Biblio

In this paper, the design of an event-driven middleware for general purpose services in smart grid (SG) is presented. The main purpose is to provide a peer-to-peer distributed software infrastructure to allow the access of new multiple and authorized actors to SGs information in order to provide new services. To achieve this, the proposed middleware has been designed to be: 1) event-based; 2) reliable; 3) secure from malicious information and communication technology attacks; and 4) to enable hardware independent interoperability between heterogeneous technologies. To demonstrate practical deployment, a numerical case study applied to the whole U.K. distribution network is presented, and the capabilities of the proposed infrastructure are discussed.

The Internet of Things (IoT) presents itself as a promising set of key technologies to provide advanced smart applications. IoT has become a major trend lately and smart solutions can be found in a large variety of products. Since it provides a flexible and easy way to gather data from huge numbers of devices and exploit them ot provide new applications, it has become a central research area lately. However, due to the fact that IoT aims to interconnect millions of constrained devices that are monitoring the everyday life of people, acting upon physical objects around them, the security and privacy challenges are huge. Nevertheless, only lately the research focus has been on security and privacy solutions. Many solutions and IoT frameworks have only a minimum set of security, which is a basic access control. The EU FP7 project RERUM has a main focus on designing an IoT architecture based on the concepts of Security and Privacy by design. A central part of RERUM is the implementation of a middleware layer that provides extra functionalities for improved security and privacy. This work, presents the main elements of the RERUM middleware, which is based on the widely accepted OpenIoT middleware.

The evolution of the Internet of Things (IoT) requires a well-defined infrastructure of systems that provides services for device abstraction and data management, and also supports the development of applications. Middleware for IoT has been recognized as the system that can provide these services and has become increasingly important for IoT in recent years. The large amount of data that flows into a middleware system demands a security architecture that ensures the protection of all layers of the system, including the communication channels and border APIs used to integrate the applications and IoT devices. However, this security architecture should be based on lightweight approaches since middleware systems are widely applied in constrained environments. Some works have already defined new solutions and adaptations to existing approaches in order to mitigate IoT middleware security problems. In this sense, this article discusses the role of lightweight approaches to the standardization of a security architecture for IoT middleware systems. This article also analyzes concepts and existing works, and presents some important IoT middleware challenges that may be addressed by emerging lightweight security approaches in order to achieve the consolidation of a standard security architecture and the mitigation of the security problems found in IoT middleware systems.

Utility computing is being gradually realized as exemplified by cloud computing. Outsourcing computing and storage to global-scale cloud providers benefits from high accessibility, flexibility, scalability, and cost-effectiveness. However, users are uneasy outsourcing the storage of sensitive data due to security concerns. We address this problem by presenting SeMiNAS–-an efficient middleware system that allows files to be securely outsourced to providers and shared among geo-distributed offices. SeMiNAS achieves end-to-end data integrity and confidentiality with a highly efficient authenticated-encryption scheme. SeMiNAS leverages advanced NFSv4 features, including compound procedures and data-integrity extensions, to minimize extra network round trips caused by security meta-data. SeMiNAS also caches remote files locally to reduce accesses to providers over WANs. We designed, implemented, and evaluated SeMiNAS, which demonstrates a small performance penalty of less than 26% and an occasional performance boost of up to 19% for Filebench workloads.

With the use of external cloud services such as Google Docs or Evernote in an enterprise setting, the loss of control over sensitive data becomes a major concern for organisations. It is typical for regular users to violate data disclosure policies accidentally, e.g. when sharing text between documents in browser tabs. Our goal is to help such users comply with data disclosure policies: we want to alert them about potentially unauthorised data disclosure from trusted to untrusted cloud services. This is particularly challenging when users can modify data in arbitrary ways, they employ multiple cloud services, and cloud services cannot be changed. To track the propagation of text data robustly across cloud services, we introduce imprecise data flow tracking, which identifies data flows implicitly by detecting and quantifying the similarity between text fragments. To reason about violations of data disclosure policies, we describe a new text disclosure model that, based on similarity, associates text fragments in web browsers with security tags and identifies unauthorised data flows to untrusted services. We demonstrate the applicability of imprecise data tracking through BrowserFlow, a browser-based middleware that alerts users when they expose potentially sensitive text to an untrusted cloud service. Our experiments show that BrowserFlow can robustly track data flows and manage security tags for documents with no noticeable performance impact.

