A super-peer is a node in a peer-to-peer network that operates both as a server to a set of clients, and as an equal in a network of super-peers. Super-peer networks strike a balance between the efficiency of centralized search, and the autonomy, load balancing and robustness to attacks provided by distributed search. Furthermore, they take advantage of the heterogeneity of capabilities (e.g., bandwidth, processing power) across peers, which recent studies have shown to be enormous. Hence, new and old P2P systems like KaZaA and Gnutella are adopting super-peers in their design. Despite their growing popularity, the behavior of super-peer networks is not well understood. For example, what are the potential drawbacks of super-peer networks? How can super-peers be made more reliable? How many clients should a super-peer take on to maximize efficiency? we examine super-peer networks in detail, gaming an understanding of their fundamental characteristics and performance tradeoffs. We also present practical guidelines and a general procedure for the design of an efficient super-peer network.

Designing an Super-Peer Network

Background: Health care providers are adopting information and communication technologies (ICTs) to enhance their services. Telemedicine is one of the services that rely heavily on ICTs to enable remote patients to communicate with health care professionals; in this case, the patient communicates with the health care professional for a follow-up or for a consultation about his or her health condition. This communication process is referred to as an e-consultation. In this paper, telemedicine services refer to health care services that use ICTs, which enable patients to share, transfer, and communicate data or information in real time (ie, synchronous) from their home with a care provider—normally a physician—at a clinical site. However, the use of e-consultation services can be positively or negatively influenced by external or internal factors. External factors refer to the environment surrounding the system as well as the system itself, while internal factors refer to user behavior and motivation.
Objective: This review aims to investigate the barriers and the facilitators that influence the use of home consultation systems in the health care context. This review also aims to identify the effectiveness of Home Online Health Consultation (HOHC) systems in improving patients’ health as well as their satisfaction with the systems.
Methods: We conducted a systematic literature review to search for articles—empirical studies—about online health consultation in four digital libraries: Scopus, Association for Computing Machinery, PubMed, and Web of Science. The database search yielded 2518 articles; after applying the inclusion and exclusion criteria, the number of included articles for the final review was 45. A qualitative content analysis was performed to identify barriers and facilitators to HOHC systems, their effectiveness, and patients’ satisfaction with them.
Results: The systematic literature review identified several external and internal facilitators and barriers to HOHC systems that were used in the creation of a HOHC framework. The framework consists of four requirements; the framework also consists of 17 facilitators and eight barriers, which were further categorized as internal and external influencers on HOHC.
Conclusions: Patients from different age groups and with different health conditions benefited from remote health services. HOHC via video conferencing was effective in delivering online treatment and was well-accepted by patients, as it simulated in-person, face-to-face consultation. Acceptance by patients increased as a result of online consultation facilitators that promoted effective and convenient remote treatment. However, some patients preferred face-to-face consultation and showed resistance to online consultation. Resistance to online consultation was influenced by some of the identified barriers. Overall, the framework identified the facilitators and barriers that positively and negatively influenced the uptake of HOHC systems, respectively.

/pdf/barriers-and-facilitators-that-influence-telemedicine-based-4hevkthzmw.pdf

Barriers and Facilitators That Influence Telemedicine-Based, Real-Time, Online Consultation at Patients’ Homes: Systematic Literature Review

Internet of Things (IoT) is a network of all devices that can be accessed through the Internet. These devices can be remotely accessed and controlled using existing network infrastructure, thus allowing a direct integration of computing systems with the physical world. This also reduces human involvement along with improving accuracy and efficiency, resulting in economic benefit. The devices in IoT facilitate the day-to-day life of people. However, the IoT has an enormous threat to security and privacy due to its heterogeneous and dynamic nature. Authentication is one of the most challenging security requirements in the IoT environment, where a user (external party) can directly access information from the devices, provided the mutual authentication between user and devices happens. In this paper, we present a new signature-based authenticated key establishment scheme for the IoT environment. The proposed scheme is tested for security with the help of the widely used Burrows-Abadi–Needham logic, informal security analysis, and also the formal security verification using the broadly accepted automated validation of Internet security protocols and applications tool. The proposed scheme is also implemented using the widely accepted NS2 simulator, and the simulation results demonstrate the practicability of the scheme. Finally, the proposed scheme provides more functionality features, and its computational and communication costs are also comparable with other existing approaches.

Secure Signature-Based Authenticated Key Establishment Scheme for Future IoT Applications

In recent years, the research in generic Internet of Things (IoT) attracts a lot of practical applications including smart home, smart city, smart grid, industrial Internet, connected healthcare, smart retail, smart supply chain and smart farming. The hierarchical IoT network (HIoTN) is a special kind of the generic IoT network, which is composed of the different nodes, such as the gateway node, cluster head nodes, and sensing nodes organized in a hierarchy. In HIoTN, there is a need, where a user can directly access the real-time data from the sensing nodes for a particular application in generic IoT networking environment. This paper emphasizes on the design of a new secure lightweight three-factor remote user authentication scheme for HIoTNs, called the user authenticated key management protocol (UAKMP). The three factors used in UAKMP are the user smart card, password, and personal biometrics. The security of the scheme is thoroughly analyzed under the formal security in the widely accepted real-or-random model, the informal security as well as the formal security verification using the widely accepted automated validation of Internet security protocols and applications tool. UAKMP offers several functionality features including offline sensing node registration, freely password and biometric update facility, user anonymity, and sensing node anonymity compared to other related existing schemes. In addition, UAKMP is also comparable in computation and communication costs as compared to other existing schemes.

