Network Accountability

The term "accountability' suggests that an entity should be held responsible for its own specific actions. Once an event has transpired, the events that took place need to be traceable so that the causes can be determined afterwards. The goal of network accountability research is to provide accountability within networks and computers by building trace files of events. The research cited here was presented or published between January and September of 2014. The focus in these articles is on smart grid, wireless, cloud, and telemedicine.

• Tongtong Li; Abdelhakim, M.; Jian Ren, "N-Hop Networks: A General Framework For Wireless Systems," Wireless Communications, IEEE, vol.21, no.2, pp.98, 105, April 2014. doi: 10.1109/MWC.2014.6812297 This article introduces a unified framework for quantitative characterization of various wireless networks. We first revisit the evolution of centralized, ad-hoc and hybrid networks, and discuss the trade-off between structure-ensured reliability and efficiency, and ad-hoc enabled flexibility. Motivated by the observation that the number of hops for a basic node in the network to reach the base station or the sink has a direct impact on the network capacity, delay, efficiency and their evaluation techniques, we introduce the concept of the N-hop networks. It can serve as a general framework that includes most existing network models as special cases, and can also make the analytical characterization of the network performance more tractable. Moreover, for network security, it is observed that hierarchical structure enables easier tracking of user accountability and malicious node detection; on the other hand, the multi-layer diversity increases the network reliability under unexpected network failure or malicious attacks, and at the same time, provides a flexible platform for privacy protection. Keywords: ad hoc networks; diversity reception; telecommunication security; wireless channels; N-hop networks; ad hoc networks; ad-hoc enabled flexibility; hybrid networks; malicious attacks; malicious node detection; multilayer diversity; network capacity; network reliability; network security; unexpected network failure ;user accountability; wireless systems; Ad hoc networks; Delays; Mobile communication; Mobile computing; Sensors; Throughput; Wireless sensor networks} (ID#:14-2415) URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6812297&isnumber=6812279

• Jing Liu; Yang Xiao; Jingcheng Gao, "Achieving Accountability in Smart Grid," Systems Journal, IEEE, vol.8, no.2, pp.493, 508, June 2014. doi: 10.1109/JSYST.2013.2260697 Smart grid is a promising power infrastructure that is integrated with communication and information technologies. Nevertheless, privacy and security concerns arise simultaneously. Failure to address these issues will hinder the modernization of the existing power system. After critically reviewing the current status of smart grid deployment and its key cyber security concerns, the authors argue that accountability mechanisms should be involved in smart grid designs. We design two separate accountable communication protocols using the proposed architecture with certain reasonable assumptions under both home area network and neighborhood area network. Analysis and simulation results indicate that the design works well, and it may cause all power loads to become accountable. Keywords: computer network security; power engineering computing; protocols; smart power grids; accountable communication protocols; cyber security concern; home area network; neighborhood area network; power system modernization; smart grid accountability; smart grid deployment; smart grid design; Accountability; advanced metering infrastructure (AMI); security; smart grid (ID#:14-2416) URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6545310&isnumber=6819870