Web Service Architecture gives a compatible and scalable structure for web service interactions with performance, responsiveness, reliability and security to make a quality of software design. Systematic quantitative approaches have been discussed for designing and developing software systems that meet performance objectives. Many companies have successfully applied these techniques in different applications to achieve better performance in terms of financial, customer satisfaction, and other benefits. This paper describes the architecture, design, implementation, integration testing, performance and maintenance of new applications. The most successful best practices used in world class organizations are discussed. This will help the application, component, and software system designers to develop web applications and fine tune the existing methods in line with the best practices. In business process automation, many standard practices and technologies have been used to model and execute business processes. The emerging technology is web applications technology which provides a great flexibility for development of interoperable environment services. In this paper we propose a Case study of Automatic Gas Booking system, a business process development strategy and best practices used in development of software components used in web applications. The classification of QWS dataset with 2507 records, service invocations, integration and security for web applications have been discussed.

Mobile devices, such as smarthphones, became a common tool in our daily routine. Mobile Applications (a.k.a. apps) are demanding access to contextual information increasingly. For instance, apps require user's environment data as well as their profiles in order to adapt themselves (interfaces, services, content) according to this context data. Mobile apps with this behavior are known as context-aware applications (CAS). Several software infrastructures have been created to help the development of CAS. However, most of them do not store the contextual data, once mobile devices are resource constrained. They are not built taking into account the privacy of contextual data either, due the fact that apps may expose contextual data, without user consent. This paper addresses these topics by extending an existing middleware platform that help the development of mobile context-aware applications. Our extension aims at store and process the contextual data generated from several mobile devices, using the computational power of the cloud, and the definition of privacy policies, which avoid dissemination of unauthorized contextual data.

The Internet of Things (IoT) offers new opportunities, but alongside those come many challenges for security and privacy. Most IoT devices offer no choice to users of where data is published, which data is made available and what identities are used for both devices and users. The aim of this work is to explore new middleware models and techniques that can provide users with more choice as well as enhance privacy and security. This paper outlines a new model and a prototype of a middleware system that implements this model.

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology has been applied in many fields, such as tracking product through the supply chains, electronic passport (ePassport), proximity card, etc. Most companies will choose low-cost RFID tags. However, these RFID tags are almost no security mechanism so that criminals can easily clone these tags and get the user permissions. In this paper, we aim at more efficient detection proximity card be cloned and design a real-time intrusion detection system based on one tool of Complex Event Processing (Esper) in the RFID middleware. We will detect the cloned tags through training our system with the user's habits. When detected anomalous behavior which may clone tags have occurred, and then send the notification to user. We discuss the reliability of this intrusion detection system and describes in detail how to work.

The emerging trends of volatile distributed energy resources and micro-grids are putting pressure on electrical power system infrastructure. This pressure is motivating the integration of digital technology and advanced power-industry practices to improve the management of distributed electricity generation, transmission, and distribution, thereby creating a web of systems. Unlike legacy power system infrastructure, however, this emerging next-generation smart grid should be context-aware and adaptive to enable the creation of applications needed to enhance grid robustness and efficiency. This paper describes key factors that are driving the architecture of smart grids and describes orchestration middleware needed to make the infrastructure resilient. We use an example of adaptive protection logic in smart grid substations as a use case to motivate the need for contextawareness and adaptivity.

