Question: Advancing effective cryptographic group access control systems.

This document presents IRON, a functional encryption (FE) system that harnesses Intel's Software Guard Extensions (SGX) to deliver a secure and practical solution. FE is a cutting-edge cryptographic technique that enables authorized users to compute on encrypted data and obtain clear results. Despite its potential, existing FE implementations for general functionalities are often too resource-intensive to be practical. IRON, however, bridges this gap by utilizing Intel SGX, demonstrating not only security but also practicality in real-world applications. The system's versatility is showcased through its ability to handle complex functionalities, while also outperforming leading cryptographic methods for simpler functions. Security is rigorously justified through a model that incorporates hardware elements, with a proof that IRON adheres to the established security criteria.

In an attribute-based encryption (ABE) scheme, a ciphertext is associated with an ℓ-bit public index ind and a message m, and a secret key is associated with a Boolean predicate P. The secret key allows decrypting the ciphertext and learning m if and only if P(ind) = 1. Moreover, the scheme should be secure against collusions of users, namely, given secret keys for polynomially many predicates, an adversary learns nothing about the message if none of the secret keys can individually decrypt the ciphertext.
 We present attribute-based encryption schemes for circuits of any arbitrary polynomial size, where the public parameters and the ciphertext grow linearly with the depth of the circuit. Our construction is secure under the standard learning with errors (LWE) assumption. Previous constructions of attribute-based encryption were for Boolean formulas, captured by the complexity class NC1.
 In the course of our construction, we present a new framework for constructing ABE schemes. As a by-product of our framework, we obtain ABE schemes for polynomial-size branching programs, corresponding to the complexity class LOGSPACE, under quantitatively better assumptions.

The use of remote services offered by cloud providers have been popular in the last lustrum. Services allow users to store remote files, or to analyze data for several purposes, like health-care or message analysis. However, when personal data are sent to the Cloud, users may lose privacy on the data-content, and on the other side cloud providers may use those data for their own businesses. In this paper, we present our solution to analyze users health-data directly into the Cloud while preserving users privacy. Our solution makes use of homomorphic encryption to protect users data during the analysis. In particular, we developed a mobile application that offloads users data into the Cloud, and a homomorphic encryption algorithm that processes those data without leaking any information to the Cloud provider. Performed empirical tests show that our HE algorithm is able to evaluate users data in reasonable time proving the feasibility of this emerging way of private-data evaluation.

This thesis is dedicated to symmetric cryptographic algorithms. The major focus of the work is on block ciphers themselves as well as on hash functions and message authentication codes based on block ciphers. Three main approaches to the cryptanalysis of symmetric cryptographic algorithms are pursued. First, several block cipher constructions are analyzed mathematically using statistical cryptanalysis. Second, practical attacks on real-world symmetric cryptosystems are considered. Finally, novel cryptanalytic techniques using side-channel leakage are studied with applications to block ciphers and message authentication codes. Differential and linear cryptanalyses are well-known statistical attacks on block ciphers. This thesis studies the security of unbalanced Feistel networks with contracting MDS diffusion with respect to differential and linear cryptanalysis. Upper bounds on the differential trail probabilities and linear probabilities of linear trails in such constructions are proven. It is shown that such unbalanced Feistel networks can be highly efficient and are comparable to many known balanced Feistel network constructions with respect to differential and linear cryptanalysis. Ultra-lightweight substitution-permutation networks with diffusion layers based on the co-design of S-boxes and bit permutations are proposed. This results in lightweight block ciphers and block cipher based compression functions for hash functions designed and analyzed. These constructions have very small footprint and can be efficiently implemented on the majority of RFID tags This work also studies practical attacks on real-world symmetric cryptographic systems. Attacks are proposed on the KeeLoq block cipher and authentication systems widely used for automotive access control and component identification. Cryptanalysis of the A5/2 stream cipher used for protecting GSM connections worldwide is performed. Linear slide attacks on KeeLoq are proposed resulting in the fastest known attack on the KeeLoq block cipher working for all keys. Severe weaknesses of the KeeLoq key management are identified. The KeeLoq real-world authentication protocols for access control and component identification are also analyzed. A special-purpose hardware architecture for attacking A5/2 is developed that allows for real-time key recovery within one second for different GSM channels. This engine is based on an optimized hardware algorithm for fast Gaussian elimination over binary finite fields.

Dynamic Searchable Symmetric Encryption (DSSE) allows to delegate keyword search and file update over an encrypted database via encrypted indexes, and therefore provides opportunities to mitigate the data privacy and utilization dilemma in cloud storage platforms. Despite its merits, recent works have shown that efficient DSSE schemes are vulnerable to statistical attacks due to the lack of forward-privacy, whereas forward-private DSSE schemes suffers from practicality concerns as a result of their extreme computation overhead. Due to significant practical impacts of statistical attacks, there is a critical need for new DSSE schemes that can achieve the forward-privacy in a more practical and efficient manner. We propose a new DSSE scheme that we refer to as Forward-private Sublinear DSSE (FS-DSSE). FS-DSSE harnesses special secure update strategies and a novel caching strategy to reduce the computation cost of repeated queries. Therefore, it achieves forward-privacy, sublinear search complexity, low end-to-end delay, and parallelization capability simultaneously. We fully implemented our proposed method and evaluated its performance on a real cloud platform. Our experimental evaluation results showed that the proposed scheme is highly secure and highly efficient compared with state-of-the-art DSSE techniques. Specifically, FS-DSSE is up to three magnitude of times faster than forward-secure DSSE counterparts, depending on the frequency of the searched keyword in the database.

In the last few years the Internet of Things (IoT) has seen widespread application and can be found in each field. Authentication and access control are important and critical functionalities in the context of IoT to enable secure communication between devices. Mobility, dynamic network topology and weak physical security of low power devices in IoT networks are possible sources for security vulnerabilities. It is promising to make an authentication and access control attack resistant and lightweight in a resource constrained and distributed IoT environment. This paper presents the Identity Authentication and Capability based Access Control (IACAC) model with protocol evaluation and performance analysis. To protect IoT from man-in-the-middle, replay and denial of service (Dos) attacks, the concept of capability for access control is introduced. The novelty of this model is that, it presents an integrated approach of authentication and access control for IoT devices. The results of other related study have also been analyzed to validate and support our findings. Finally, the proposed protocol is evaluated by using security protocol verification tool and verification results shows that IACAC is secure against aforementioned attacks. This paper also discusses performance analysis of the protocol in terms of computational time compared to other Journal of Cyber Security and Mobility, Vol. 1, 309–348. c © 2013 River Publishers. All rights reserved. 310 P.N. Mahalle et al. existing solutions. Furthermore, this paper addresses challenges in IoT and security attacks are modelled with the use cases to give an actual view of IoT networks.

We study the setting in which a user stores encrypted documents (e.g. e-mails) on an untrusted server. In order to retrieve documents satisfying a certain search criterion, the user gives the server a capability that allows the server to identify exactly those documents. Work in this area has largely focused on search criteria consisting of a single keyword. If the user is actually interested in documents containing each of several keywords (conjunctive keyword search) the user must either give the server capabilities for each of the keywords individually and rely on an intersection calculation (by either the server or the user) to determine the correct set of documents, or alternatively, the user may store additional information on the server to facilitate such searches. Neither solution is desirable; the former enables the server to learn which documents match each individual keyword of the conjunctive search and the latter results in exponential storage if the user allows for searches on every set of keywords. We define a security model for conjunctive keyword search over encrypted data and present the first schemes for conducting such searches securely. We propose first a scheme for which the communication cost is linear in the number of documents, but that cost can be incurred “offline” before the conjunctive query is asked. The security of this scheme relies on the Decisional Diffie-Hellman (DDH) assumption. We propose a second scheme whose communication cost is on the order of the number of keyword fields and whose security relies on a new hardness assumption.

In modern societies, the number of mobile users has dramatically risen in recent years. In this paper, an efficient authentication scheme for distributed mobile cloud computing services is proposed. The proposed scheme provides security and convenience for mobile users to access multiple mobile cloud computing services from multiple service providers using only a single private key. The security strength of the proposed scheme is based on bilinear pairing cryptosystem and dynamic nonce generation. In addition, the scheme supports mutual authentication, key exchange, user anonymity, and user untraceability. From system implementation point of view, verification tables are not required for the trusted smart card generator (SCG) service and cloud computing service providers when adopting the proposed scheme. In consequence, this scheme reduces the usage of memory spaces on these corresponding service providers. In one mobile user authentication session, only the targeted cloud service provider needs to interact with the service requestor (user). The trusted SCG serves as the secure key distributor for distributed cloud service providers and mobile clients. In the proposed scheme, the trusted SCG service is not involved in individual user authentication process. With this design, our scheme reduces authentication processing time required by communication and computation between cloud service providers and traditional trusted third party service. Formal security proof and performance analyses are conducted to show that the scheme is both secure and efficient.

