Untrusted Users Research Articles

Cooperative Relay Transmission under Physical Layer Security for Non-Orthogonal Networks

In this paper, the secrecy performance for a downlink cooperative non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) communication system is studied under two cases. In the first case, the presence of an untrusted user is studied. While, the presence of an eavesdropper node is considered in the second case. The base station transmits superimposed information signals to the half-duplex two-way relay node. The relay amplifies-and-forwards the received signal towards the users. This paper studies the effectiveness of two factors on the secrecy performance in terms of secrecy capacity. these factors are the power allocated for each user, and the distance between the untrusted user and the cooperative relay node with respect to the strong user. Moreover, this paper proposes the shared jamming signal strategy in order to enhance the physical layer security of the cooperative NOMA in the presence of an eavesdropper node. Furthermore, simulations of the secrecy capacity are presented and compared with a conventional scheme based on null-steering jamming scheme. Based on the result the proposed technique outperforms the conventional technique in terms the of secrecy capacity.

Measuring Decentrality in Blockchain Based Systems

Blockchain promises to provide a distributed and decentralized means of trust among untrusted users. However, in recent years, a shift from decentrality to centrality has been observed in the most accepted Blockchain system, i.e., Bitcoin. This shift has motivated researchers to identify the cause of decentrality, quantify decentrality and analyze the impact of decentrality. In this work, we take a holistic approach to identify and quantify decentrality in Blockchain based systems. First, we identify the emergence of centrality in three layers of Blockchain based systems, namely governance layer, network layer and storage layer. Then, we quantify decentrality in these layers using various metrics. At the governance layer, we measure decentrality in terms of fairness, entropy, Gini coefficient, Kullback-Leibler divergence, etc. Similarly, in the network layer, we measure decentrality by using degree centrality, betweenness centrality and closeness centrality. At the storage layer, we apply a distribution index to define centrality. Subsequently, we evaluate the decentrality in Bitcoin and Ethereum networks and discuss our observations. We noticed that, with time, both Bitcoin and Ethereum networks tend to behave like centralized systems where a few nodes govern the whole network.

Secure Transmission Designs for NOMA Systems Against Internal and External Eavesdropping

The key idea of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is to serve multiple users in the same resource block to improve the spectral efficiency. Whereas due to the resource sharing, a security flaw of NOMA emerges in the presence of internal untrusted users, especially untrusted near users who are closer to the base station and can easily access the confidential information for paired far users. To mitigate the flaw, in this paper, we investigate the reliable and secure transmission of NOMA systems with untrusted near users, and propose joint beamforming and power allocation (JBP) scheme for the scenario. Meanwhile, from security point of view, we extend to a worse-case scenario where both untrusted near users and external eavesdroppers exist, and propose joint artificial noise aided beamforming and power allocation (JANBP) scheme to achieve a reliable and secure transmission for the scenario. The exact and asymptotic closed-form expressions of secrecy outage probability (SOP) for the two scenarios are derived to evaluate the secrecy performance achieved by the proposed schemes, respectively. The analysis and simulation results show the superiority of the proposed JBP and JANBP schemes in terms of combating internal and external eavesdropping, and also indicate the two schemes can achieve the same SOP at high SNR.

Attribute Based Encryption in Cloud Computing

Cloud acts as a database for huge amount of data. It allows users to store the information or data related items in the cloud storage and allows them to use/ their data via network connection. There are different types of cloud, Public private hybrid and community. In case of public cloud the user rents the storage and stores the data in it. There exist some trust issues in storing data in the cloud since there are many untrusted users who also rented the cloud and there is need for the encryption of data there are many ways to encrypt the data the new trend in encryption is attribute based encryption. The main advantage in attribute based encryption is that it depends on the attributes of the user which differs vastly from one user to another. This paper explains about the use of attribute based encryption in cloud and how it differs from the other encryption algorithms and it advantages over other algorithms. This paper also explains about the cipher-text policy in ABE in various aspects

