatial range aggregation query processing in wireless sensor networks

The existing privacy-preserving aggregation query processing methods in sensor networks rely on pre-established network topology and require all nodes in the network to participate in query processing. Maintaining the topology results in a large amount of energy overhead, and in many cases, the user is interested only in the aggregated query results of some areas in the network, and thus, the participation of the entire network node is not necessary. Aiming to solve this problem, this article proposes a spatial range aggregation query algorithm for a dynamic sensor network with privacy protection (energy-efficient privacy-preserving data aggregation). The algorithm does not rely on the pre-established topology but considers only the query area that the user is interested in, abandoning all nodes to participate in distributing the query messages while gathering the sensory data in the query range. To protect node data privacy, Shamir’s secret sharing technology is used to prevent internal attackers from stealing the sensitive data of the surrounding nodes. The analysis and experimental results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the existing algorithms in terms of energy and privacy protection.

New Locally Correctable Codes Based on Projective Reed–Muller Codes

Locally decodable codes and locally correctable codes (LCCs) have several important applications, such as private information retrieval, secure multiparty computation, and circuit lower bounds. Three major parameters are considered in LCCs: query complexity, message length, and codeword length. The most familiar LCCs in the regime of low query complexity are the generalized Reed–Muller (GRM) codes. However, it has not previously been determined whether there exist codes that have shorter codeword lengths than GRM codes with the same query complexity and message length. In this paper, we show that the projective Reed–Muller (PRM) codes are such LCCs for some parameters. The GRM code is specified by the alphabet size $q$ , the number of variables $m$ , and the degree $d$ , where $d\le q-2$ . When $d= q-2$ and $q-1$ is a power of a prime, we prove that there exists a PRM code with shorter codeword length than the GRM code with the same query complexity and message length. We also present for these PRM codes a perfectly smooth local decoder to recover a symbol in a codeword by accessing not more than $q$ symbols at the coordinates of the codeword.

The Multicast Function Design Based on Cortina System CS8022

In this paper, the Ethernet multicast management protocol agent (IGMP Proxy) processing unit is designed, which is composed of ARMCPU and CS8022 chips. The packets through the up-link or the down-link are firstly received by CS8022 network node interfaces or service node interfaces, then through the CS8022 port analysis, the IGMP message would be sent to the IGMP Proxy Program of ARMCPU to handle. The IGMP Proxy program is composed of the main module, the host module and the routing module. After the processing of the main module, the host module and the routing module, the amount of the IGMP message between the multicast router and the user computer can be greatly reduced, and speed up the response speed of the multicast router query message; When the multicast stream reaches the multicast router, the time for receiving the multicast stream from the user computer is shortened and the network bandwidth is saved.

Alpha Multipliers Breadth-First Search Technique for Resource Discovery in Unstructured Peer-to-Peer Networks

Resource discovery in unstructured peer-to-peer (P2P) networks is important in the field of grid computing. Breadth-first search (BFS) is widely used for resource discovery in unstructured P2P networks. The technique is proven to return as many search results as possible. However, the network cost of the technique is high due to the flooding of query messages that can degenerate the performance of the whole network. The objective of this study is to optimise the BFS technique, so that it will produce good search results without flooding the network with unnecessary walkers. Several resource discovery techniques used in unstructured P2P networks are discussed and categorised. P2P simulators that are used for P2P network experiments were studied in accordance to their characteristics such as, scalability, extensibility and support status. Several network topology generators were also scrutinised and selected in order to find out the most real-life like network generation model for unstructured P2P experiments. Multiple combinations of five-tuple alpha multipliers have been experimented to find out the best set to make -BFS. In our test, the -BFS increases the query efficiency of the conventional BFS from 55.67% to 63.15%.