• Jeyanthi, N.; Thandeeswaran, R.; Mcheick, H., "SCT: Secured Cloud based Telemedicine," Networks, Computers and Communications, The 2014 International Symposium on , vol., no., pp.1,4, 17-19 June 2014. doi: 10.1109/SNCC.2014.6866531 Telemedicine started its journey and successful deployment over several decades. But still it could not mark a remarkable contribution to neither rural nor urban areas. People realized its impact when it saved a life from becoming an extinct. Telemedicine connects patient and specialized doctors remotely and also allows them to share the sensitive medical records. Irrespective of the mode of data exchange, all types of media are vulnerable to security and performance issues. Remote data exchange during an emergency situation should not be delayed and at the same time should not be altered. While transit, a single bit change could be interpreted differently at the other end. Hence telemedicine comes with all the challenges of performance and security issues. Delay, cost and scalability are the pressing performance factors whereas integrity, availability and accountability are the security issues need to be addressed. This paper lights up on security without compromising quality of service. Telemedicine is on track from standard PSTN, wireless Mobile phones and satellites. Secure Cloud based Telemedicine (SCT) uses Cloud which could free the people from administrative and accounting burdens. Keywords: biomedical equipment; cloud computing; data integrity; delays; electronic data interchange; emergency services; mobile computing; mobile handsets; security of data; telemedicine; telephone networks ;SCT; accounting burdens; administrative burdens; emergency situation; medical record sharing; performance factors; quality service quality; remote data exchange alteration; remote data exchange delay; remote data exchange mode; secured cloud based telemedicine; single bit change effect; standard PSTN; telemedicine accountability; telemedicine availability; telemedicine cost; telemedicine delay; telemedicine effect; telemedicine integrity; telemedicine performance issues; telemedicine scalability; telemedicine security issues; wireless mobile phones; Availability; Cloud computing; Educational institutions; Medical services; Read only memory; Security; Telemedicine; Cloud; Security; Telemedicine; availability; confidentiality (ID#:14-2417) URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6866531&isnumber=6866503

• Gueret, Christophe; de Boer, Victor; Schlobach, Stefan, "Let's "Downscale" Linked Data," Internet Computing, IEEE , vol.18, no.2, pp.70,73, Mar.-Apr. 2014. doi: 10.1109/MIC.2014.29 Open data policies and linked data publication are powerful tools for increasing transparency, participatory governance, and accountability. The linked data community proudly emphasizes the economic and societal impact such technology shows. But a closer look proves that the design and deployment of these technologies leave out most of the world's population. The good news is that it will take small but fundamental changes to bridge this gap. Research agendas should be updated to design systems for small infrastructure, provide multimodal interfaces to data, and account better for locally relevant, contextualized data. Now is the time to act, because most linked data technologies are still in development. Keywords: Data processing; Digital systems; Linked technologies; Open systems; digital divide; linked data technologies; multimodal interfaces; open linked data (ID#:14-2418) URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6777473&isnumber=6777469

• Chen, X.; Li, J.; Huang, X.; Li, J.; Xiang, Y.; Wong, D., "Secure Outsourced Attribute-based Signatures," Parallel and Distributed Systems, IEEE Transactions on, vol. PP, no.99, pp.1,1, January 2014. doi: 10.1109/TPDS.2013.2295809 Attribute-based signature (ABS) enables users to sign messages over attributes without revealing any information other than the fact that they have attested to the messages. However, heavy computational cost is required during signing in existing work of ABS, which grows linearly with the size of the predicate formula. As a result, this presents a significant challenge for resource-constrained devices (such as mobile devices or RFID tags) to perform such heavy computations independently. Aiming at tackling the challenge above, we first propose and formalize a new paradigm called Outsourced ABS, i.e., OABS, in which the computational overhead at user side is greatly reduced through outsourcing intensive computations to an untrusted signing-cloud service provider (S-CSP). Furthermore, we apply this novel paradigm to existing ABS schemes to reduce the complexity. As a result, we present two concrete OABS schemes: i) in the first OABS scheme, the number of exponentiations involving in signing is reduced from O(d) to O(1) (nearly three), where d is the upper bound of threshold value defined in the predicate; ii) our second scheme is built on Herranz et al.'s construction with constant-size signatures. The number of exponentiations in signing is reduced from O(d2) to O(d) and the communication overhead is O(1). Security analysis demonstrates that both OABS schemes are secure in terms of the unforgeability and attribute-signer privacy definitions specified in the proposed security model. Finally, to allow for high efficiency and flexibility, we discuss extensions of OABS and show how to achieve accountability as well. Keywords: Educational institutions; Electronic mail; Games; Outsourcing; Polynomials; Privacy; Security (ID#:14-2419) URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6714536&isnumber=4359390

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Articles listed on these pages have been found on publicly available internet pages and are cited with links to those pages. Some of the information included herein has been reprinted with permission from the authors or data repositories. Direct any requests via Email to SoS.Project (at) SecureDataBank.net for removal of the links or modifications to specific citations. Please include the ID# of the specific citation in your correspondence.