As the world moves to digital storage for archival purposes, there is an increasing demand for systems that can provide secure data storage in a cost-effective manner. By identifying common chunks of data both within and between files and storing them only once, deduplication can yield cost savings by increasing the utility of a given amount of storage. Unfortunately, deduplication exploits identical content, while encryption attempts to make all content appear random; the same content encrypted with two different keys results in very different ciphertext. Thus, combining the space efficiency of deduplication with the secrecy aspects of encryption is problematic.
 We have developed a solution that provides both data security and space efficiency in single-server storage and distributed storage systems. Encryption keys are generated in a consistent manner from the chunk data; thus, identical chunks will always encrypt to the same ciphertext. Furthermore, the keys cannot be deduced from the encrypted chunk data. Since the information each user needs to access and decrypt the chunks that make up a file is encrypted using a key known only to the user, even a full compromise of the system cannot reveal which chunks are used by which users.

In the recent years, the Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) have gained popularity for general purpose applications, immensely outperforming traditional optimized CPU based implementations. A class of such applications implemented on GPUs to achieve faster execution than CPUs include cryptographic techniques like the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) which is a widely deployed symmetric encryption/decryption scheme in various electronic communication domains. With the drastic advancements in electronic communication technology, and growth in the user space, the size of data exchanged electronically has increased substantially. So, such cryptographic techniques become a bottleneck to fast transfers of information. In this work, we implement the AES-128 ECB Encryption on two of the recent and advanced GPUs (NVIDIA Quadro FX 7000 and Tesla K20c) with different memory usage schemes and varying input plaintext sizes and patterns. We obtained a speedup of up to 87x against an advanced CPU (Intel Xeon X5690) based implementation. Moreover, our experiments reveal that the different degrees of pattern repetitions in input plaintext affect the encryption performance on GPU.

Virtualization techniques are the key in both public and private cloud computing environments. In such environments, multiple virtual instances are running on the same physical machine. The logical isolation between systems makes security assurance weaker than physically isolated systems. Thus, Virtual Machine Introspection techniques become essential to prevent the virtual system from being vulnerable to attacks. However, this technique breaks down the borders of the segregation between multiple tenants, which should be avoided in a public cloud computing environment. In this paper, we focus on building an encrypted Virtual Machine Introspection system, CryptVMI, to address the above concern, especially in a public cloud system. Our approach maintains a query handler on the management node to handle encrypted queries from user clients. We pass the query to the corresponding compute node that holds the virtual instance queried. The introspection application deployed on the compute node processes the query and acquires the encrypted results from the virtual instance for the user. This work shows our design and preliminary implementation of this system.


Question: Advancing effective cryptographic group access control mechanisms.

SCONE: A Framework for Secure Linux Containers Utilizing Intel SGX
Sergei Arnautov, Bohdan Trach, Franz Gregor, Thomas Knauth, Andre Martin, Christian Priebe, Joshua Lind, Divya Muthukumaran, Dan O’Keeffe, Mark L Stillwell, David Goltzsche, David Eyers, Rüdiger Kapitza, Peter Pietzuch, and Christof Fetzer Department of Informatik, TU Dresden, christof.fetzer@tu-dresden.de Department of Computing, Imperial College London, prp@imperial.ac.uk Institute of Informatik, TU Braunschweig, rrkapitz@ibr.cs.tu-bs.de Department of Computer Science, University of Otago, dme@cs.otago.ac.nz

SCONE, a pioneering framework, is designed to enhance the security of Linux containers through the integration of Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX). This approach allows for the creation of secure enclaves within containers, ensuring that sensitive data and processes remain protected even in potentially hostile environments. The collaborative effort of researchers from the Technical University of Dresden, Imperial College London, Technical University of Braunschweig, and the University of Otago has resulted in a robust solution that bridges the gap between high-level container functionality and low-level hardware security features. By leveraging Intel SGX, SCONE not only secures the execution environment but also optimizes performance, making it a versatile tool for enhancing the security of containerized applications without compromising efficiency.

Alessandro Cimatti 1, Edmund Clarke2, Enrico Giunchiglia3, Fausto Giunchiglia 4, Marco Pistore1, Marco Roveri 1, Roberto Sebastiani 4, and Armando Tacchella 3 1 ITC-IRST, Via Sommarive 18, 38050 Trento, Italy fcimatti,pistore,roverig@irst.itc.it 2 Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh (PA), USA emc@cs.cmu.edu 3 DIST – Università di Genova, Viale Causa 13, 16145 Genova, Italy fenrico,tacg@mrg.dist.unige.it 4 Università di Trento, Via Sommarive 14, 38050 Trento, Italy ffausto,rsebag@science.unitn.it

Securing software systems, is of paramount importance today. This is especially true for cloud systems, as they can be attacked nearly anytime from everywhere over the Internet. Ensuring security in general, however, typically has a negative impact on performance, usability, and increases the system’s complexity. For cloud systems, which are built for high performance and availability as well as elastic scalability, security, therefore, may annihilate many of these original quality properties. Consequently, security, especially for cloud systems, can be understood as a trade-off problem where security mechanisms, applied to protect the system from specific threats and to achieve specific security goals, trade in security for other quality properties. For Cloud Storage Systems (CSS)—i.e., distributed storage systems that replicate data over a cluster of nodes in order to manage huge data amounts, highly volatile query load (elastic scalability), and extraordinary needs for availability and fault-tolerance—this trade-off problem is particularly prominent. Already, the different original quality properties of CSS cannot be provided at the same time and, thus, lead to fundamental trade-offs such as the trade-off between consistency, availability, and partition tolerance (see, e.g.: [53]). The piggybacked trade-offs coming from considering security as an additionally wanted quality property of such systems lead to further trade-offs that must be decided and managed. In this thesis, we focus on the trade-offs between security and performance in CSS. In order to not contradict the original design goals of CSS, a sensible management of these trade-offs in CSS requires a high degree of understanding of the relationships between security and performance in the security mechanisms of a specific CSS. Otherwise, this can lead to a badly configured CSS which is a security risk or consumes a lot of resources unnecessarily. This thesis, hence, aims at enhancing the understanding of the trade-offs between security and performance in CSS as well as at improving the management of these trade-offs in such systems. For this, we present three independent contributions in this thesis. The first contribution intends to improve the overall understanding of security in and security requirements for CSS. We present two reference usage models that support a security engineer in understanding the general usage of cloud storage

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.infsof.2014.09.012 0950-5849/ 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. ⇑ Corresponding author at: Center of Informatics, Federal University of Pernambuco (CIn/UFPE), Av. Jornalista Anibal Fernandes, S/N, Cidade Universitária, 50. Recife, PE, Brazil. Tel.: +55 81 8250 0470. E-mail addresses: fss4@cin.ufpe.br (F. Selleri Silva), fsfs@cin.ufpe.br (F.S.F. Soares), alp5@cin.ufpe.br (A.L. Peres), ima2@cin.ufpe.br (I.M.d. Azevedo), aplfv@ci (A.P.L.F. Vasconcelos), fkk@cin.ufpe.br (F.K. Kamei), srlm@cin.ufpe.br (S.R.d.L. Meira). Fernando Selleri Silva a,b,⇑, Felipe Santana Furtado Soares , Angela Lima Peres , Ivanildo Monteiro de Azevedo , Ana Paula L.F. Vasconcelos , Fernando Kenji Kamei , Silvio Romero de Lemos Meira a,c

In modern societies, the number of mobile users has dramatically risen in recent years. In this paper, an efficient authentication scheme for distributed mobile cloud computing services is proposed. The proposed scheme provides security and convenience for mobile users to access multiple mobile cloud computing services from multiple service providers using only a single private key. The security strength of the proposed scheme is based on bilinear pairing cryptosystem and dynamic nonce generation. In addition, the scheme supports mutual authentication, key exchange, user anonymity, and user untraceability. From system implementation point of view, verification tables are not required for the trusted smart card generator (SCG) service and cloud computing service providers when adopting the proposed scheme. In consequence, this scheme reduces the usage of memory spaces on these corresponding service providers. In one mobile user authentication session, only the targeted cloud service provider needs to interact with the service requestor (user). The trusted SCG serves as the secure key distributor for distributed cloud service providers and mobile clients. In the proposed scheme, the trusted SCG service is not involved in individual user authentication process. With this design, our scheme reduces authentication processing time required by communication and computation between cloud service providers and traditional trusted third party service. Formal security proof and performance analyses are conducted to show that the scheme is both secure and efficient.