Opportunistic Situation Identification (OSI) is new paradigms for situation-aware systems, in which contexts for situation identification are sensed through sensors that happen to be available rather than pre-deployed and application-specific ones. OSI extends the application usage scale and reduces system costs. However, designing and implementing OSI module of situation-aware systems encounters several challenges, including the uncertainty of context availability, vulnerable network connectivity and privacy threat. This paper proposes a novel middleware framework to tackle such challenges, and its intuition is that it facilitates performing the situation reasoning locally on a smartphone without needing to rely on the cloud, thus reducing the dependency on the network and being more privacy-preserving. To realize such intuitions, we propose a hybrid learning approach to maximize the reasoning accuracy using limited phone's storage space, with the combination of two the-state-the-art techniques. Specifically, this paper provides a genetic algorithm based optimization approach to determine which pre-computed models will be selected for storage under the storage constraints. Validation of the approach based on an open dataset indicates that the proposed approach achieves higher accuracy with comparatively small storage cost. Further, the proposed utility function for model selection performs better than three baseline utility functions.

The concept of smart cities envisions services that provide distraction-free support for citizens. To realize this vision, the services must adapt to the citizens' situations, behaviors and intents at runtime. This requires services to gather and process the context of their users. Mobile devices provide a promising basis for determining context in an automated manner on a large scale. However, despite the wide availability of versatile programmable mobile platforms such as Android and iOS, there are only few examples of smart city applications. One reason for this is that existing software platforms primarily focus on low-level resource management which requires application developers to repeatedly tackle many challenging tasks. Examples include efficient data acquisition, secure and privacy-preserving data distribution as well as interoperable data integration. In this paper, we describe the GAMBAS middleware which tries to simplify the development of smart city applications. To do this, GAMBAS introduces a Java-based runtime system with an associated software development kit (SDK). To clarify how the runtime system and the SDK can be used for application development, we describe two simple applications that highlight different middleware functions.

In this paper, we consider the impact of a weaker model of eventual consistency on distributed multi-player games. This model is suitable for networks in which hosts can leave and join at anytime, e.g., in an intermittently connected environment. Such a consistency model is provided by the Secure Infrastructure for Networked Systems (SINS) [24], a reliable middleware framework. SINS allows agents to communicate asynchronously through a distributed transactional key-value store using anonymous publish-subscribe. It uses Lamport's Paxos protocol [17] to replicate state. We consider a multi-player maze game as example to illustrate our consistency model and the impact of network losses/delays therein. The framework based on SINS presented herein provides a vehicle for studying the effect of human elements participating in collaborative simulation of a physical world as in war games.

This paper proposes a service operator-aware trust scheme (SOTS) for resource matchmaking across multiple clouds. Through analyzing the built-in relationship between the users, the broker, and the service resources, this paper proposes a middleware framework of trust management that can effectively reduces user burden and improve system dependability. Based on multidimensional resource service operators, we model the problem of trust evaluation as a process of multi-attribute decision-making, and develop an adaptive trust evaluation approach based on information entropy theory. This adaptive approach can overcome the limitations of traditional trust schemes, whereby the trusted operators are weighted manually or subjectively. As a result, using SOTS, the broker can efficiently and accurately prepare the most trusted resources in advance, and thus provide more dependable resources to users. Our experiments yield interesting and meaningful observations that can facilitate the effective utilization of SOTS in a large-scale multi-cloud environment.

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) can potentially benefit a wide array of applications and areas. Here, the authors look at some of the challenges surrounding CPS, and consider a feasible solution for creating a robust, secure, and cost-effective architecture.

Android "Health-DR." is innovative idea for ambulatory appliances. In rapid developing technology, we are providing "Health-DR." application for the insurance agent, dispensary, patients, physician, annals management (security) for annals. So principally, the ample of record are maintain in to the hospitals. The application just needs to be installed in the customer site with IT environment. Main purpose of our application is to provide the healthy environment to the patient. Our cream focus is on the "Health-DR." application meet to the patient regiment. For the personal use of member, we provide authentication service strategy for "Health-DR." application. Prospective strategy includes: Professional Authentications (User Authentication) by doctor to the patient, actuary and dispensary. Remote access is available to the medical annals, doctor affability and patient affability. "Health-DR." provides expertness anytime and anywhere. The application is middleware to isolate the information from affability management, client discovery and transit of database. Annotations of records are kept in the bibliography. Mainly, this paper focuses on the conversion of E-Health application with flexible surroundings.
 