Secure Transmission via Beamforming Optimization for NOMA Networks

Owing to the eminent performance gain, non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has been regarded as a promising approach to achieve high throughput and low latency for the next-generation networks. Nevertheless, potential adversaries can still pose a threat to secure transmission in NOMA systems. Hence, in this article, secure transmission schemes based on beamforming optimization are designed to combat both internal and external eavesdropping for downlink multi-input single-output NOMA networks. Using the transmit beamforming design, we first propose two schemes to protect the privacy of a specific NOMA user in the presence of untrusted users. Then, the sum secrecy rate optimization problem is studied to combat the external eavesdropper through optimizing the precoding vectors, when the channel state information (CSI) is available. In addition, two secure beamforming strategies with the help of artificial noise and inter-user interference are proposed without eavesdropping CSI, respectively. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed schemes, and some open issues are discussed as well.

Efficient Revocation of Untrusted User in Identity based Cloud Storage System for Shared Big Data

Efficient Revocation of Untrusted User in Identity based Cloud Storage System for Shared Big Data

Robust Physical Layer Security for Power Domain Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access-Based HetNets and HUDNs: SIC Avoidance at Eavesdroppers

In this paper, we investigate the physical layer security in downlink of Power Domain Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (PD-NOMA)-based heterogeneous cellular network (HetNet). In this paper, we assume two categories of users are available: 1) Trusted users and 2) untrusted users (eavesdroppers) at which transparency of users is not clear for the BSs, i.e., they are potential eavesdroppers. Our aim is to maximize the sum secrecy rate of the network. To this end, we formulate joint subcarrier and power allocation optimization problems to increase sum secrecy rate. Moreover, we propose a novel scheme at which the eavesdroppers are prevented from doing Successive Interference Cancellation (SIC), while legitimate users are able to do it. In practical systems, perfectly availability of all eavesdroppers' Channel State Information (CSI) at legitimate transmitters are impractical. Also CSIs of legitimate users may be also imperfect due to the error of channel estimation. Hence, we study two cases of CSI availability: 1) Perfect CSI of nodes (legitimate users and eavesdroppers) are available at the BSs and 2) imperfect CSI of nodes are available at the BSs. Since the proposed optimization problems are non-convex, we adopt the well-known iterative algorithm called Alternative Search Method (ASM). In this algorithm, the optimization problems are converted to two subproblems, power allocation and subcarrier allocation. We solve the power allocation problem by the Successive Convex Approximation approach and solve the subcarrier allocation subproblem, by exploiting the Mesh Adaptive Direct Search algorithm (MADS). Moreover, in order to study the optimality gap of the proposed solution method, we apply the monotonic optimization method. Moreover, we evaluate the proposed scheme for secure massive connectivity in Heterogeneous Ultra Dense Networks (HUDNs). Furthermore, we investigate multiple antennas base stations scenario in this literature. Finally, we numerically compare the proposed scheme with the conventional case at which the eavesdroppers are able to apply SIC. Numerical results highlight that the proposed scheme significantly improves the sum secrecy rate compared with the conventional case.

Subcarrier pairing as channel gain tailoring: Joint resource allocation for relay-assisted secure OFDMA with untrusted users

Joint resource allocation involving optimization of subcarrier allocation, subcarrier pairing (SCP), and power allocation in a cooperative secure orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) communication system with untrusted users is considered. Both amplify and forward (AF), and decode and forward (DF) modes of operations are considered with individual power budget constraints for source and relay. After finding optimal subcarrier allocation for an AF relayed system, we prove the joint power allocation as a generalized convex problem, and solve it optimally. Compared to the conventional channel gain matching view, the optimal SCP is emphasized as a novel concept of channel gain tailoring. We prove that the optimal SCP pairs subcarriers such that the variance among the effective channel gains is minimized. For a DF relayed system, we show that depending on the power budgets of source and relay, SCP can either be in a subordinate role where it improves the energy efficiency, or in a main role where it improves the spectral efficiency of the system. In an AF relayed system we confirm that SCP plays a crucial role, and improves the spectral efficiency of the system. The channel gain tailoring property of SCP, various roles of SCP in improving the spectral and energy efficiency of a cooperative communication system are validated with the help of simulation results.