Multicast stream authentication and signing is an important and challenging problem. Applications include the continuous authentication of radio and TV Internet broadcasts, and authenticated data distribution by satellite. The main challenges are fourfold. First, authenticity must be guaranteed even when only the sender of the data is trusted. Second, the scheme needs to scale to potentially millions of receivers. Third, streamed media distribution can have high packet loss. Finally, the system needs to be efficient to support fast packet rates. We propose two efficient schemes, TESLA and EMSS, for secure lossy multicast streams. TESLA, short for Timed Efficient Stream Loss-tolerant Authentication, offers sender authentication, strong loss robustness, high scalability, and minimal overhead, at the cost of loose initial time synchronization and slightly delayed authentication. EMSS, short for Efficient Multi-chained Stream Signature, provides nonrepudiation of origin, high loss resistance, and low overhead, at the cost of slightly delayed verification. This work began in Summer 1999 when Adrian Perrig and Dawn Song were visiting the IBM T. J. Watson research lab. Initial research on stream authentication was done during Summer 1999 by Ran Canetti, Adrian Perrig, and Dawn Song at IBM. Additional improvements were suggested by J. D. Tygar in Fall 1999 at UC Berkeley. Implementation was done in Fall 1999 by Adrian Perrig at UC Berkeley. The work on stream signatures was done by J. D. Tygar, Adrian Perrig, and Dawn Song at UC Berkeley. Additional work was performed by Ran Canetti in Spring 2000. Ran Canetti is at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, and Adrian Perrig, Dawn Song, and J. D. Tygar are at the Computer Science Division, UC Berkeley. This research was suported in part by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency under DARPA contract N6601-99-28913 (under supervision of the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center San Diego), by the National Science foundation under grant FD99-79852, and by the United States Postal Service under grant USPS 1025 90-98-C-3513. Views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official opinion or policies, either expressed or implied of the US government or any of its agencies, DARPA, NSF, USPS, or IBM.

Visual Cryptography and biometrics have been identified as the two most important aspects of digital security. In this paper, we propose a method for the preparation and secure transmission of fingerprint images using visual cryptography scheme. Visual cryptography (VC) is a kind of secret image sharing scheme that uses the human visual system to perform the decryption computations. A visual cryptography scheme (VCS) allows confidential messages to be encrypted into k-out-of-n secret sharing schemes. Whenever the number of participants from the group (n) is larger than or equal to the predetermined threshold value (k), the confidential message can be obtained by these participants. VCS is interesting because decryption can be done with no prior knowledge of cryptography and can be performed without any cryptographic computations. In this paper, the fingerprint image is broken up into n pieces, which individually yield no information about the image. These pieces of the images, called shares or shadows, may then be distributed among a group of n participants/dealers. By combining any k (k ≤ n) of these shares, the original fingerprint image can be recovered, but combining less than k of them will not reveal any information about the image. The scheme is perfectly secure and very easy to implement. To decode the encrypted information, i.e., to get the original information back, the shares are stacked and the secret image pops out. The only drawback of the VCS is the loss in contrast of reconstructed image. The proposed method for the reconstruction of fingerprint image is based on XNOR operation. This will enable one to obtain back perfect fingerprint image.

This paper describes the first identity-based broadcast encryption scheme (IBBE) with constant size ciphertexts and private keys. In our scheme, the public key is of size linear in the maximal size m of the set of receivers, which is smaller than the number of possible users (identities) in the system. Compared with a recent broadcast encryption system introduced by Boneh, Gentry and Waters (BGW), our system has comparable properties, but with a better efficiency: the public key is shorter than in BGW. Moreover, the total number of possible users in the system does not have to be fixed in the setup.

Cloud computing is the new business paradigm introduced in the IT market in the current decade providing the customers with the option to pay for the amount of service utilized. The use of cloud computing has increased rapidly in many organizations. Ensuring security of data in a cloud is a major factor in the cloud computing environment, as users often store fragile information in cloud storage. Public auditing on shared data stored in the cloud is done by exploiting Aggregate Signature Scheme. With this mechanism, the identity of the signer of various blocks of shared data is kept private from public verifiers, who are able to verify efficiently the integrity of shared data without retrieving the entire file. However traceability is a major issue. A Multi-clouds Database Model (MCDB) which is based on Multi-clouds service providers instead of using single cloud service provider such as in Amazon cloud service is used to implement traceability. Also, dealing with single cloud providers is predicted to become less popular with customers due to risks of service availability failure and the possibility of malicious insiders in the single cloud. A movement towards multi-clouds is highly efficient and this system would also check for the data's which are attacked by malicious users, with short time and cost requirement.

Benefits of Internet of Things and cloud–fog-edge computing are associated with the risks of confidentiality, integrity, and availability related with the loss of information, denial of access for a long time, information leakage, conspiracy and technical failures. In this article, we propose a configurable, reliable, and confidential distributed data storage scheme with the ability to process encrypted data and control results of computations. Our systemutilizes Redundant ResidueNumber System (RRNS)with newmethod of error correction codes and secret sharing schemes. We introduce the concept of an approximate value of a rank of a number (AR), which allows us to reduce the computational complexity of the decoding from RNS to binary representation, and size of the coefficients. Based on the properties of the approximate value and arithmetic properties of RNS,we introduce AR-RRNSmethod for error detection, correction, and controlling computational results. We provide a theoretical basis to configure probability of information loss, data redundancy, speed of encoding and decoding to cope with different objective preferences, workloads, and storage properties. Theoretical analysis shows that by appropriate selection of RRNS parameters, the proposed scheme allows not only increasing safety, reliability, and reducing an overhead of data storage, but also processing of encrypted data. © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Rapid advances in networking and Internet technologies have fueled the emergence of the "software as a service" model for enterprise computing. Successful examples of commercially viable software services include rent-a-spreadsheet, electronic mail services, general storage services, disaster protection services. "Database as a Service" model provides users power to create, store, modify, and retrieve data from anywhere in the world, as long as they have access to the Internet. It introduces several challenges, an important issue being data privacy. It is in this context that we specifically address the issue of data privacy.There are two main privacy issues. First, the owner of the data needs to be assured that the data stored on the service-provider site is protected against data thefts from outsiders. Second, data needs to be protected even from the service providers, if the providers themselves cannot be trusted. In this paper, we focus on the second challenge. Specifically, we explore techniques to execute SQL queries over encrypted data. Our strategy is to process as much of the query as possible at the service providers' site, without having to decrypt the data. Decryption and the remainder of the query processing are performed at the client site. The paper explores an algebraic framework to split the query to minimize the computation at the client site. Results of experiments validating our approach are also presented.


Question: Advancing the efficiency of cryptographic group access control systems.

This paper presents Sanctum, a novel approach to achieving robust software isolation through minimal hardware modifications. Like Intel's Software Guard Extensions (SGX), Sanctum ensures the isolation of software modules running concurrently, but it goes a step further by safeguarding against a class of software attacks that exploit memory access patterns to infer sensitive information. Sanctum's design philosophy prioritizes simplicity and security, reducing the attack surface and the complexity of the security analysis. The majority of Sanctum's security logic is implemented in trusted software, avoiding the use of cryptographic keys in software operations, which makes it more transparent and easier to analyze compared to the opaque microcode found in SGX. Our implementation is tailored for the Rocket RISC-V core, an open-source architecture that facilitates detailed security assessments by researchers. Sanctum's hardware extensions are adaptable to various processor cores, as they do not require alterations to fundamental CPU components but rather add security measures at the interfaces between these components, without affecting the cycle time. The project demonstrates that achieving strong software isolation is possible with a limited set of minimally invasive hardware changes and acceptable overhead, showcasing the feasibility of Sanctum's approach in enhancing security without sacrificing performance.

