Unprotected Environment Research Articles

Hash message authentication codes for securing data in wireless body area networks

SummaryThere are numerous medical applications for the growing use of wireless body area networks (WBANs), including remote patient health monitoring, early illness detection, and computer‐assisted rehabilitation. WBAN links many sensor nodes implanted or affixed to the human body to monitor physiological data. WBAN technology has the potential to benefit medical healthcare systems tremendously. However, the gathering and transferring sensitive physiological data in an unprotected environment raises severe security and privacy concerns. The limited resources and broadcast transmission of a WBAN pose grave safety issues in biomedical applications. Keeping sensitive patient data safe during broadcasts is critical in the healthcare business. As a result of the massive memory and processing requirements required by traditional public or private key architectures, tiny sensor nodes cannot use them. WBAN sensor nodes can communicate securely using the KHMAC key‐agreement technique proposed in this article. Measurements and confirmations of shared physiological parameters at the transmitter and recipient sensors are key to the proposed protocol KHMAC before communication is established. The proposed KHMAC protocol enables sensors to use their prior session knowledge for secure communication within a predetermined time window. This will shorten the time it takes to establish a shared key, prevent the retransmission of extracted characteristics in the medium and eavesdropping attacks, and preserve the unpredictability of the key. Both the feature extraction and key agreement stages will be shown to have higher precision and lower error rates with KHMAC's proposed key management methodology. The proposed protocol is proven to be more energy and memory efficient than existing key agreement systems.

Economic feasibility of tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) production under protected and unprotected environment

Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum L.) is a high-value crop that is in high demand globally. The present study was carried out at G B Pant University of Agriculture and Technology (GBPUAT), Pantnagar, Uttarakhand during 2016–18 with the objective to explore the economic feasibility of tomato production under controlled and uncontrolled environments. The present study examines the costs and returns associated with the production of tomatoes in greenhouses and open fields, including the initial investment, operational costs, and revenue generated. The study found that greenhouse tomato production was more expensive, with a higher initial investment and operational costs, but generated higher yields and returns per unit area. On the other hand, open-field tomato production had lower initial investment and operational costs but had lower yields and returns per unit area. Overall, tomato production can be economically feasible under both controlled and uncontrolled environments, but the decision to use either method should be based on the specific conditions of each farm and the market demand for the product.

Review of the techniques and mechanisms for enhancing trust in internet of things for smart agriculture

Smart agriculture is an emerging technology that has been developed from innovative information technologies such as AI, IoT, ML, smart vehicles in order to maximize outputs while optimizing farm inputs for better production and profit. However, these innovations have several vulnerabilities, especially, given that most of agriculture is practiced in open fields, exposed to harsh, unprotected environments. Studies have been conducted on its security issues and how to mitigate the threats from the vulnerabilities along with some studies in data privacy in smart agriculture. However, studies on trust issues of farmers on these technologies are absent. This paper looks at the security issues and how they impact on farmers’ trust on these technologies. It finally offers direction on hoe to enhance their trust on the smart farming technologies.

Sintering of Iron Powders by Resistance Heating Technique

In this study, powder metal samples of 15x15x4 mm dimensions of Fe powders were produced at different pressures (650,850,1050 MPa). They were sintered in atmospheric environment with the help of resistance sintering method applied for the first time using electric resistance welding machine. The sintered and green densities of the powder metal samples were determined and their sinterability in the unprotected environment was examined. In addition, the effects of electric resistance heating technique on sintering were investigated by performing hardness measurement and microscopic examination of sintered samples. As a conclusion, powder metal samples were sintered successfully with the electric resistance welding technique in an unprotected environment and high-density values such as 98% were obtained.