Trust based access control model for securing electronic healthcare system

An important issue in the Cloud-Based Electronic Healthcare System (CBEHS) is to protect the sensitive data and resources from the untrusted user. Enforcing the protection in the CBEHS, the access control model plays an important role. Access control is a security mechanism that checks every request of the data to identify the legitimate user. The access request will be granted or denied with the help of preconfigured access control policies. Although, in the previous years, many access control methods, techniques, and models have been proposed, but due to changing user’s behavior and security requirements in the CBEHS, the models suffer from several attacks and threats like Sybil attacks, collusion attack, insider attack, service hijacking, misuse of health data, and impersonation attack, etc. Due to this type of attack, the healthcare data and resources become more vulnerable. In this paper, we have proposed an access control model which is based on the trustworthiness of the requested user. This Trust-Based Access Control Model for Healthcare System (TBACMHS) framework composed of the trust mechanism, trust model, and access control policies which enhance the accuracy and efficiency of the system. This access control framework will ensure the only trusted and authorized user can access the data and resources. The detail design and presentation of the model show that the accuracy and efficiency of the CBEHS are more as compared to other trust models.

A Personalized QoS Prediction Approach for CPS Service Recommendation Based on Reputation and Location-Aware Collaborative Filtering.

With the rapid development of cyber-physical systems (CPS), building cyber-physical systems with high quality of service (QoS) has become an urgent requirement in both academia and industry. During the procedure of building Cyber-physical systems, it has been found that a large number of functionally equivalent services exist, so it becomes an urgent task to recommend suitable services from the large number of services available in CPS. However, since it is time-consuming, and even impractical, for a single user to invoke all of the services in CPS to experience their QoS, a robust QoS prediction method is needed to predict unknown QoS values. A commonly used method in QoS prediction is collaborative filtering, however, it is hard to deal with the data sparsity and cold start problem, and meanwhile most of the existing methods ignore the data credibility issue. Thence, in order to solve both of these challenging problems, in this paper, we design a framework of QoS prediction for CPS services, and propose a personalized QoS prediction approach based on reputation and location-aware collaborative filtering. Our approach first calculates the reputation of users by using the Dirichlet probability distribution, so as to identify untrusted users and process their unreliable data, and then it digs out the geographic neighborhood in three levels to improve the similarity calculation of users and services. Finally, the data from geographical neighbors of users and services are fused to predict the unknown QoS values. The experiments using real datasets show that our proposed approach outperforms other existing methods in terms of accuracy, efficiency, and robustness.

ILLIA: Enabling <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$k$ </tex-math> </inline-formula>-Anonymity-Based Privacy Preserving Against Location Injection Attacks in Continuous LBS Queries

With the increasing popularity of location-based services (LBSs), it is of paramount importance to preserve one’s location privacy. The commonly used location privacy preserving approach, location ${k}$ -anonymity, strives to aggregate the queries of ${k}$ nearby users within a so-called cloaked region via a trusted third-party anonymizer. As such, the probability to identify the location of every user involved is no more than ${1/k}$ , thus offering privacy preservation for users. One inherent limitation of ${k}$ -anonymity, however, is that all users involved are assumed to be trusted and report their real locations. When location injection attacks (LIAs) are conducted, where the untrusted users inject fake locations (along with fake queries) to the anonymizer, the probability of disclosing one’s location privacy could be greatly more than ${1/k}$ , yielding a much higher risk of privacy leakage. To tackle this problem, in this paper we present ILLIA, the first work that enables ${k}$ -anonymity-based privacy preservation against LIA in continuous LBS queries. Central to the ILLIA idea is to explore the pattern of the users’ mobility in continuous LBS queries. With a thorough understanding of the users’ mobility similarity, a credibility-based ${k}$ -anonymity scheme is developed, such that ILLIA is able to defense against LIA without requiring in advance knowledge of how fake locations are manipulated while still maintaining high quality of services. Both the effectiveness and the efficiency of ILLIA are validated by extensive simulations on real world dataset loc-Gowalla.