We present an Identity Based Encryption (IBE) system that is fully secure in the standard model and has several advantages over previous such systems – namely, computational efficiency, shorter public parameters, and a “tight” security reduction, albeit to a stronger assumption that depends on the number of private key generation queries made by the adversary. Our assumption is a variant of Boneh et al.’s decisional Bilinear Diffie-Hellman Exponent assumption, which has been used to construct efficient hierarchical IBE and broadcast encryption systems. The construction is remarkably simple. It also provides recipient anonymity automatically, providing a second (and more efficient) solution to the problem of achieving anonymous IBE without random oracles. Finally, our proof of CCA2 security, which has more in common with the security proof for the Cramer-Shoup encryption scheme than with security proofs for other IBE systems, may be of independent interest.

Cloud computing is an emerging computing model in which resources of the computing communications are provided as services over the Internet. Privacy and security of cloud storage services are very important and become a challenge in cloud computing due to loss of control over data and its dependence on the cloud computing provider. While there is a huge amount of transferring data in cloud system, the risk of accessing data by attackers raises. Considering the problem of building a secure cloud storage service, current scheme is proposed which is based on combination of RSA and AES encryption methods to share the data among users in a secure cloud system. The proposed method allows providing difficulty for attackers as well as reducing the time of information transmission between user and cloud data storage.

The mechanism for traditional Searchable Symmetric Encryption is pay-then-use. That is to say, if a user wants to search some documents that contain special keywords, he needs to pay to the server firstly, then he can enjoy search service. Under this situation, these kinds of things will happen: After the user paying the service fees, the server may either disappear because of the poor management or returning nothing. As a result, the money that the user paid cannot be brought back quickly. Another case is that the server may return incorrect document sets to the user in order to save his own cost. Once such events happen, it needs the arbitration institution to mediate which will cost a long time. Besides, to settle the disputes the user has to pay to the arbitration institution. Ideally, we deeply hope that when the user realizes the server has a tendency to cheat in the task of searching, he can immediately and automatically withdraw his money to safeguard his right. However, the existing SSE protocols cannot satisfy this demand. To solve this dilemma, we find a compromised method by introducing the block chain into SSE. Our scheme achieves three goals stated below. Firstly, when the server does not return any thing to user after he gets the search token, the user can get some compensation from the server, because the server can infer some important information from the Index and this token. Besides, the user also doesn’t pay the service charge. Secondly, if the documents that the server returns are false, the server cannot receive service fees, meanwhile, he will be punished. Lastly, when the user receives some bitcoin from server at the beginning, he may terminate the protocol. Under this situation, the server is a victim. In order to prevent such thing from happening, the server will broadcast a transaction to redeem his pledge after an appointed time. ∗Corresponding author Email addresses: tianhb@mail.sysu.edu.cn (Haibo Tian), isszhfg@mail.sysu.edu.cn (Fangguo Zhang ) Preprint submitted to Elsevier April 26, 2017

High-throughput and area-efficient designs of hash functions and corresponding mechanisms for Message Authentication Codes (MACs) are in high demand due to new security protocols that have arisen and call for security services in every transmitted data packet. For instance, IPv6 incorporates the IPSec protocol for secure data transmission. However, the IPSec's performance bottleneck is the HMAC mechanism which is responsible for authenticating the transmitted data. HMAC's performance bottleneck in its turn is the underlying hash function. In this article a high-throughput and small-size SHA-256 hash function FPGA design and the corresponding HMAC FPGA design is presented. Advanced optimization techniques have been deployed leading to a SHA-256 hashing core which performs more than 30% better, compared to the next better design. This improvement is achieved both in terms of throughput as well as in terms of throughput/area cost factor. It is the first reported SHA-256 hashing core that exceeds 11Gbps (after place and route in Xilinx Virtex 6 board).

In the recent years, the Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) have gained popularity for general purpose applications, immensely outperforming traditional optimized CPU based implementations. A class of such applications implemented on GPUs to achieve faster execution than CPUs include cryptographic techniques like the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) which is a widely deployed symmetric encryption/decryption scheme in various electronic communication domains. With the drastic advancements in electronic communication technology, and growth in the user space, the size of data exchanged electronically has increased substantially. So, such cryptographic techniques become a bottleneck to fast transfers of information. In this work, we implement the AES-128 ECB Encryption on two of the recent and advanced GPUs (NVIDIA Quadro FX 7000 and Tesla K20c) with different memory usage schemes and varying input plaintext sizes and patterns. We obtained a speedup of up to 87x against an advanced CPU (Intel Xeon X5690) based implementation. Moreover, our experiments reveal that the different degrees of pattern repetitions in input plaintext affect the encryption performance on GPU.

Cryptography has become an important topic in undergraduate curricula in mathematics and computer science, not just for its intrinsic interest---``about the most fun you can have with mathematics''\cite{ferg04, but for its current standing as the basis for almost all computer security. From wireless networking to secure email to password protection, cryptographic methods are used to secure information, to protect users, and to protect data.
 At Victoria University, cryptography has been taught as part of a mathematics and computer science degree for several years. The students all have had at least a year of tertiary mathematics, and some exposure to a computer algebra system (Maple). However, the cost of Maple, and the current licensing agreement, means that students are unable to experiment with the software away from the computer laboratories at the University. For this reason we have decided to investigate the use of open-source computer algebra systems Maxima and Axiom. Although not as full-featured and powerful as the commercial systems Maple and Mathematica, we show they are in fact admirably suited for a subject such as cryptography. In some ways Maxima and Axiom even surpass Maple and Mathematica. Student response to the introduction of these systems has been very positive.

Multiparty computation (MPC) among n parties can tolerate up to tsynchronous communication setting; however, in an asynchronous communication setting, the resiliency bound decreases to only t < n/3 active corruptions. We improve the resiliency bound for asynchronous MPC (AMPC) to match synchronous MPC using non-equivocation.
 Non-equivocation is a message authentication mechanism to restrict a corrupted sender from making conflicting statements to different (honest) parties. It can be implemented using an increment-only counter and a digital signature oracle, realizable with trusted hardware modules readily available in commodity computers and smartphone devices. A non-equivocation mechanism can also be transferable and allows a receiver to verifiably transfer the authenticated statement to other parties. In this work, using transferable non-equivocation, we present an AMPC protocol tolerating t < n/2 faults. From a practical point of view, our AMPC protocol requires fewer setup assumptions than the previous AMPC protocol with t < n/2 by Beerliova-Trubiniova, Hirt and Nielsen [PODC 2010]: unlike their AMPC protocol, it does not require any synchronous broadcast round at the beginning of the protocol and avoids the threshold homomorphic encryption setup assumption. Moreover, our AMPC protocol is also efficient and provides a gain of Θ(n) in the communication complexity per multiplication gate, over the AMPC protocol of Beerliova-Trubiniova et al. In the process, using non-equivocation, we also define the first asynchronous verifiable secret sharing (AVSS) scheme with t < n/2, which is of independent interest to threshold cryptography.

The application of elliptic curves to the field of cryptography has been relatively recent. It has opened up a wealth of possibilities in terms of security, encryption, and real-world applications. In particular, we are interested in public-key cryptosystems that use the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem to establish security. The objective of this thesis is to assemble the most important facts and findings into a broad, unified overview of this field. To illustrate certain points, we also discuss a sample implementation of the elliptic curve analogue of the El

We develop an abstract framework that encompasses the key properties of bilinear groups of composite order that are required to construct secure pairing-based cryptosystems, and we show how to use prime-order elliptic curve groups to construct bilinear groups with the same properties. In particular, we define a generalized version of the subgroup decision problem and give explicit constructions of bilinear groups in which the generalized subgroup decision assumption follows from the decision DiffieHellman assumption, the decision linear assumption, and/or related assumptions in prime-order groups. We apply our framework and our prime-order group constructions to create more efficient versions of cryptosystems that originally required composite-order groups. Specifically, we consider the Boneh-GohNissim encryption scheme, the Boneh-Sahai-Waters traitor tracing system, and the Katz-Sahai-Waters attribute-based encryption scheme. We give a security theorem for the prime-order group instantiation of each system, using assumptions of comparable complexity to those used in the composite-order setting. Our conversion of the last two systems to prime-order groups answers a problem posed by Groth and Sahai.

