Browsing by Author "Ullah, Sana"
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- An Enhanced WLAN Security System With FPGA Implementation for Multimedia ApplicationsPublication . Hayajneh, Thaier; Ullah, Sana; Jamil Mohd, Bassam; Balagani, KiranMaintaining a high level of data security with a low impact on system performance is more challenging in wireless multimedia applications. Protocols that are used for wireless local area network (WLAN) security are known to significantly degrade performance. In this paper, we propose an enhanced security system for a WLAN. Our new design aims to decrease the processing delay and increase both the speed and throughput of the system, thereby making it more efficient for multimedia applications. Our design is based on the idea of offloading computationally intensive encryption and authentication services to the end systems’ CPUs. The security operations are performed by the hosts’ central processor (which is usually a powerful processor) before delivering the data to a wireless card (which usually has a low-performance processor). By adopting this design, we show that both the delay and the jitter are significantly reduced. At the access point, we improve the performance of network processing hardware for real-time cryptographic processing by using a specialized processor implemented with field-programmable gate array technology. Furthermore, we use enhanced techniques to implement the Counter (CTR) Mode with Cipher Block Chaining Message Authentication Code Protocol (CCMP) and the CTR protocol. Our experiments show that it requires timing in the range of 20–40 μs to perform data encryption and authentication on different end-host CPUs (e.g., Intel Core i5, i7, and AMD 6-Core) as compared with 10–50 ms when performed using the wireless card. Furthermore, when compared with the standard WiFi protected access II (WPA2), results show that our proposed security system improved the speed to up to 3.7 times.
- An Enhanced WLAN Security System With FPGA Implementation for Multimedia ApplicationsPublication . Hayajneh, Thaier; Ullah, Sana; Mohd, Bassam J.; Balagani, Kiran S.Maintaining a high level of data security with a low impact on system performance is more challenging in wireless multimedia applications. Protocols that are used for wireless local area network (WLAN) security are known to significantly degrade performance. In this paper, we propose an enhanced security system for a WLAN. Our new design aims to decrease the processing delay and increase both the speed and throughput of the system, thereby making it more efficient for multimedia applications. Our design is based on the idea of offloading computationally intensive encryption and authentication services to the end systems’ CPUs. The security operations are performed by the hosts’ central processor (which is usually a powerful processor) before delivering the data to a wireless card (which usually has a low-performance processor). By adopting this design, we show that both the delay and the jitter are significantly reduced. At the access point, we improve the performance of network processing hardware for real-time cryptographic processing by using a specialized processor implemented with field-programmable gate array technology. Furthermore, we use enhanced techniques to implement the Counter (CTR) Mode with Cipher Block Chaining Message Authentication Code Protocol (CCMP) and the CTR protocol. Our experiments show that it requires timing in the range of 20–40 μs to perform data encryption and authentication on different end-host CPUs (e.g., Intel Core i5, i7, and AMD 6-Core) as compared with 10–50 ms when performed using the wireless card. Furthermore, when compared with the standard WiFi protected access II (WPA2), results show that our proposed security system improved the speed to up to 3.7 times.
- An intelligent clustering scheme for distributed intrusion detection in vehicular cloud computingPublication . Kumar, Neeraj; Singh, Jaskaran Preet; Bali, Rasmeet S.; Misra, Sudip; Ullah, SanaIn recent years, vehicular cloud computing (VCC) has emerged as a new technology which is being used in wide range of applications in the area of multimedia-based healthcare applications. In VCC, vehicles act as the intelligent machines which can be used to collect and transfer the healthcare data to the local, or global sites for storage, and computation purposes, as vehicles are having comparatively limited storage and computation power for handling the multimedia files. However, due to the dynamic changes in topology, and lack of centralized monitoring points, this information can be altered, or misused. These security breaches can result in disastrous consequences such as-loss of life or financial frauds. Therefore, to address these issues, a learning automata-assisted distributive intrusion detection system is designed based on clustering. Although there exist a number of applications where the proposed scheme can be applied but, we have taken multimedia-based healthcare application for illustration of the proposed scheme. In the proposed scheme, learning automata (LA) are assumed to be stationed on the vehicles which take clustering decisions intelligently and select one of the members of the group as a cluster-head. The cluster-heads then assist in efficient storage and dissemination of information through a cloud-based infrastructure. To secure the proposed scheme from malicious activities, standard cryptographic technique is used in which the auotmaton learns from the environment and takes adaptive decisions for identification of any malicious activity in the network. A reward and penalty is given by the stochastic environment where an automaton performs its actions so that it updates its action probability vector after getting the reinforcement signal from the environment. The proposed scheme was evaluated using extensive simulations on ns-2 with SUMO. The results obtained indicate that the proposed scheme yields an improvement of 10 % in detection rate of malicious nodes when compared with the existing schemes.
