https://doi.org/10.5220/0012350100003648

https://doi.org/10.5220/0012174800003595

The Internet of Things is gaining traction for sensing and monitoring outdoor environments such as water bodies, forests, or agricultural lands. Sustainable deployment of sensors for environmental sampling is a challenging task because of the spatial and temporal variation of the environmental attributes to be monitored, the lack of the infrastructure to power the sensors for uninterrupted monitoring, and the large continuous target environment despite the sparse and limited sampling locations. In this paper, we present an environment monitoring framework that deploys a network of sensors and gateways connected through low-power, long-range networking to perform reliable data collection. The three objectives correspond to the optimization of information quality, communication capacity, and sustainability. Therefore, the proposed environment monitoring framework consists of three main components: (i) to maximize the information collected, we propose an optimal sensor placement method based on QR decomposition that deploys sensors at information-and communication-critical locations; (ii) to facilitate the transfer of big streaming data and alleviate the network bottleneck caused by low bandwidth, we develop a gateway configuration method with the aim to reduce the deployment and communication costs; and (iii) to allow sustainable environmental monitoring, an energy-aware optimization component is introduced. We validate our method by presenting a case study for monitoring the water quality of the Ergene River in Turkey. Detailed experiments subject to real-world data show that the proposed method is both accurate and efficient in monitoring a large environment and catching up with dynamic changes.

https://doi.org/10.5220/0011306500003283

Conventional password-based authentication is considered inadequate by users as many online services started to affect each other. Online credentials are used to recover other credentials and complex attacks are directed to the weakest one of many of these online credentials. As researchers are looking for new authentication techniques, one time passwords, which is a two-factor authentication scheme, looks like a natural enhancement over conventional username/password schemes. The manuscript places the OTP verifier to the cloud to ease adoption of its usage by cloud service providers. When the OTP verifier is placed on the cloud as a service, other cloud service providers could outsource their OTP deployments as well as cloud users could activate their respective account on the OTP provider on several cloud services. This enables them to use several cloud services without the difficulty of managing several OTP accounts for each cloud service. On the other hand, OTP service provision saves inexperienced small to medium enterprises from spending extra costs for OTP provisioning hardware, software, and employers. The paper outlines architecture to build a secure, privacy-friendly, and sound OTP provider in the cloud to outsource the second factor of authentication. Cloud user registration to OTP provider, service provider activation, and authentication phases are inspected. The security and privacy considerations of the proposed architecture are defined and analyzed. Attacks from outsiders, unlinkability properties of user profiles, attacks from curious service providers or OTP verifiers are mitigated within the given assumptions. The proposed solution, which locates the OTP provider in the cloud, is rendered robust and sound as a result of the analysis.

https://doi.org/10.5220/0006688204180425

Security concerns are still retarding cloud adoption. While the research community work on clearing these concerns, an optimistic fair cloud compliant logging scheme may ease the cloud to spread. This study proposes a secure logging mechanism. The mechanism employs an online bulletin board as a public write‐only storage for the log records. The bulletin board also acts as a trusted third party during conflict resolution. The secure logging protocol describes how the log records are distributed to the stakeholders. The protocol's security is verified with model checking tools and no security threats could be found.

Cloud computing is a promising approach for the efficient use of computational resources. It delivers computing as a service rather than a product for a fraction of the cost. However, security concerns prevent many individuals and organizations from using clouds despite its cost effectiveness. Resolving security problems of clouds may alleviate concerns and increase cloud usage; in consequence, it may decrease overall costs spent for the computational devices and infrastructures. This paper particularly focuses on the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) clouds. Security of PaaS clouds is considered from multiple perspectives including access control, privacy and service continuity while protecting both the service provider and the user. Security problems of PaaS clouds are explored and classified. Countermeasures are proposed and discussed. The achieved solutions are intended to be the rationales for future PaaS designs and implementations.

Many electronic voting systems, classified mainly as homomorphic cryptography based, mix-net based and blind signature based, appear in the eighties after zero knowledge proofs were introduced. The common ground for all these three systems is the fact that none of them works without real time cryptologic computations which should be held on a server. As far as known, the agent-based approach has not yet been used in a secure electronic voting system. In this study, an agent-based electronic voting schema, which does not force real time computations on the server side and lets people vote at home, is proposed. Conventional cryptologic methods are used in the proposed schema to ensure some of the requirements of an electronic voting system where some of the requirements are constructed within distributed agent phenomena