Many P2P applications require security services such as privacy, anonymity, authentication, and non-repudiation. Such services could be provided through a hierarchical Public Key Infrastructure. However, P2P networks are usually Internet-scale distributed systems comprised of nodes with undetermined trust level, thus making hierarchical solutions unrealistic. In this paper, we propose Chord-PKI, a distributed PKI architecture which is build upon the Chord overlay network, in order to provide security services for P2P applications. Our solution distributes the functionality of a PKI across the peers, by using threshold cryptography and proactive updating. We analyze the security of the proposed infrastructure and through simulations, we evaluate its performance for various scenarios of untrusted node distributions.


Question: Intelligent irrigation utilizing an embedded system design.

This paper introduces a novel smart irrigation system designed to address the global challenge of water scarcity, particularly in agriculture. The system employs cost-effective soil moisture sensors and utilizes XBee-based wireless communication for efficient water resource management. Recognizing the urgent need for improved water usage in developing countries, where traditional irrigation practices often prevail, the proposed solution integrates a custom-designed, low-cost soil moisture sensor to monitor and regulate water supply in areas experiencing water shortages. The sensor's operation is based on the principle of resistance variation in soil moisture, employing readily available materials and fabrication techniques. Data collected by the sensor node is transmitted wirelessly via XBee modules to a central server, which then governs water distribution. To enhance user engagement and system transparency, a user-friendly interface is developed to display daily moisture readings. The system's low-cost and wireless design enables expansive monitoring of moisture levels across extensive agricultural landscapes. Furthermore, the innovative moisture sensing technique can be seamlessly integrated into an automated drip irrigation system, facilitating precision agriculture with decentralized water control, thus revolutionizing water management in farming.

**Question**: A Direct Search Method to solve Economic Dispatch Problem with Valve-Point Effect

**Documents**: A hybrid of genetic algorithm and particle swarm optimization for recurrent network design
An evolutionary recurrent network which automates the design of recurrent neural/fuzzy networks using a new evolutionary learning algorithm is proposed in this paper. This new evolutionary learning algorithm is based on a hybrid of genetic algorithm (GA) and particle swarm optimization (PSO), and is thus called HGAPSO. In HGAPSO, individuals in a new generation are created, not only by crossover and mutation operation as in GA, but also by PSO. The concept of elite strategy is adopted in HGAPSO, where the upper-half of the best-performing individuals in a population are regarded as elites. However, instead of being reproduced directly to the next generation, these elites are first enhanced. The group constituted by the elites is regarded as a swarm, and each elite corresponds to a particle within it. In this regard, the elites are enhanced by PSO, an operation which mimics the maturing phenomenon in nature. These enhanced elites constitute half of the population in the new generation, whereas the other half is generated by performing crossover and mutation operation on these enhanced elites. HGAPSO is applied to recurrent neural/fuzzy network design as follows. For recurrent neural network, a fully connected recurrent neural network is designed and applied to a temporal sequence production problem. For recurrent fuzzy network design, a Takagi-Sugeno-Kang-type recurrent

Smart world is envisioned as an era in which objects (e.g., watches, mobile phones, computers, cars, buses, and trains) can automatically and intelligently serve people in a collaborative manner. Paving the way for smart world, Internet of Things (IoT) connects everything in the smart world. Motivated by achieving a sustainable smart world, this paper discusses various technologies and issues regarding green IoT, which further reduces the energy consumption of IoT. Particularly, an overview regarding IoT and green IoT is performed first. Then, the hot green information and communications technologies (ICTs) (e.g., green radio-frequency identification, green wireless sensor network, green cloud computing, green machine to machine, and green data center) enabling green IoT are studied, and general green ICT principles are summarized. Furthermore, the latest developments and future vision about sensor cloud, which is a novel paradigm in green IoT, are reviewed and introduced, respectively. Finally, future research directions and open problems about green IoT are presented. Our work targets to be an enlightening and latest guidance for research with respect to green IoT and smart world.

India is the agriculture based country, since it contributes 7.68 percent of total global agricultural output. In India, agricultural sector contributes about seventeen percentage of total Indian gross domestic product (GDP). Effective growth and improved yield of plants are necessary for increment of farmer's profit and economy of India. For this purpose farmers need domain experts for manual monitoring of plants. But manual monitoring will not give satisfactory result all the time. Moreover, domain experts are not available at all regions and are expensive as farmers have to pay fees including travelling charges. Hence, it requires developing an efficient smart farming technique which will help for better yield and growth with less human efforts. In this paper, we provide a review on methods developed by various researchers for detection of diseases in plants, in the field of image processing. It includes research in disease detection of plants such as apple, grapes, pepper, pomegranate, tomato etc.

The available parking management systems require human efforts for recording entries of coming and leaving vehicles from parking in sheets. For huge parking it is difficult to keep track of the information. Use of Radio Frequency Identification known as RFID technology reduces human efforts and Optical Character Recognition known as OCR, enabled system will provide an automated system for parking management. And also it will provide the control over the access of parking space by the use of boom barriers. For huge parking it will be an effective system. Parking can be a commercial one or can be a Very Important Person (VIP) parking. Depending on the usage system can be used. Vehicle cannot be parked in parking if it is not registered. OCR acts as a solution for vehicles which are not registered. To keep track of the happenings in parking cameras are used. Places where automated systems are required, the proposed system is an answer. System combines the two strong technologies RFID and OCR.

The technologies associated with the Internet of Things have great potential for application in the domain of food and agriculture, especially in view of the societal and environmental challenges faced by this sector. From farm to fork, IoT technologies could transform the sector, contributing to food safety, and the reduction of agricultural inputs and food waste. A major step toward greater uptake of these technologies will be the execution of IoT-based large-scale pilots (LSPs) in the entire supply chain. This article outlines the challenges and constraints that an LSP deployment of IoT in this domain must consider. Sectoral and technological challenges are described in order to identify a set of technological and agrifood requirements. An architecture based on a system of systems approach is briefly presented, the importance of addressing the interoperability challenges faced by this sector is highlighted, and we elaborate on requirements for new business models, security, privacy, and data governance. A description of the technologies and solutions involved in designing pilots for four agrifood domains (dairy, fruit, arable, meat and vegetable supply chain) is eventually provided. In conclusion, it is noted that for IoT to be successful in this domain, a significant change of culture is needed.

Flooding is one of the major disasters occurring in various parts of the world. The system for real-time monitoring of water conditions: water level; flow; and precipitation level, was developed to be employed in monitoring flood in Nakhon Si Thammarat, a southern province in Thailand. The two main objectives of the developed system is to serve 1) as information channel for flooding between the involved authorities and experts to enhance their responsibilities and collaboration and 2) as a web based information source for the public, responding to their need for information on water condition and flooding. The developed system is composed of three major components: sensor network, processing/transmission unit, and database/ application server. These real-time data of water condition can be monitored remotely by utilizing wireless sensors network that utilizes the mobile General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) communication in order to transmit measured data to the application server. We implemented a so-called VirtualCOM, a middleware that enables application server to communicate with the remote sensors connected to a GPRS data unit (GDU). With VirtualCOM, a GDU behaves as if it is a cable directly connected the remote sensors to the application server. The application server is a web-based system implemented using PHP and JAVA as the web application and MySQL as its relational database. Users can view real-time water condition as well as the forecasting of the water condition directly from the web via web browser or via WAP. The developed system has demonstrated the applicability of today’s sensors in wirelessly monitor real-time water conditions.

ARTICLE INFO In this system an electro-mechanical robot is designed and controlled using hand gesture in real time. The system is designed on microcontroller platform using Keil and MPLAB tools. Hand gesture recognition is done on the principle of resistance change sensed through flex sensor. These sensors are integrated in a hand gloves from which input to the system is given. The designed system is divided into two sections as transmitter and receiver. The transmitter section will be in hand gloves from which the data is sensed and processed through PIC16F7487 and send serially to the receiver section. RF technology is used to transmit the data at the receiver section at the frequency of 2.4 GHz. ARM 7 (LPC2148) processor is used to receive the data. Here from the received data, the character is predicted and matched with the closet character from which the character is identified and displayed on LCD. The various case studies is prepared for the designed system and tested in real time. The proposed system can be used for the various applications such as in unmanned machines, industries, handicapped personnel etc. Keywords— a Sensor gloves, flex sensors, PIC controller, ARM processor etc Article History Received:20 th September 2015 Received in revised form :

1Department of Computer Engineering, Chung-Ang University, Seoul, Korea 2Department of Computer Science, Universidad Autônoma de Madrid, Spain Correspondence Jai E. Jung, Department of Computer Engineering, Chung-Ang University, Korea. Email: j3ung@cau.ac.kr David Camacho, Department of Computer Science, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, Spain. Email: david.camacho@uam.es Funding information Chung-Ang University Summary Smart traffic light control at intersections is 1 of the major issues in Intelligent Transportation System. In this paper, on the basis of the new emerging technologies of Internet of Things, we introduce a new approach for smart traffic light control at intersection. In particular, we firstly propose a connected intersection system where every objects such as vehicles, sensors, and traffic lights will be connected and sharing information to one another. By this way, the controller is able to collect effectively and mobility traffic flow at intersection in real-time. Secondly, we propose the optimization algorithms for traffic lights by applying algorithmic game theory. Specially, 2 game models (which are Cournot Model and Stackelberg Model) are proposed to deal with difference scenarios of traffic flow. In this regard, based on the density of vehicles, controller will make real-time decisions for the time durations of traffic lights to optimize traffic flow. To evaluate our approach, we have used Netlogo simulator, an agent-based modeling environment for designing and implementing a simple working traffic. The simulation results shows that our approach achieves potential performance with various situations of traffic flow.