- Cloud-assisted Wireless Body Area NetworksPublication . Ullah, Sana; Vasilakos, Athanasios; Chao, Han-Chieh; Suzuki, JunichiWireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) have emerged as a promising technology for medical and non-medical applications. WBANs consist of a number of miniaturized, portable, and autonomous sensor nodes that are used for long-term health monitoring of patients. These sensor nodes continuously collect information of patients, which are used for ubiquitous health monitoring. In addition, WBANs may be used for managing catastrophic events and increasing the effectiveness and performance of rescue forces. The huge amount of data collected by WBAN nodes demands scalable, on-demand, powerful, and secure storage and processing infrastructure. Cloud computing is expected to play a significant role in achieving the aforementioned objectives. The cloud computing environment links different devices ranging from miniaturized sensor nodes to high-performance supercomputers for delivering people-centric and context-centric services to the individuals and industries. The possible integration of WBANs with cloud computing (WBAN-cloud) will introduce viable and hybrid platform that must be able to process the huge amount of data collected from multiple WBANs. This WBAN-cloud will enable users (including physicians and nurses) to globally access the processing and storage infrastructure at competitive costs. Because WBANs forward useful and life-critical information to the cloud – which may operate in distributed and hostile environments, novel security mechanisms are required to prevent malicious interactions to the storage infrastructure. Both the cloud providers and the users must take strong security measures to protect the storage infrastructure.
- A Cross-layer QoS Management Framework for ZigBee Cluster-Tree NetworksPublication . Severino, Ricardo; Ullah, Sana; Tovar, EduardoWireless sensor networks show great potential to successfully address the timeliness and energy-efficiency requirements of different cyber-physical system applications. Generally, these requirements span several layers of the stack and demand an on-line mechanism capable of efficiently tuning several parameters, in order to better support highly dynamic traffic characteristics. This work presents a cross-layer QoS management framework for ZigBee cluster-tree networks. The proposed framework carries out an on-line control of a set of parameters ranging from the MAC sub-layer to the network layer, improving the successful transmission probability and minimizing the memory requirements and queuing delays through an efficient bandwidth allocation at the network clusters. Through extensive simulations in a real datacenter monitoring application scenario, we show that the proposed framework improves the successful transmission probability by 10 %, and reduces the end-to-end delay by 94 %.
- Energy-efficient MAC protocols for WBANs: Opportunities and challengesPublication . Ullah, Sana; Li, ChangleWireless body area networks (WBANs) are expected to play a significant role in smart healthcare systems. One of the most important attributes of WBANs is to increase network lifetime by introducing novel and low-power techniques on the energy-constrained sensor nodes. Medium access control (MAC) protocols play a significant role in determining the energy consumption in WBANs. Existing MAC protocols are unable to accommodate communication requirements in WBANs. There is a need to develop novel, scalable and reliable MAC protocols that must be able to address all these requirements in a reliable manner. In this special issue, we attracted high quality research and review papers on the recent advances in MAC protocols for WBANs.
- From Sensing to Alerting: a Pathway of RESTful Messaging in Ambient Assisted LivingPublication . Hossain, M. Anwar; Parra, Jorge; Rahman, Sk Md Mizanur; Ullah, Sana; Mouftah, Hussein T.Sensing and alerting are fundamental to AAL. It is a long way from sensing to alerting, where lots of messages are interchanged among different processing units. Starting from the transfer of sensed data to the data processor and all the way to the alert generator, messages change in format, type, and size when intended for different stakeholders. Along this way, it becomes important to decide which messages to transfer, how to transfer, and when to transfer, taking into account the dependability requirements for a reliable AAL system. This article highlights AAL communication from various message transfer perspectives and proposes a general framework of alert/response in an AAL environment addressing these messaging requirements. The cornerstone of the proposed framework is the consideration of dependable RESTful communication throughout the message trail within a local and cloud-based environment. This is coupled with a publish-subscribe mechanism that offers a lightweight solution to address the variability of message transfers in AAL.
