Northeastern State University

About: Northeastern State University is a education organization based out in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Wireless sensor network & Computer science. The organization has 477 authors who have published 831 publications receiving 21482 citations. The organization is also known as: NSU.

SPPS: A Search Pattern Privacy System for Approximate Shortest Distance Query of Encrypted Graphs in IIoT

Abstract: In recent years, Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has gradually attracted the attention of the industry owing to its accurate time synchronization, communication accuracy, and high adaptability. As an important data structure, graphs are widely used in IIoT applications, where entities and their relationships can be expressed in the form of graphs. With the widespread adoption of IIoT and cloud computing, an increasing number of individuals or organizations are outsourcing their IIoT graph data to cloud servers to enjoy the unlimited storage space and fast computing service. To protect the privacy of graph data, graphs are usually encrypted before being outsourced. In this article, we propose a search pattern privacy system for approximate shortest distance query of encrypted graphs in IIoT. To realize search pattern privacy, we adopt two noncolluded cloud servers to accomplish different tasks. We leverage the first server to store the encrypted data and perform query operations, and use the second one to rerandomize the contents and shuffle the locations of the queried records. Before queries, we generate the trapdoors by using different random numbers. After queries, we ask the second server to rerandomize the contents of the records that the first server touched. In addition, we shuffle the physical locations of original records by inserting some fake records. In this way, all contents and physical locations of the touched records change, so that the first server cannot distinguish whether two queries are the same or not. To enhance the efficiency on the user side, we further improve this system by moving some heavy workloads from the user to the cloud. The security analysis and the performance evaluation show that our work is secure and efficient.

A survey of security threats and defense on Blockchain

Abstract: Blockchain provides a trusted environment for storing information and propagating transactions. Owing to the distributed property and integrity, blockchain has been employed in various domains. However, lots of studies prove that the security mechanism of blockchain exposes its vulnerability especially when the blockchain suffers attacks. This work provides a systematic summary of the security threats and countermeasures on blockchain. We first review the working procedure and its implementation techniques. We then summarize basic security properties of blockchain. From the view of the blockchain’s architecture, we describe security threats of blockchain, including weak anonymity, vulnerability of P2P network, consensus mechanism, incentive mechanism and smart contract. We then describe the related attacks and summarize the current representative countermeasures which improve anonymity and robustness against security threats respectively. Finally, we also put forward future research directions on consensus, incentive mechanisms, privacy preservation and encryption algorithm to further enhance security and privacy of the blockchain-based multimedia.

Reliable Code Disseminations Through Opportunistic Communication in Vehicular Wireless Networks

Abstract: Large numbers of software-defined sensor devices have formed a basic infrastructure for data collection. One of the challenges is how to update the program codes of devices in a low-cost and reliable style. This paper figures that the vehicular wireless networks (VWNs), combined with a base station (BS) platform, can play a significant role in disseminating program codes in a smart city. A code dissemination algorithm that selects vehicles as disseminators is proposed to accomplish the coverage ratio of codes and benefits of vehicular disseminators in a reliable manner and to reduce the costs of the BS. The algorithm targets to make the disseminators to achieve more coverage regions of a code. The benefit distribution method, which targets the improvement of benefits in suburban regions and encourages vehicle owners, is redefined and differs from previous benefit distribution schemes. Through disseminating, the vehicles can obtain more benefits, and the costs of the BS can be reduced. We ultimately simulate the performances of the selection algorithms with GPS datasets to prove the progressiveness of the “Code Disseminations through Opportunistic Communication in Vehicular Wireless Networks” (CD-VWNs) scheme in terms of coverage and benefits. The benefit-ratio performance criterion can be improved by 21.078% over other models. The coverage-ratio performance criterion can result in an improvement of 31.94% over other selection schemes. The evaluation metric ${\mathcal {Z}}_{r}$ performance criterion can result in an improvement of approximately 25.256%. With the CD-VWNs scheme, loss of codes can be decreased, and the dissemination system remains reliable and survivable.

A privacy preserving authentication scheme for roaming in ubiquitous networks

Abstract: Ubiquitous networks enable mobile users to communicate with each other efficiently and independently without the need of inventing agent. This approach is proved to be delay and spectral efficient. Due to the nature of underlying Big data, such networks are prone to several security and privacy challenges. Because such gigantic data is not only difficult to store, maintain and manipulate but Big data’s open architecture makes the security threats inevitable. Therefore, incorporating authentication between mobile node and foreign network during roaming in ubiquitous networks has become a tedious task. Very recently, Farash et al. found a number of weaknesses in the schemes proposed by Wen et al. and Shin et al. Furthermore, Farash et al. proposed an enhanced scheme for roaming user in ubiquitous network. However, after thorough investigation, we show fragilities of Farash et al.’s scheme against (1) mobile user anonymity violation; (2) disclosure of secret parameter of mobile node; (3) session key disclosure; and (4) mobile node impersonation attacks. Therefore, we propose an improved scheme to fix these fragilities. We analyze the security of proposed scheme using popular automated verification tool ProVerif. The analysis confirms that the proposed scheme resists the known attacks while having quite low overhead as compared with Farash et al.’s scheme. Therefore, in order to get better performance proposed scheme is a suitable candidate to be employed along with supercomputing systems for dealing the security challenges of big data in ubiquitous networks.