Smart home has become a visible concept that attracts the collaboration of various areas of science and engineering. Increasing the power efficiency and power management has become an important research topic since a decade. In this research article, the focus is to ease the life of elder and handicapped people. In point of fact as compare to the healthy people, elderly and disabled people experiences difficulties to perform their everyday activities. Elderly and disabled people can be supported by using smart homes by providing them secure, safe, and controlled environments. The developed system allows the users to be able to control the appliances with least physical efforts. More particularly, the designed system allow users to switch the home appliances ON and OFF just by sending message command by using Android application or SMS with the help of a cell phone. Not only the far remote monitoring, but the local management of appliances is made possible by using the Bluetooth technology. The experimental results demonstrate that the user can control the home appliances with the designed Android application by using the voice, Bluetooth, and SMS inputs.

The aim of home automation is to control home devices from a central control point. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a low cost but yet flexible and secure Internet based home automation system. The communication between the devices is wireless. The protocol between the units in the design is enhanced to be suitable for most of the appliances. The system is designed to be low cost and flexible with the increasing variety of devices to be controlled.

In this study, we present an award-wining software environment for groundwater education and research. The software functions as a ‘‘digital laboratory’’ in which students can freely explore: visually creating an aquifer of desired configurations and then immediately investigating and visualizing the groundwater system. Students learn by active exploration and interaction. The software allows introducing routinely research and complex problem-solving into the classroom. 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Comput Appl Eng Educ 11: 179 202, 2003; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com.); DOI 10.1002/cae.10052


Question: Intelligent irrigation utilizing an embedded system design.

This paper presents a comprehensive economic analysis of irrigation methods for various crops in Bangladesh, comparing the costs associated with diesel, grid electricity, and solar-powered irrigation systems. The research focuses on 27 distinct crops, collecting data on the volume of water required for each. To ensure a fair comparison, three pumps with the same 5 horsepower rating, one each for solar, diesel, and electric systems, were selected. The specific areas covered by each irrigation method were calculated based on the water volume data. A 10-year cost projection was then developed in local currency (taka). The findings revealed that, for all crops, grid-powered irrigation is the most economical option, primarily due to the substantial initial investment required for solar systems.[12] Further, the study highlighted that solar-powered irrigation is particularly uneconomical for crops like onion, carrot, chilli, tomato, maize, garlic, gourd, ginger, turmeric, pumpkin, cabbage, cauliflower, ladyfinger, banana, papaya, and groundnut, as it incurs the highest costs among the three methods.[5] Conversely, for crops such as potato, cotton, soybean, sunflower, strawberry, lentil, and mustard, solar irrigation is significantly more cost-effective than diesel-powered irrigation.

The study underscores the importance of considering the specific crop and associated water volume requirements when evaluating the economic viability of different irrigation methods in Bangladesh. Solar-powered irrigation, despite its high initial costs, can offer significant long-term savings for certain crops, making it a potentially lucrative option in the agricultural sector. This analysis provides valuable insights for farmers and policymakers seeking to optimize irrigation practices and costs in the region.

Smart world is envisioned as an era in which objects (e.g., watches, mobile phones, computers, cars, buses, and trains) can automatically and intelligently serve people in a collaborative manner. Paving the way for smart world, Internet of Things (IoT) connects everything in the smart world. Motivated by achieving a sustainable smart world, this paper discusses various technologies and issues regarding green IoT, which further reduces the energy consumption of IoT. Particularly, an overview regarding IoT and green IoT is performed first. Then, the hot green information and communications technologies (ICTs) (e.g., green radio-frequency identification, green wireless sensor network, green cloud computing, green machine to machine, and green data center) enabling green IoT are studied, and general green ICT principles are summarized. Furthermore, the latest developments and future vision about sensor cloud, which is a novel paradigm in green IoT, are reviewed and introduced, respectively. Finally, future research directions and open problems about green IoT are presented. Our work targets to be an enlightening and latest guidance for research with respect to green IoT and smart world.

We propose a novel wireless access monitoring and control system based on the digital door lock, which is explosively used as a digital consumer device. Digital door lock is an electronic locking system operated by the combination of digital key, security password or number codes. This paper presents a prototype of the proposed system and shows a scheme for the implementation. To implement the system with ZigBee network protocol, four types of modules are developed, ZigBee module, digital door lock module, human detection module, and ZigBee relay module. ZigBee module is designed to support wireless sensor network and also used for the ZigBee tag to identify the access objects. Digital door lock module is implemented as a digital consumer device to control the access system as well as locking system. It is very convenient system for the consumers and has extensible and flexible characteristics. That is, it can be used as a home security system by the ZigBee network with additional sensor devices. Therefore, it can be a good practical product for the realization of an access monitoring and control system. It also can be applied to the real market for home networking system. Furthermore, the system can be extended to another service such as a connection between mobile phone and home networking system.

We present an extended analysis of our previous work on the HydroSense technology, which is a low-cost and easily installed single-point sensor of pressure for automatically disaggregating water usage activities in the home (Froehlich et al., 2009 [53]). We expand upon this work by providing a survey of existing and emerging water disaggregation techniques, a more comprehensive description of the theory of operation behind our approach, and an expanded analysis section that includes hot versus coldwater valve usage classification and a comparisonbetween two classification approaches: the template-based matching scheme used in Froehlich et al. (2009) [53] and a new stochastic approach using a Hidden Markov Model. We show that both are successful in identifying valveand fixturelevel water events with greater than 90% accuracies. We conclude with a discussion of the limitations in our experimental methodology and open problems going forward. © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Communication between deaf-dumb and a normal person have always been a challenging task . About 9 billion people in the world come into this category which is quite large number to be ignored. As deaf-dumb people use sign language for their communication which is difficult to understand by the normal people. This paper aims at eradicating the communication barrier between them by developing an embedded system which will translate the hand gestures into

M2M wireless communication of various machines and devices in mobile networks is a fast growing business and application area in industry, maintenance business, customer service, security, and banking areas. This paper presents design and implementation of remote control system by means of GSM cellular communication network. The design integrates the device to be controlled, the microcontroller, and the GSM module so that it can be used for a wide range of applications. Detailed description and implementation of each design element are presented. To verify the principle operation of the M2M design, two home applications are experimentally tested using PC-based environment.

Each year, the number of stolen vehicle is on the rise. Usually, to prevent theft, a physical type countermeasure is used such as padlock, disk break lock and other more which is a preventive action but it is not enough safe. The objective of this study is to create a controllable system that can display the location of a vehicle using Global position system (GPS) to pin point the location and Global System for Mobile (GSM) as a mean for communicating with the vehicle for ease of finding after a theft attempt. The system is made to test the accuracy of the location that is send to the user when the vehicle is in motion and stationary in the city and suburb. The system is made by combining a micro controller with GPS and GSM, then comparing it with other similar device available in the market like Garmin and a reference website to find the radius of error. The study of proposed device begins by studying IEEE journal about alternative product and the vehicle itself. The hardware and program development is done by research and trial and error as the controller do not interact with both module at the same time, after successfully programming both module, it is combined into a single program with addition of interrupt program. The experiment is done in three set of tests so that the system accuracy can be determine when stationary and in motion on vehicle, output controlling is the test to determine if the controller can be made into anti-theft system. The result of the test concludes that the system can provide standard GPS coordinate when requested via Short Message Service (SMS). The system can also be used to control an actuator.