Containerized Grain Logistics Processes for Implementing Sustainable Identity Preservation

Grains are often exposed to unprotected environment during post-harvest logistics processes. Since grains are usually accommodated in silos on farms, when importing grains, they are transported to silos or yards at ports by heavy vehicles, and imported to another country (or region) by bulk carriers. Thereafter the grains are stored at silos and transported in bulk or tone-sacks by heavy vehicles. The grain quality often deteriorates due to unprotected storage and transportation environment through the logistics processes, whereby they become affected by insects, pests, rancidity, discoloration, and so on. This study examines a containerized grain logistics contributing to well-known identity preservation, analyzes the applicability in terms of logistics cost, and discusses potential effects on sustainability improvement by tracing and preserving the grains for a longer duration in well-protected spaces during the logistics processes. This study introduces the necessity of preservation containers to implement the containerized grain logistics to prevent quality deterioration. A comparative cost analysis is conducted to investigate the effect of the containerized grain logistics. According to the comparative analysis, conventional bulk logistics has benefits in shipping (76.2%) and storage costs (89%), whereas the containerized logistics has economic viability in tariff (23.2%) and infrastructure costs (51.2%).

Biometric Authentication for Intelligent and Privacy-Preserving Healthcare Systems.

Secure identification is a critical system requirement for patients seeking health-related services. In the event of critical, aged, or disabled patients who require frequent health treatments, quick and easy identification is vital. Researchers describe the notion of the unprotected environment in this study, in which patients can receive health services from the hospital's smart and intelligent surroundings without the use of explicit equipment. Patients would interact directly with the environment and be identified through it. We suggest a biometric-based authentication technique for the unprotected hospital environment that also safeguards the patient's identity privacy. Furthermore, we demonstrate that this authentication technique is resistant to many well-known assaults, including insider attacks, replay attacks, and identity privacy. Doctors and other staff members showed enthusiastic responses after installing 2-factor authentications, as it makes their workflow efficient and makes things easier for patients. It also lets them focus on other factors rather than worrying about data security; hence, we need biometric authentication in intelligent and privacy-preserving healthcare systems. The paper deals with two-factor biometric authentication, and despite the added security, two-factor authentication adoption is said to be poor. It is due to a lack of awareness and difficulty to use and configure two-factor authentication (2FA) into a particular application by some individuals who struggle with the concept of authentication and its technology. Also, many 2FA methods in widespread use today have not been subjected to adequate usability testing. Research focuses on the point that there is still a large section of people unaware of the use of biometric systems to protect their online data. Researchers collected quantitative and qualitative data from 96 individuals during a two-week between-subjects usability survey of some common and rarely used 2FA approaches. The survey allowed the researcher to investigate which authentication methods are given higher priority and why, along with the relationship between different usage patterns and perceived usability, and identify user misconceptions and insecure habits to determine ease of use. It was observed that the biometric-based method was given the utmost preferability.

The Transition from Short- to Long-Term Marine Corrosion of Carbon Steels: 1. Experimental Observations

This paper is concerned with developing an understanding of the transition between modes 1 and 2 of the bi-modal characteristic often observed for corrosion (mass) loss of many different alloys and in a variety of longer-term (years) exposure conditions. Corrosion losses and pit depth and size for carbon steels (0.01 wt%, 0.04 wt%, and 0.06 wt% C) immersed continuously in sheltered 20°C (av.) seawater, 30°C (constant) seawater, and 70°C (constant) distilled water environments are reported with observations at 14 d and 28 d intervals over 1.4 y. The data allow clear demonstration of bi-modal behavior and variability in mass loss much less than typical for unprotected environments. All cases showed significant development of pit depths and pit areas particularly later in mode 1, through the transition phase and into mode 2. Using established observations of pitting mechanisms, the development of pitting is interpreted as facilitating the reduction in pH at the corrosion interface that permits the cathodic reaction to change from oxygen reduction in mode 1 to hydrogen evolution in mode 2, consistent with longer-term predominantly anaerobic corrosion in the later part of the bi-modal model. The observations also shed some light on the relationship between pitting corrosion and what is conventionally referred to as uniform corrosion.