Design of Secure User Authenticated Key Management Protocol for Generic IoT Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) will be integrated into the future Internet as one of the components of the Internet of Things, and will become globally addressable by any entity connected to the Internet. Despite the great potential of this integration, it also brings new threats, such as the exposure of sensor nodes to attacks originating from the Internet. In this context, lightweight authentication and key agreement protocols must be in place to enable end-to-end secure communication. Recently, Amin et al. proposed a three-factor mutual authentication protocol for WSNs. However, we identified several flaws in their protocol. We found that their protocol suffers from smart card loss attack where the user identity and password can be guessed using offline brute force techniques. Moreover, the protocol suffers from known session-specific temporary information attack, which leads to the disclosure of session keys in other sessions. Furthermore, the protocol is vulnerable to tracking attack and fails to fulfill user untraceability. To address these deficiencies, we present a lightweight and secure user authentication protocol based on the Rabin cryptosystem, which has the characteristic of computational asymmetry. We conduct a formal verification of our proposed protocol using ProVerif in order to demonstrate that our scheme fulfills the required security properties. We also present a comprehensive heuristic security analysis to show that our protocol is secure against all the possible attacks and provides the desired security features. The results we obtained show that our new protocol is a secure and lightweight solution for authentication and key agreement for Internet-integrated WSNs.

/pdf/lightweight-three-factor-authentication-and-key-agreement-3xqu64fdt3.pdf

Lightweight Three-Factor Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol for Internet-Integrated Wireless Sensor Networks

In 2014, Turkanovic et al. proposed a smart card-based authentication scheme for heterogeneous ad hoc wireless sensor network. This scheme is very efficient since it employs only hash function and XOR operation. However, we found that Turkanovic et al. ’s scheme is vulnerable to impersonation attack with node capture, stolen smart card attack, sensor node spoofing attack, stolen verifier attack, and fails to ensure backward secrecy. We propose an efficient scheme to overcome all those weaknesses. Moreover, we also propose an advanced scheme, which provides perfect forward secrecy without much modification from the first proposed scheme.

A Provably Secure, Efficient, and Flexible Authentication Scheme for Ad hoc Wireless Sensor Networks

Lossless and unlimited multi-image sharing based on Chinese remainder theorem and Lagrange interpolation

Communication network has grown to the stage where it becomes ubiquitous. It allows us to access to on-line services at anytime, anywhere and by any devices. This brings out new services, that was previous only accessible via computers, now are available on mobile devices such as e-commerce applications. These applications require mobile users to be authenticated in order to use the services. In this paper, we proposed a novel authenticated key agreement scheme that allows users and servers mutually authenticate each other. Our scheme also conceals users' identities from adversaries; this is provided in initiator untraceability property of the scheme. Furthermore, the scheme has good computation cost as well as communication and storage costs; thus, the proposed scheme is suitable for the mobile devices.

Novel Untraceable Authenticated Key Agreement Protocol Suitable for Mobile Communication

Among four ecommerce business models, the customer-to-customer (C2C) model allows customers to exchange goods or services, and get their money through fully or partly direct transactions. This model is usually dependent on mediate companies, e.g. eBay or Craigslist, for solving the main challenges of technology maintenance and quality control. This paper presents a decentralized C2C ecommerce model based on mobile peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. Several advantageous characteristics of the mobile P2P network including autonomy in control and administration, scalability and reliability in peers and resources not only avoid centralized servers and technology maintenance but also facilitate quality control by selecting various quality peers and resources using flexible search mechanisms on mobile devices. We have provided the design of Book Trading Service (BTS) using Gnutella protocol and the prototype of the BTS application on Android mobile platform. The experimental results show the feasibility and effectiveness of the decentralized C2C ecommerce model and the BTS application that can also be applied to several application domains.

Applying Peer-to-Peer Networks for Decentralized Customer-to-Customer Ecommerce Model

In global mobile network, it is required to authenticate mobile users, provide secure communication channel be- tween a user and a foreign agent using session key, and guarantee users' anonymity and untraceability. In order to improve the security of mobile roaming service, two- factor authentication which employs smart card and pass- word was introduced to global mobile network. In 2014, Kuo et al. [5] proposed an anonymous two-factor authentication scheme for mobile roaming service. However, we found that this scheme is vulnerable to four kinds of manin-the-middle attacks and denial-of-service attack. In this paper, we first review Kuo et al.'s scheme and analyze its weaknesses. Then, we propose an efficient anonymous two-factor authentication protocol that overcomes those vulnerabilities in Kuo et al.'s.

Hai-Duong Le

Papers

A Provably Secure, Efficient, and Flexible Authentication Scheme for Ad hoc Wireless Sensor Networks

Lossless and unlimited multi-image sharing based on Chinese remainder theorem and Lagrange interpolation

Novel Untraceable Authenticated Key Agreement Protocol Suitable for Mobile Communication

Applying Peer-to-Peer Networks for Decentralized Customer-to-Customer Ecommerce Model

A Novel Untraceable Authentication Scheme for Mobile Roaming in GLOMONET.