Experimental preparation and verification of quantum money

A quantum money scheme enables a trusted bank to provide untrusted users with verifiable quantum banknotes that cannot be forged. In this work, we report an experimental demonstration of the preparation and verification of unforgeable quantum banknotes. We employ a security analysis that takes experimental imperfections fully into account. We measure a total of $3.6\times 10^6$ states in one verification round, limiting the forging probability to $10^{-7}$ based on the security analysis. Our results demonstrate the feasibility of preparing and verifying quantum banknotes using currently available experimental techniques.

Utility Regions for DF Relay in OFDMA-Based Secure Communication With Untrusted Users

This letter investigates the utility of a trusted decode-and-forward relay in OFDMA-based secure communication system with untrusted users. For deciding on the use of relay, we first present optimal subcarrier allocation policies for direct communication (DC) and relayed communication (RC). Next, we identify exclusive RC mode, exclusive DC mode, and mixed (RDC) mode subcarriers which can support both the modes. In RDC mode, we present optimal mode selection policy and a suboptimal strategy independent of power allocation which is asymptotically optimal at both low and high SNRs. Via numerical results we present insights on relay utility regions.

Collaborative Load Management with Safety Assurance in Smart Grids

Load shedding can combat the overload of a power grid that may jeopardize the grid’s safety. However, disconnected customers may be excessively inconvenienced or even endangered. With the emergence of demand-response based on cyber-enabled smart meters and appliances, customers may participate in solving the overload by curtailing their demands collaboratively such that no single customers will have to bear a disproportionate burden of reduced usage. However, compliance or commitment to curtailment requests by untrusted users is uncertain, which causes an important safety concern. This article proposes a two-phase load management scheme that (i) gives customers a chance to curtail their demands and correct a grid’s overload when there are no immediate safety concerns but (ii) falls back to load shedding to ensure safety once the grid enters a vulnerable state. Extensive simulations based on a 37-bus electrical grid and traces of real electrical load demonstrate the effectiveness of this scheme. In particular, if customers are, as expected, sufficiently committed to the load curtailment, overloads can be resolved in real time by collaborative and graceful usage degradation among them, thereby avoiding unpleasant load shedding.

Deterministic and Efficient Quantum Key Distribution Using Entanglement Parity Bits and Ancillary Qubits

In this paper, we propose an efficient and deterministic quantum key distribution protocol for establishing a secret key between two untrusted users. In this protocol, a secret key is distributed to a sender and a receiver who share entangled states with a third trusted party but not with each other. This secret key is distributed by the means of special pure quantum states using remote state preparation and controlled gates. In addition, we employ the parity bits of the entangled pairs and the ancillary states to assist in preparing and measuring the secret states. Distributing a state to two users requires two maximally entangled pairs as the quantum channel and a two-particle von Neumann projective measurement. The proposed protocol is exact and deterministic. It distributes a secret key of $ d $ qubits by the means of $ 2d $ entangled pairs and, on average, $ d $ bits of classical communication. We demonstrate the security of this protocol against entanglement attacks and present a method of privacy amplification.