The proposed Fire alarm system is a real-time monitoring system that detects the presence of smoke in the air due to fire and captures images via a camera installed inside a room when a fire occurs. The embedded systems used to develop this fire alarm system are Raspberry Pi and Arduino Uno. The key feature of the system is the ability to remotely send an alert when a fire is detected. When the presence of smoke is detected, the system will display an image of the room state in a webpage. The system will need the user confirmation to report the event to the Firefighter using Short Message Service (SMS). The advantage of using this system is it will reduce the possibility of false alert reported to the Firefighter. The camera will only capture an image, so this system will consume a little storage and power.

The aim of this research survey note is to provide a comprehensive overview of Smart Home Environments with a focus on their architectures and application areas, as well as utilized technologies, infrastructures, and standards. The main source of information was provided by past and existing research and development projects carried out in this area, while the main result of our survey is a classification of Smart Home Environments, as revealed by this projects’ survey.

Nowadays, the remote Home Automation turns out to be more and more significant and appealing. It improves the value of our lives by automating various electrical appliances or instruments. This paper describes GSM (Global System Messaging) based secured device control system using App Inventor for Android mobile phones. App Inventor is a latest visual programming platform for developing mobile applications for Android-based smart phones. The Android Mobile Phone Platform becomes more and more popular among software developers, because of its powerful capabilities and open architecture. It is a fantastic platform for the real world interface control, as it offers an ample of resources and already incorporates a lot of sensors. No need to write programming codes to develop apps in the App Inventor, instead it provides visual design interface as the way the apps looks and use blocks of interlocking components to control the app’s behaviour. The App Inventor aims to make programming enjoyable and accessible to novices.

Based on the autonomous field robot BoniRob, which was developed for plant phenotyping, the authors have created an enhanced platform BoniRob (V2). The design of BoniRob (V2) considers two main improvements: At first the robustness for continuous outdoor use is increased and secondly the robot now makes available a reusable platform that can serve for multiple agricultural purposes. The combination of the platform BoniRob (V2) and application modules (“BoniRob-Apps”) is comparable to the classical combination of a tractor and an implement. In order to demonstrate this new concept, the authors have implemented three BoniRob-Apps, which can be integrated in BoniRob (V2) via defined mechanical, electrical and logical interfaces. The research project RemoteFarming.1 goes even beyond the accomplishment of a specific task by a robot and demonstrates the integration of the BoniRob (V2) platform into agricultural processes. For that purpose innovative agricultural engineering is combined with webbased communication technologies. The target is to develop a robotic mechanical weed control system which integrates a human user as remote worker in the process. The robotic weed control system is used for intra row weed treatment in carrots at BBCH-scales 10 to 20 in organic farming. This task is today conducted by hand. Introduction In recent years a variety of field robot prototypes have been proposed. They cover several applications, such as scouting and sampling, precise variable rate application of pesticides and fertilizers as well as autonomous weeding [1][2]. However, until now there is no commercial application of autonomous field operation in agriculture available. This is partly due to open issues regarding safety and legal requirements of autonomous operations [3].Another problem of the presented prototypes for autonomous field robots is their conception as single-purpose robots, despite there being several applications with market potential [6]. As the single-purpose concept leads typically would lead high costs due to a low workload over the year (specific tasks are required over only a short period of time), the systems are not economically feasible yet. To overcome this barrier a new concept for a multipurpose field robot is shown here. Multipurpose field robot platform BoniRob (V2) The BoniRob (V2) platform has been designed as an improved version of the BoniRob crop scout, which has been announced by the authors [5]. The BoniRob (V2) is shown in Fig 1. Fig.1: BoniRob (V2) during a RemoteFarming.1 field trial It was reengineered with focus on robustness and reusability. This manifests in increases of power supply by the electrical generator, continuous and peak torque at the wheel drives as well as chassis clearance (Table 1). Table 1: Technical figures of BoniRob (V2) BoniRob crop scout BoniRob (V2) platform Power of electric generator 2.0 kW 2.6 kW Battery’s capacity 110 Ah 170 Ah Continuous drive torque (per wheel) 55 Nm 70 Nm Peak drive torque (per wheel) 110 Nm 240 Nm As it can be seen in Fig.1, the height adjustment of the entire robot body was replaced by vertically fixed arms for each wheel, which can be rotated in the horizontal plane for adjustment of track width and centration of the robot body over the row to be treated. The hydraulic height adjustment was replaced by a manual, mechanical height-adjustment module frame. Furthermore, all other hydraulic drives were replaced by electrical systems. The BoniRob-App concept Using the multipurpose field robot platform BoniRob (V2) as a carrier, supplier and base for multiple BoniRob-Apps can be compared to the traditional combination of a single tractor with multiple implements. BoniRob-Apps can be integrated into the platform using defined mechanical, electrical and logical interfaces. The module frame of 0.77 m x 0.75 m in the centre of the robot allows mechanically attaching the BoniRob-App (Fig. 2). The mounting height can be adjusted in a range of 0.4 m. The electrical connection is set up using a custom plug. This provides energy supply to the BoniRob-App and different voltage levels (230V AC, 24 V DC, 12 V DC, 5 V DC). Moreover, it allows linking the emergency stop infrastructure of platform and App, such that even the App can stop the entire robot in case of emergency. Also, the custom plug sets up a Gigabit-Ethernet connection to the host-computer on BoniRob (V2). The entire communication infrastructure on BoniRob (V2) and between platform and the Apps is designed using Ethernet and ROS [4]. A sequence controller with 2 levels opens the way for distributed drive control of the robot. In the row the App (level 2 sequence controller) can access the drive control. On the headland the platform (level 1 sequence controller) holds the access to the drive control and runs the turn procedure of the robot. This Fig. 2: Multiple BoniRob-Apps can be used in the same platform allows switching the access to the drive depending on the state including letting the App control the drive train of the robot in properly defined situations. Again, this can be compared to a tractor-implement combination. In recent years in the field of Tractor Implement Management advances have been made towards control of the tractor by the implement in specific situations, because the implement and its sensors are closer to the process and more specifically adapted to it. This also shows that BoniRob-Apps are more than just tools to be used with the BoniRob (V2) platform but smart combinations of mechanical and electrical systems together with processand application-specific intelligence. BoniRob-Apps: Demonstrating examples In order to demonstrate the new concept, the authors implemented three BoniRob-Apps:


Question: An intelligent irrigation system utilizing an embedded controller.

This paper details a project aimed at addressing the 21st-century challenge of feeding the world's growing population through smart farm technology. Traditional farming methods, while sustainable, are being replaced by agricultural automation systems for efficiency and cost-effectiveness. Our research objective is to offer a long-term sustainable solution for agricultural automation, specifically focusing on the development of portable measurement technologies and an irrigation control system using wireless sensor networks.

In our pursuit of an automated irrigation system, we've integrated sensors for soil moisture, air humidity, and air temperature to gather data on the environmental conditions of vegetable crops. To achieve this, we've designed an irrigation system that utilizes a wireless sensor network, enabling the collection of environmental data and remote control of the irrigation system through a smart phone. The goal of our experiment is to evaluate the effectiveness of an automated irrigation system versus manual control via a smart phone.

To control the irrigation system, we've devised a communication protocol for the wireless sensor network to transmit environmental data and receive control commands for turning the irrigation system on or off. Our system has proven successful in controlling the irrigation process and ensuring water is delivered efficiently to the roots of the vegetable plants. This paper illustrates the benefits of automating irrigation systems for farm businesses, making operations more convenient and reducing long-term costs compared to traditional agriculture methods.

Our experimental results highlight a 96% accuracy in sending and receiving control commands for the irrigation system and a 98% accuracy in environmental data collection. This highlights the potential of our smart farm solution to revolutionize agricultural practices and contribute to sustainable food production.

This paper presents the analysis of the Internet of Things (IoT) approach and its application for the development of embedded monitoring and automatic control systems (EMACS) for technological objects and processes that are included in complex industrial systems. The functional structure and main components of EMACS based on IoT approach are given. The examples of IoT applications in design of specialized EMACS for such complex technical objects as gas turbine engines and floating docks are presented. Considerable attention is given to particular qualities of the functional structures, software and hardware implementation as well as multi-level human-machine interfaces of the EMACS for main process parameters. The developed EMACS provide: (a) high precision control of real-time operating processes of gas turbine engines and floating docks, (b) monitoring and automatic control of current technological parameters with high quality indicators, that leads to significant increasing of energy and economic efficiency of both industrial objects.

