Today there is considerable interest for making use of the latest technological advancements for several healthcare applications. However, there are several challenges for making use of different technologies for healthcare applications. In particular, there is a need to ensure that the healthcare related services receive priority during events, such as legitimate failures of devices, congestion, and attacks in the networks. In this paper, we discuss some of the requirements for making use of technology for healthcare applications and propose techniques for secure monitoring of patients with wandering behavior in a hospital or elderly care environment. One of the aims of our work is to use technology for secure monitoring of patients with wandering behavior to keep them away from danger, or detect if the behavior of the patient violates the policies of the hospital, or even violates privacy policies of other patients. Our approach makes use of software defined networking (SDN), Wireless LAN (WLAN), and wearable devices for the patients. Our approach incurs low cost since WLAN is widely deployed. However, there are some challenges for making use of WLAN for monitoring dementia patients, since it is primarily used for accessing the Internet and its open nature is vulnerable to different types of security attacks. Hence we make use of SDN to solve some of these challenges and provide priority for the monitoring services. We have developed a security application for an SDN controller that can be used to enforce fine granular policies for communication between the hosts, real time location tracking of the patients, and deal with attacks on the hospital networks. The policy-based security enforcement helps to differentiate healthcare related traffic from other traffic and provide priority to the healthcare traffic. The real time location tracking detects wandering by patients and if necessary can raise alarms to the staff. The attack detection component makes use of attack signatures and behavior-based intrusion detection to deal with attacks on hospital networks. We will also present the prototype implementation of our model using ONOS SDN controller and OpenFlow Access Points.

Secure Monitoring of Patients With Wandering Behavior in Hospital Environments

Significant developments in the recent times have led to an increasing use of mobile devices such as smart phones in accessing Internet services and applications over wireless networks. In this paper, we propose a security architecture for counteracting denial of service attacks in Beyond 3G (B3G) network architecture with mobile nodes. We describe the system architecture and discuss the different cases of attack scenarios involving the mobility of the attacking and victim nodes. Our proposed solution takes into account practical issues such as limited resources of the mobile nodes. It has distinct advantages such as monitoring of the traffic to the victim node and the attack traffic being dropped before reaching the victim, the ability to trace back the attacking node and prevent the attack at the home agent or foreign agent that is closer to the attacking node, and the ability to deal with dynamic changes in attack traffic patterns. We also present an analysis of our proposed architecture as well as simulation results.

Security Techniques for Beyond 3G Wireless Mobile Networks

Security Techniques for Counteracting Attacks in Mobile Healthcare Services.

The security protocols for WLAN such as WEP have fundamental weakness which can be exploited by the attacker to obtain unauthorized access to the wireless networks and generate attacks. In this paper, we propose a security architecture for counteracting denial of service attacks in wireless based network architecture with mobile nodes. We describe the system model and discuss the different cases of attack scenarios involving the mobility of the attacking and victim nodes. We describe how mobile IP protocol in conjunction with our model can be used to deal efficiently with the attacks on mobile nodes.

Counteracting DDoS attacks in WLAN

The current mobile devices have become smart and are increasingly being used for conducting business and personal activities. Also, there is increasing number of attacks targeting such mobile devices. The term mobile botnet refers to group of mobile devices that are compromised and controlled by the attacker that can be used for generating distributed denial-of-service attacks. The security protocols that have been proposed for wireless and mobile networks have several weaknesses that can be exploited by the attacker to obtain unauthorized access and generate attacks. Also, there is growing number of malicious applications that are aimed to compromise smartphones and using them for generating different types of attacks. In this paper, we propose techniques to counteract distributed denial-of-service attacks on wireless mobile devices. We describe the operation and architectural components of our model. We will show that our model is able to efficiently deal with the attacks by dropping the attack traffic before it targets the victim mobile node, can prevent the attack traffic at the upstream nodes, and also deal with the attack cases that involve mobility of the attacking and victim nodes. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Securing wireless mobile nodes from distributed denial-of-service attacks

Seamless handover is one of the most attractive research fields in B3G systems. Many mechanisms are proposed to provide certain QoS guarantees in handovers of mobile systems, which would also introduce new threats, such as DoS and DDOS attacks. In this paper, we extend a cookie-based scheme to protect systems from DoS and DDoS attacks. We also adopt a novel queuing network model to analyze our scheme by estimating two essential metrics, i.e. the mean total response time and the mean queue length of MAP. Numerical results indicate that our mechanism works better than the traditional cookie-based scheme and it could effectively help networks defend against abnormal attacks in the handover process.

A Novel Cookie-Based DDoS Protection Scheme and its Performance Analysis

Future network systems and embedded infrastructure devices in ubiquitous environments will need to consume low power and process large amounts of network packet traffic. In order to meet necessary high processing efficiency requirements, future processors will have many heterogeneous cores with reduced reliability due to low voltage, small transistor sizes, semiconductor wearout, and environmental factors such as noise and interference. It will be necessary for multi-core network infrastructure software to mitigate transient hardware faults to maintain acceptable system reliability. Applications such as packet processing can benefit from the reliability versus performance tradeoff. We propose a model based on Stochastic Reward Nets to evaluate the performance vs. reliability tradeoff of unreliable embedded multi-core network processors, and apply this model to a multi-core packet processing application.

Yang Wang

Papers

A Novel Cookie-Based DDoS Protection Scheme and its Performance Analysis

Network processing performability evaluation on heterogeneous reliability multicore processors using SRN model