An efficient privacy preserving data aggregation approach for mobile sensing

The advances in sensing capabilities of smartphones give rise to a variety of mobile participatory sensing applications that collect users' personal data. Because of the existence of both sensitive, private personal data, and untrusted aggregator, serious privacy concerns on users arise. Currently, existing privacy preserving data collection methods either require bidirectional communications between an untrusted aggregator and mobile users in every aggregation period, or have high computation or communication overhead. To address these problems, we propose an efficient data aggregation approach by which an untrusted aggregator in mobile sensing can collect the statistics over the data contributed by multiple mobile users, while supporting privacy preservation of each user and data integrity verification. In this approach, information hiding and homomorphic encryption are applied to guarantee the data privacy of mobile users. In detail, a breadth-first search tree is first constructed at the initial phase among the mobile users, and then the original datum of each user is perturbed among its neighbors in ciphertext space by using information hiding and homomorphic encryption. The evaluations of our approach show that our protocol requires lower communication and computation overhead and thus more feasible for the computation constrained mobile devices. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Jammer-Assisted Resource Allocation in Secure OFDMA With Untrusted Users

In this paper, we consider the problem of resource allocation in the orthogonal frequency division multiple access system with single source and $M$ untrusted users in presence of a friendly jammer. The jammer is used to improve either the weighted sum secure rate or the overall system fairness. The formulated optimization problem in both the cases is a mixed integer non-linear programming problem, belonging to the class of NP-hard. In the sum secure rate maximization scenario, we decouple the problem and first obtain the subcarrier allocation at source and the decision for jammer power utilization on a per-subcarrier basis. Then, we do joint source and jammer power allocation using primal decomposition and alternating optimization framework. Next, we consider fair resource allocation by introducing a novel concept of subcarrier snatching with the help of jammer. We propose two schemes for jammer power utilization, called proactively fair allocation (PFA) and on-demand allocation (ODA). PFA considers equitable distribution of jammer power among the subcarriers, while ODA distributes jammer power based on the user demand. In both cases of jammer usage, we also present suboptimal solutions that solve the power allocation at a highly reduced complexity. Asymptotically optimal solutions are derived to benchmark optimality of the proposed schemes. We compare the performance of our proposed schemes with equal power allocation at source and jammer. Our simulation results demonstrate that the jammer can indeed help in improving either the sum secure rate or the overall system fairness.

OFDMA-Based DF Secure Cooperative Communication With Untrusted Users

In this letter we consider resource allocation for OFDMA-based secure cooperative communication by employing a trusted Decode and Forward (DF) relay among the untrusted users. We formulate two optimization problems, namely, (i) sum rate maximization subject to individual power constraints on source and relay, and (ii) sum power minimization subject to a fairness constraint in terms of per-user minimum support secure rate requirement. The optimization problems are solved utilizing the optimality of KKT conditions for pseudolinear functions.

An Improved Authentication Mechanism Based on Dynamic Game Behavior in Cloud Computing

With the cloud computing model being widely recognized, the concerns about cloud computing security are growing. Traditional static security measures could not solve the security problems in dynamic cloud computing, because cloud computing is different from the traditional IT technology in service mode, operation mode, and exchange mode. This study proposed a user dynamic game behavior based authentication security control mechanism, which considers adequately the effective range of properties of each evidence, and provides the layer’s behavior authentication evidence. The method has the self binding, can make the system potentially untrusted users sending malicious requests probabilistic stability at a relatively low level, the method provides a strong basis for cloud service providers to take accurate measures. According to the characteristics of service model in cloud computing, it defines the user behavior authentication sets consisting of attributes, definition and classification, studies the user behavioral evidence collection, normalizes the process and learning method, and makes out the behavior certification strategies and management strategies, thus improving effectively the cloud computing security.

Refining dependencies for information flow analysis of database applications

Preserving confidentiality of sensitive information in any computing system always remains a challenging issue. One such reason is improper coding of softwares which may lead to the disclosure of sensitive information to unauthorised users while propagating along the code during execution. Language-based information flow security analysis has emerged as a promising technique to prove that program's executions do not leak sensitive information to untrusted users. In this paper, we propose information flow analysis of database applications. The main contributions of the paper are: 1) refinement of dependence graphs for database applications by removing false dependencies; 2) information-flow analysis of database applications using refined dependence graph. Our approach covers a more generic scenario where attackers are able to view only a part of the attribute-values according to the policy, and leads to a more precise semantic-based analysis which reduces false positives with respect to the literature.