Comparison of Data Dissemination Protocols for Road Traffic Collecting Application in a Vehicular Ad hoc Network

Providing real-time road traffic information to drivers is a critical step to improve road traffic efficiency by allowing appropriate routes to be chosen. In a Vehicular Ad hoc Network (VANET), a query message can be disseminated along several road paths for collecting road traffic information. While several VANET protocols have been proposed to accomplish such task, they were evaluated in different settings, environments, and a limited scale. To gain better insights for actual deployment, it is necessary to explore their relative performance advantages and limitations. In this paper, we compare Slotted 1 persistence, Efficient Directional Broadcast (EDB), Data dissemination pRotocol In VEhicular networks (DRIVE), and Road Traffic Collecting (RTC) protocols under a large scale city networks, high vehicle density, multiple query sessions, and the presence of interfering background traffic. The evaluation focuses on the average percentage of targeted road segment coverage, the total number of transmitted messages, and the completion delay time. The results show that EDB outperforms other protocols in terms of the road segment coverage with highest number of transmitted messages while RTC yields a lower number of transmitted messages with less road segment coverage. However, EDB requires road-side units at every intersection and its performance dramatically drops under the failure of road-side units.

Fuzzy searching and routing in unstructured mobile peer-to-peer networks

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks offer a scalable solution for efficient query searching and sharing across the unstructured networks. With an increased overhead due to large amount of object searching and routing in unstructured P2P networks, it is a challenge to continue QoS routing among different mobile peers. Most existing mobile P2P protocols focus on inflexible techniques to route queries and discover objects of interest. Such common techniques incur a relatively high search time due to remarkable network traffic and duplication of query messages. The correlation between routing and mobility is crucial to efficiently search and route the query object in an overlay to avoid unnecessary consumption of network resources. Our previous fuzzy search controller model (Shah and Kim in 12th IEEE international conference on dependable, autonomic and secure computing (DASC), 2014) reduced the search time query processing in P2P networks, but it caused low hit rate and a high overhead due to peer mobility. Thus, this article proposes a scalable fuzzy controller based on probabilistic walk for unstructured mobile P2P networks to reduce the search time with controlled mobility. The search time is reduced by jumping a query walker to a 2-hop away ultrapeer, selected through a fuzzy scheme. Furthermore, each mobile ultrapeer shares its pong cache with its directly connected ultrapeer in order to increase the hit rate and reduce the network overhead. Simulations show that the fuzzy search controller gives better performance than the competing protocols in terms time 10% reduction in response time and 15% increase in hit rate in different mobility scenarios.

Using GSW FHE to provide stronger privacy protection for searchable encryption

Nowadays, with increasingly strong awareness of privacy protection, more and more people choose to encrypt their data and then outsource it to the server, but how to search the encrypted data is a challenging problem in this situation. Many people have studied this problem, not only for the fundamental property of this, but also because there is a practical issue where the volume of data is so huge that it is impractical for users to download the whole data and search on it. One common solution is to build an inverted index using a special algorithm and support searchable algorithm on the encrypted data, but this causes another problem: the privacy will be leaked to the data owner when the owner and user are not the same person. In this paper, we design a novel scheme to solve this problem. We provide stronger privacy protection for users when they search on the data, and the scheme can protect the privacy of the inverted index table and content of data. Besides, the data owner cannot get any information about the query messages searched by users. Also, we analyse the security of our scheme, and the simulation demonstrates the good performance of our scheme.

Distributed Group-Based Mobility Management Scheme in Wireless Body Area Networks

For group-based mobility management in 6LoWPAN-based wireless body area networks (WBAN), some schemes using the Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIP) have been proposed. However, the existing PMIP-based mobility schemes tend to induce large registration delay and handover delay. To overcome such limitations, we propose a new distributed group-based mobility management scheme, in which the Local Mobility Anchor (LMA) function is implemented by each Mobile Access Gateway (MAG) and the handover operation is performed between two neighboring MAGs without the help of LMA. Besides, each MAG maintains the information of the group of mobile sensors and aggregates the Authentication-Authorization-Accounting (AAA) query messages for a group of mobile sensors as a “single” message to decrease the control overhead. By numerical analysis, it is shown that the proposed scheme can reduce the registration and handover delays, compared to the existing PMIP-based mobility schemes.