THE CAUSAL EFFECT OF WATER AND SANITATION ON CHILDREN UNDER FIVE-YEAR MORTALITY IN AFGHANISTAN

Due to the inaccessibility of households to improved drinking water and safe sanitation, Afghan children die at the early age of childhood. This study provides empirical evidence to examine the causal effect of unsafe drinking water and poor sanitation on children under 5-year mortality in Afghanistan. To testify the relationship between household’s sanitation environment and drinking water sources on children under five-year mortality, the children under five-year categorized into the neonatal, infant, and under five-year ages. The binary logistic regression and marginal effect model have been used to discover the impact of water and sanitation on children under-five year mortality. The result revealed that children born in unimproved environments such as unclean drinking water sources and poor sanitation facilities are more likely to die in infancy age. The risk of poor sanitation facilities is significantly higher than unsafe water supply on child mortality at the age of less than 5. In conclusion, an unprotected environment is statistically more likely to increase the risk of children under five-year mortality in Afghanistan. The result recommended to the government to provide a safe water supply, increase the awareness of household members about sanitation, and improve the quality of public healthcare services to decrease the casual effect of water and poor sanitation on children under five-year mortalities.

The Reality of Education in Gaza: An Analysis of the Impacts of the Israeli Blockade and Identification of its Humanitarian Recovery Needs 2006-2018

This study aimed to examine the impact of the Israeli blockade on Palestinian education and to identify the humanitarian recovery needs necessary for the quality and continuity of education. The study used the descriptive analytical method which involved examining at the phenomenon under investigation. To answer the questions of the study, the Comprehensive Literature Review Meta-Framework of the Seven-step Model was employed to guide the methodology of this research to introduce profound inferences about the impacts of the Israeli blockade on education in the Gaza Strip as well as about the recovery needs necessary to ensure the quality and continuity of Palestinian education. The findings revealed that the Israeli blockade severely impacted Palestinian education in the Gaza Strip and hindered student access to quality and inclusive education in various ways. Students were the most affected by the 12-year blockade. They were repeatedly exposed to a huge loss of lives, severe psychological traumas, and worsening economic conditions. As well, teachers were not immune from the grave consequences of the blockade in terms of murder, denial of mobility and exchange, deprivation of professional development, psychological traumas, and chronic power-cut-offs. Also, the entire Palestinian educational system was impaired by the Israeli blockade in terms of direct school destruction, stuck school reconstruction, chronic power supply deficit, unprotected learning environment, and controlled educational curriculum. Targeting and controlling students, teachers, educational infrastructure, and curricula caused long-lasting impairment to the whole Palestinian educational system. The Israeli blockade was detrimental to the students’ right to quality education that would advance their competencies and responds to the compelling current and future development needs in the Gaza Strip. Therefore, the study identified some foremost humanitarian recovery needs to be addressed by Palestinian policy makers to redress the forbidding impacts of the Israeli blockade on Palestinian education. Keywords: Palestinian education, Israeli blockade.

Future of IOT

Abstract: Internet of Things (IoT) can also be a thinking that encompasses severa objects and approaches of verbal exchange to change info. these days IoT is a lot of a descriptive time period of a imaginative and prescient that the whole thing ought to be related to the web. IoT are going to be primary inside the future as a end result of the notion exposes possibilities for manufacturer new offerings and new innovations. All objects are going to be linked and geared up to speak with one another, whereas they function in unprotected environments. This later side outcomes in most important protection challenges. With the introduction of the net of Things (IoT), our verbal exchange capability may not be constrained to completely cell devices. Rather, it will increase to any or all matters with that we have a tendency to be. numerous research have referred to IoT-related offerings and platforms. However, there rectangular measure completely restrained discussions concerning the IoT network. at some point of this paper, we will completely analyze the technical small print involving the IoT network. supported our survey of papers, we are going to provide perception concerning the lengthy run IoT community and consequently the integral parts which will alter it. With the net of Things (IoT) bit by means of bit evolving due to the fact the succeeding area of the evolution of the web, it turns into integral to well known the different manageable domains for utility of IoT, and consequently the evaluation challenges that rectangular measure associated to these applications. Beginning from smart cities, to fitness care, good agriculture, imparting and retail, to even smart residing and good environments IoT is estimated to infiltrate into just about all components of way of life. Keywords: Internet of Things, IoT, information security, identification, home automation, secure communication, Internet of Everything, IoT network, future network, IoT applications, IoT gateway, future technologies.