A Wireless sensor network is designed and implemented to automatically and remotely monitor and control the water quality parameters such as temperature, turbidity, pH and dissolved oxygen required for pisiculture. The measurements of the system which is at base station are communicated to the remote farmer through built-in Wi-Fi of NI-myRIO and displayed on user’s computer screen from where he can monitor and change the settings of the system. An audio output is also produced from speakers of the computer. SMS alert is sent to farmer’s mobile for variations in the monitored parameters of the system at the base station via GSM modem. The programming of the entire system is done using LabVIEW software and NI myRIO which has inbuilt processor, FPGA, Wi-Fi and web servicing capabilities. Web publishing tool of LabVIEW allows internet access to the front panel of the system to any remote user.

This paper involves designing a small scale battery charging system which is powered via a photovoltaic panel. This work aims at the usage of solar energy for charging the battery and optimizing the power of the system. Implementation is done using Artificial Neural Network (ANN) on FPGA. To develop this system an Artificial Neural Network is trained and its result is further used for the PWM technique. PWM pulse generation has been done using Papilio board which is based on XILINX Spartan 3E FPGA. The ANN with PWM technique is ported on FPGA which is programmed using VHDL. This able to automatically control the whole charging system operation without requirement of external sensory unit. The simulation results are achieved by using MATLAB and XILINX. These results allowed demonstrating the charging of the battery using proposed ANN and PWM technique. KeywordsPhotovoltaic battery charger, PWM, ANN, FPGA

Buildings are responsible for 40% of global energy use and contribute towards 30% of the total CO2 emissions. The drive to reduce energy use and associated greenhouse gas emissions from buildings has acted as a catalyst in the development of advanced computational methods for energy efficient design, management and control of buildings and systems. Heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems are the major source of energy consumption in buildings and ideal candidates for substantial reductions in energy demand. Significant advances have been made in the past decades on the application of computational intelligence (CI) techniques for HVAC design, control, management, optimization, and fault detection and diagnosis. This article presents a comprehensive and critical review on the theory and applications of CI techniques for prediction, optimization, control and diagnosis of HVAC systems. The analysis of trends reveals that the minimisation of energy consumption was the key optimization objective in the reviewed research, closely followed by the optimization of thermal comfort, indoor air quality and occupant preferences. Hardcoded Matlab program was the most widely used simulation tool, followed by TRNSYS, EnergyPlus, DOE-2, HVACSim+ and ESP-r. Metaheuristic algorithms were the preferred CI method for solving HVAC related problems and in particular genetic algorithms were applied in most of the studies. Despite the low number of studies focussing on multi-agent systems (MAS), as compared to the other CI techniques, interest in the technique is increasing due to their ability of dividing and conquering an HVAC optimization problem with enhanced overall performance. The paper also identifies prospective future advancements and research directions.

Flooding is one of the major disasters occurring in various parts of the world. The system for real-time monitoring of water conditions: water level; flow; and precipitation level, was developed to be employed in monitoring flood in Nakhon Si Thammarat, a southern province in Thailand. The two main objectives of the developed system is to serve 1) as information channel for flooding between the involved authorities and experts to enhance their responsibilities and collaboration and 2) as a web based information source for the public, responding to their need for information on water condition and flooding. The developed system is composed of three major components: sensor network, processing/transmission unit, and database/ application server. These real-time data of water condition can be monitored remotely by utilizing wireless sensors network that utilizes the mobile General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) communication in order to transmit measured data to the application server. We implemented a so-called VirtualCOM, a middleware that enables application server to communicate with the remote sensors connected to a GPRS data unit (GDU). With VirtualCOM, a GDU behaves as if it is a cable directly connected the remote sensors to the application server. The application server is a web-based system implemented using PHP and JAVA as the web application and MySQL as its relational database. Users can view real-time water condition as well as the forecasting of the water condition directly from the web via web browser or via WAP. The developed system has demonstrated the applicability of today’s sensors in wirelessly monitor real-time water conditions.

In this paper, an embedded system for motion control of omnidirectional mobile robots is presented. An omnidirectional mobile robot is a type of holonomic robots. It can move simultaneously and independently in translation and rotation. The RoboCup small-size league, a robotic soccer competition, is chosen as the research platform in this paper. The first part of this research is to design and implement an embedded system that can communicate with a remote server using a wireless link, and execute received commands. Second, a fuzzy-tuned proportional–integral (PI) path planner and a related low-level controller are proposed to attain optimal input for driving a linear discrete dynamic model of the omnidirectional mobile robot. To fit the planning requirements and avoid slippage, velocity, and acceleration filters are also employed. In particular, low-level optimal controllers, such as a linear quadratic regulator (LQR) for multiple-input-multiple-output acceleration and deceleration of velocity are investigated, where an LQR controller is running on the robot with feedback from motor encoders or sensors. Simultaneously, a fuzzy adaptive PI is used as a high-level controller for position monitoring, where an appropriate vision system is used as a source of position feedback. A key contribution presented in this research is an improvement in the combined fuzzy-PI LQR controller over a traditional PI controller. Moreover, the efficiency of the proposed approach and PI controller are also discussed. Simulation and experimental evaluations are conducted with and without external disturbance. An optimal result to decrease the variances between the target trajectory and the actual output is delivered by the onboard regulator controller in this paper. The modeling and experimental results confirm the claim that utilizing the new approach in trajectory-planning controllers results in more precise motion of four-wheeled omnidirectional mobile robots.

Machine intelligence is a developing technology which has made its way to various fields of engineering and technology. Robots are slowly being implemented in the field of agriculture, very soon AgriBots are to take over the agricultural fields and be used for various difficult and tiresome tasks involving agriculture. They have become the inevitable future of agriculture. This paper proposes an idea that will help in effective cultivation of vast areas of land left uncultivated or barren. Numerous farmers are dying during hill farming mainly due to falling from heights, which can be reduced by this technological effort. The proposed work will help in cultivation in remote areas and increase green cover as well as help farmers in harsh environments. The Agricultural Aid to Seed Cultivation (AASC) robot will be an unmanned aerial vehicle equipped with a camera, a digital image processing unit and a seed cultivation unit. A quadcopter is chosen as an aerial vehicle is independent of the form and shape of the ground and is not deterred by these factors while providing high mobility and reliability. The research aims about the new technology which can be suitable for any kind of remote farming.

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) enable new services within Smart Cities. Efficient Waste Collection is considered a fundamental service for Smart Cities. Internet of Things (IoT) can be applied both in ITS and Smart cities forming an advanced platform for novel applications. Surveillance systems can be used as an assistive technology for high Quality of Service (QoS) in waste collection. Specifically, IoT components: (i) RFIDs, (ii) sensors, (iii) cameras, and (iv) actuators are incorporated into ITS and surveillance systems for efficient waste collection. In this paper we propose an advanced Decision Support System (DSS) for efficient waste collection in Smart Cities. The system incorporates a model for data sharing between truck drivers on real time in order to perform waste collection and dynamic route optimization. The system handles the case of ineffective waste collection in inaccessible areas within the Smart City. Surveillance cameras are incorporated for capturing the problematic areas and provide evidence to the authorities. The waste collection system aims to provide high quality of service to the citizens of a Smart City.

During the last decade, a lot of progress has happened in the field of autonomous embedded devices (also known as motes) and wireless sensor networks. In this context, we envision next-generation systems to have autonomous database management functionalities on each mote, for supporting easy management of data on flash disks, adequate querying capabilities, and ubiquitous computing with no-effort. Following this major vision, in this paper we describe application scenarios, middleware approach and data management algorithms of a novel system, called Stream Operation (StreamOp), which effectively and efficiently realizes the depicted challenges. In particular, StreamOp supports heterogeneity, i.e. It works on top of different platforms, efficiency, i.e. It returns responses quickly, and autonomy, i.e. It saves battery power. We show how StreamOp provides these features, along with some experimental results that clearly validate our main assumptions.

The aim of this research survey note is to provide a comprehensive overview of Smart Home Environments with a focus on their architectures and application areas, as well as utilized technologies, infrastructures, and standards. The main source of information was provided by past and existing research and development projects carried out in this area, while the main result of our survey is a classification of Smart Home Environments, as revealed by this projects’ survey.