- A Green Approach for Selfish Misbehavior Detection in 802.11-Based Wireless NetworksPublication . Hayajneh, Thaier; Almashaqbeh, Ghada; Ullah, SanaIEEE 802.11 is one of the most well-established and widely used standard for wireless LAN. Its Medium Access control (MAC) layer assumes that the devices adhere to the standard’s rules and timers to assure fair access and sharing of the medium. However, wireless cards driver flexibility and configurability make it possible for selfish misbehaving nodes to take advantages over the other well-behaving nodes. The existence of selfish nodes degrades the QoS for the other devices in the network and may increase their energy consumption. In this paper we propose a green solution for selfish misbehavior detection in IEEE 802.11-based wireless networks. The proposed scheme works in two phases: Global phase which detects whether the network contains selfish nodes or not, and Local phase which identifies which node or nodes within the network are selfish. Usually, the network must be frequently examined for selfish nodes during its operation since any node may act selfishly. Our solution is green in the sense that it saves the network resources as it avoids wasting the nodes energy by examining all the individual nodes of being selfish when it is not necessary. The proposed detection algorithm is evaluated using extensive OPNET simulations. The results show that the Global network metric clearly indicates the existence of a selfish node while the Local nodes metric successfully identified the selfish node(s). We also provide mathematical analysis for the selfish misbehaving and derived formulas for the successful channel access probability.
- Guest Editorial Special Issue on Communications Technologies and Infrastructures for Smart e-Health SystemsPublication . Ullah, Sana; Pedrycz, Witold; Karagiannidis, George K.; Chao, Han-Chieh; Gacek, Adam; Verikoukis, ChristosThe papers in included in this special issue examines new and novel communication methods for smart e-health systems. Recent developments in the healthcare domain have facilitated the integration of several technologies for smart, cost-effective, reliable, and pervasive health monitoring of chronic diseases. Current research efforts focus on developing real-time communication methods, mostly for body area networks (BANs) that are used to deliver patients´ information effectively. These efforts are limited to communication within a BAN; however, less attention has been paid to connect multiple BANs to remote servers in real time. In addition, there is a limited study on the integration of BANs with different technologies including mobile cloud computing—a technology that may assist in storing and processing the huge amount of BAN data at competitive costs. Machine to machine is also considered to be a valuable paradigm in delivering BAN data to a remote server/cloud for further analysis. This may assist in reducing risks and cost of remote health monitoring. Unlike conventional research in BANs where researchers focused on individual networks, there is a need to develop innovative communication methods with a focus on complete and smart e-health systems. This smart e-health system must integrate the aforementioned technologies with multiple BANs, and provide rich healthcare services to end users. It calls for research on versatile topics ranging from physical and medium access control protocols to BANs coexistence, traffic characterization, cloud resource allocation, and cloud monitoring and maintenance.
- Guest editorial: Secure cloud computing for mobile health servicesPublication . Abbas, Haider; Ullah, Sana; Misra, Sudip; Chen, Yuh-ShyanSeamless availability of medical and biological data to legitimate users is the top concern for healthcare systems that are being managed electronically. This demand, as a result, has paved multiple ways for modern technologies deployment in telemedicine and mobile healthcare services. The cloud computing technology deployment in healthcare systems is also considered as a part of the same initiative that has provided numerous benefits to this area. However, at the same time this also gave rise to the possibility of sensitive data exposure by various unpredictable threats associated with cloud computing technology. This threat landscape becomes more critical when it comes to the sensitive data and services management of a healthcare system. As noticed through the recent incidents, the healthcare systems are vulnerable to multiple threats, that may have serious impact on the healthcare working environment, safety of operations, patient’s data privacy and secure transmissions of medical data.