Trustee: A Trust Management System for Fog-Enabled Cyber Physical Systems

In this paper, we propose a lightweight trust management system (TMS) for fog-enabled cyber physical systems (Fog-CPS). Trust computation is based on multi-factor and multi-dimensional parameters, and formulated as a statistical regression problem which is solved by employing random forest regression model. Additionally, as the Fog-CPS systems could be deployed in open and unprotected environments, the CPS devices and fog nodes are vulnerable to numerous attacks namely, collusion, self-promotion, bad-mouthing, ballot-stuffing, and opportunistic service. The compromised entities can impact the accuracy of trust computation model by increasing/decreasing the trust of other nodes. These challenges are addressed by designing a generic trust credibility model which can countermeasure the compromise of both CPS devices and fog nodes. The credibility of each newly computed trust value is evaluated and subsequently adjusted by correlating it with a standard deviation threshold. The standard deviation is quantified by computing the trust in two configurations of hostile environments and subsequently comparing it with the trust value in a legitimate/normal environment. Our results demonstrate that credibility model successfully countermeasures the malicious behaviour of all Fog-CPS entities i.e., CPS devices and fog nodes. The multi-factor trust assessment and credibility evaluation enable accurate and precise trust computation and guarantee a dependable Fog-CPS system.

Design and implementation of an integrated pipeline security system with optmized scheduling

<p>Offshore equipment and facilities are some of the most capital intensive and strategically located assets that require millions to billions of dollars to setup. Thus, it is important to put in place a stout security and surveillance system to ultimately protect these assets from vandalisation and theft. Monitoring of intruders/ unfamiliar objects within and outside the offshore platform requires a round-the-clock observation through provided security personnel who are stationed so as to quickly respond to any threat within a safe distance in the event of any physical intrusion but this measure is fraught with some challenges. Some of these challenges include fatigue, error in human judgement, and the limited vision of humans to mention but a few. To remedy these weaknesses and ensure a robust protection, the design and implementation/ setting up of a surveillance system to detect and track real time security concerns with a much wider and effective coverage area to enable the control unit make a well informed decision appropriately is an imperative. The system presented in this paper is designed to operate in harsh (sea waves, and fog) and unprotected (extreme heat, cold precipitation) environment.</p>

A Secure Integrated Framework for Fog-Assisted Internet-of-Things Systems

Fog-assisted Internet-of-Things (Fog-IoT) systems are deployed in remote and unprotected environments, making them vulnerable to security, privacy, and trust challenges. Existing studies propose security schemes and trust models for these systems. However, mitigation of insider attacks, namely, blackhole, sinkhole, sybil, collusion, self-promotion, and privilege escalation, has always been a challenge and mostly carried out by the legitimate nodes. Compared to other studies, this article proposes a framework featuring attribute-based access control and trust-based behavioral monitoring to address the challenges mentioned above. The proposed framework consists of two components, the security component (SC) and the trust management component (TMC). SC ensures data confidentiality, integrity, authentication, and authorization. TMC evaluates Fog-IoT entities' performance using a trust model based on a set of Quality of Service (QoS) and network communication features. Subsequently, trust is embedded as an attribute within SC's access control policies, ensuring that only trusted entities are granted access to fog resources. Several attacking scenarios, namely, Denial of Service (DoS), Distributed DoS, probing, and data theft are designed to elaborate on how the change in trust triggers the change in access rights and, therefore, validates the proposed integrated framework's design principles. The framework is evaluated on a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ to benchmark its performance in terms of time and memory complexity. Our results show that both SC and TMC are lightweight and suitable for resource-constrained devices.

An Efficient Counter-Based DDoS Attack Detection Framework Leveraging Software Defined IoT (SD-IoT)

The Internet of things (IoT) introduces emerging applications (i.e., smart homes, smart cities, smart health, and smart gird) that assist the traditional infrastructure environments to be connected with smart objects. Things are connected with the Internet and numerous new IoT devices are developing at a rapid pace. As these smart objects are connected and able to communicate with each other in unprotected environments; therefore, the whole communication ecosystem requires security solutions at different levels. IoT technology possesses unique characteristics with various resource constraints and heterogeneous network protocol requirements, unlike traditional networks. The attacker exploits numerous security vulnerabilities of an IoT infrastructure, to generate a DDoS attack. The increase in DDoS attacks has made it important to address the consequences which imply in the IoT industry. This research proposes an SD-IoT based framework that provides security services to the IoT network. We developed a C-DAD (Counter-based DDoS Attack Detection) application that is based on counter values of different network parameters, which helps to detect DDoS attack successfully. C-DAD is a dynamic and programmable solution, and is deeply tested with different network parameters. The algorithm demonstrates a good performance with better results through SDN. Moreover, the proposed framework detects the attack efficiently in a minimum amount of time and with lesser consumption of CPU and memory resources.

Restoration of hydraulic cylinder rods by method of ESA

During the operation of equipment, its structural elements under the influence of frictional forces and the environment are exposed to various types of wear. To maintain the rolling stock in a working condition, it is necessary to systematically carry out a large set of measures, such as maintenance, current and overhaul repairs with periodic replacement and restoration of worn parts and assemblies. It is obvious that maintaining the performance of modern machines requires high technical knowledge and modern technology. It is not uncommon for special machinery, including tractors and various agricultural vehicles, to be equipped with hydraulic power systems to perform various heavy operations. The actuating mechanisms of such systems are hydraulic cylinders. One of the main features of their design and operation is that the main and very precise part - the rod in working order is in an unprotected environment, namely in the open air. The specificity of the work of heavy equipment is high dust content, gas pollution and the presence of various abrasive materials in the work area in the form of stones and soil. Under these conditions, the precision, polished rods are subject to significant wear. In this paper, the possibility of restoring hydraulic cylinder rods for small types of wear (scratches and dents of a depth of no more than 0,3 mm) is considered by the method of electrospark alloying (ESA), with the creation of coatings on their working surfaces that are identical in their characteristics to the new ones. Electrode materials and processing modes were selected. Research was carried out to determine the dynamic microhardness of the created coating.

Development of SETUP-free cryptographic protocols

Today, hybrid cryptosystems are important part in structure of information telecommunication systems. That's why information security measures are extremely crucial at each stage of cryptosystem development life cycle. One of the most important specific of modern cryptosystems is the fact, that they often deployed in unprotected environment and outside the physically secured perimeter. That introduces new attack vectors, e.g. kleptographic attacks which include implementation forgery at endpoints. Such attack types are extremely dangerous because of the victim, who is a participant of some restricted area (electronic document flow, payment system, secure communication etc.), may induce threats for non-compromised participants (e.g., sensitive information leakage). One of the ways to solve mitigate this risks is development subliminal channel free cryptosystems which are resistant against different types of kleptographic attacks. In the article we show results belong to development of SETUP free cryptographic protocol development. Firstly, we suggest formal model for basic ''challenge-response'' protocol with subliminal channel. Using this formal model, we introduce sufficient conditions which lead to impossibility of existence of subliminal channels. Also the theorem about sufficient conditions has been formulated and proved. Further, we suggest improvements of basic protocols -- nonce generation and 1-round Diffie-Hellman key agreement protocol with design that is based of sufficient conditions. Using formalization of suggested enhanced protocols we formulated and proved the theorem about SETUP resistance property for these protocols. Our results may be useful for other SETUP free protocols development, this will be helpful for increasing security of hybrid cryptosystem.

Measuring Performances of a White-Box Approach in the IoT Context

The internet of things (IoT) refers to all the smart objects that are connected to other objects, devices or servers and that are able to collect and share data, in order to “learn” and improve their functionalities. Smart objects suffer from lack of memory and computational power, since they are usually lightweight. Moreover, their security is weakened by the fact that smart objects can be placed in unprotected environments, where adversaries are able to play with the symmetric-key algorithm used and the device on which the cryptographic operations are executed. In this paper, we focus on a family of white-box symmetric ciphers substitution–permutation network (SPN)box, extending and improving our previous paper on the topic presented at WIDECOM2019. We highlight the importance of white-box cryptography in the IoT context, but also the need to have a fast black-box implementation (server-side) of the cipher. We show that, modifying an internal layer of SPNbox, we are able to increase the key length and to improve the performance of the implementation. We measure these improvements (a) on 32/64-bit architectures and (b) in the IoT context by encrypting/decrypting 10,000 payloads of lightweight messaging protocol Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT).

New efficient M2C and M2M mutual authentication protocols for IoT-based healthcare applications

With the rapid advancement of heterogeneous wireless technologies and their proliferation in ambient connected objects, the Internet of Things (IoT) is a paradigm that revolutionizes communication between people/objects. Communication between connected objects is achieved via various communication modes, including Machine-to-Machine (M2M) and Machine-to-Cloud (M2C). In the medical field, monitoring devices help to collect, exchange and process patient health parameters, and are employed in open and unprotected environments, which expose them to various attacks. For this reason, providing high levels of security and privacy become crucial, and a first requirement to ensure this is authentication. In this paper, we propose three new lightweight, efficient authentication protocols for IoT-based healthcare applications. We formally verify them using AVISPA and ProVerif automated tools. For each protocol, we provide a security analysis and a performance evaluation that we compare to related existing proposals.

Enterprise Cybersecurity: Investigating and Detecting Ransomware Infections Using Digital Forensic Techniques

As the world continues to grow and embrace technology ransomware is growing problem. When ransomware encrypts storage sytems, systems shutdown, productivity grinds to a halt, and serious long-term damage takes place. As this is a known problem many firms have developed functionality to address ransomware issues in key security technologies such as intrusion protection systems. Many firms, especially smaller ones, may not have access to these technologies or perhaps the integration of these technologies might not yet be possible due ot varying circumstances. Regardless, ransomware must still be addressed as cyber miscreants actually target weak and unprotected environment. Even without tools that automate and aggregrate security capability, systems administrators can use systems utilities, applications, and digital forensic techniques to detect ransomware and defend their environemnts. This paper explores the literature regarding ransomware attacks, discusses current issues on how ransomware might be addressed, and presents recommendations to detect and investigate ransomware infection.

End to end light weight mutual authentication scheme in IoT-based healthcare environment

In a modern healthcare environment, the adoption of mobile health care technology is promising to enhance the quality of patient monitoring of chronically ill as well as elderly and healthy individuals for quick intervention at any critical situation. The patient’s vital signs and physiological parameters can be monitored by the sensor nodes attached to the patient’s body sensor network which is then transmitted to the appropriate medical professional for further action through wireless communication media such as Bluetooth, WiFi, 3G/4G. At the same time, the security and privacy of the patient data are to be protected against the inherent threats and vulnerabilities in an unprotected environment. In this aspect, we have proposed an end to end mutual authentication scheme to ensure the security and privacy of the patient balancing security and performance. The proposed authentication scheme also makes use of PDA or a smartphone as a gateway node enabling continuous monitoring of the patient even in a nonclinical environment. In addition, the scheme includes the protocol steps for an emergency scenario, by which the quality of patient care is sustained in a critical situation. The security analysis shows that the proposed scheme is more efficient compared with other related schemes.