Applications such as fleet management and logistics, emergency response, public security and surveillance or mobile workforce management use geo-positioning and mobile networks as means of enabling real-time monitoring, communication and collaboration among a possibly large set of mobile nodes. The majority of those systems require real-time tracking of mobile nodes (e.g. vehicles, people or mobile robots), reliable communication to/from the nodes, as well as group communication among the mobile nodes. In this paper we describe a distributed middleware with focus on management of context-defined groups of mobile nodes, and group communication with large sets of nodes. We also present a prototype Fleet Tracking and Management system based on our middleware, give an example of how context-specific group communication can enhance the node's mutual awareness, and show initial performance results that indicate small overhead and latency of the group communication and management.

Mobile Apps running on smartphones and tablet pes offer a new possibility to enhance the work of engineers because they provide an easy-to-use, touchscreen-based handling and can be used anytime and anywhere. Introducing mobile apps in the engineering domain is difficult because the IT environment is heterogeneous and engineering-specific challenges in the app development arise e. g., large amount of data and high security requirements. There is a need for an engineering-specific middleware to facilitate and standardize the app development. However, such a middleware does not yet exist as well as a holistic set of requirements for the development. Therefore, we propose a design method which offers a systematic procedure to develop Mobile Engineering-Application Middleware.

Using heterogeneous clouds has been considered to improve performance of big-data analytics for healthcare platforms. However, the problem of the delay when transferring big-data over the network needs to be addressed. The purpose of this paper is to analyze and compare existing cloud computing environments (PaaS, IaaS) in order to implement middleware services. Understanding the differences and similarities between cloud technologies will help in the interconnection of healthcare platforms. The paper provides a general overview of the techniques and interfaces for cloud computing middleware services, and proposes a cloud architecture for healthcare. Cloud middleware enables heterogeneous devices to act as data sources and to integrate data from other healthcare platforms, but specific APIs need to be developed. Furthermore, security and management problems need to be addressed, given the heterogeneous nature of the communication and computing environment. The present paper fills a gap in the electronic healthcare register literature by providing an overview of cloud computing middleware services and standardized interfaces for the integration with medical devices.

Due to the development of cloud computing and NoSQL database, more and more sensitive information are stored in NoSQL databases, which exposes quite a lot security vulnerabilities. This paper discusses security features of MongoDB database and proposes a transparent middleware implementation. The analysis of experiment results show that this transparent middleware can efficiently encrypt sensitive data specified by users on a dataset level. Existing application systems do not need too many modifications in order to apply this middleware.

The term Cloud Computing is not something that appeared overnight, it may come from the time when computer system remotely accessed the applications and services. Cloud computing is Ubiquitous technology and receiving a huge attention in the scientific and industrial community. Cloud computing is ubiquitous, next generation's in-formation technology architecture which offers on-demand access to the network. It is dynamic, virtualized, scalable and pay per use model over internet. In a cloud computing environment, a cloud service provider offers “house of resources” includes applications, data, runtime, middleware, operating system, virtualization, servers, data storage and sharing and networking and tries to take up most of the overhead of client. Cloud computing offers lots of benefits, but the journey of the cloud is not very easy. It has several pitfalls along the road because most of the services are outsourced to third parties with added enough level of risk. Cloud computing is suffering from several issues and one of the most significant is Security, privacy, service availability, confidentiality, integrity, authentication, and compliance. Security is a shared responsibility of both client and service provider and we believe security must be information centric, adaptive, proactive and built in. Cloud computing and its security are emerging study area nowadays. In this paper, we are discussing about data security in cloud at the service provider end and proposing a network storage architecture of data which make sure availability, reliability, scalability and security.

Science Gateways bridge multiple computational grids and clouds, acting as overlay cyber infrastructure. Gateways have three logical tiers: a user interfacing tier, a resource tier and a bridging middleware tier. Different groups may operate these tiers. This introduces three security challenges. First, the gateway middleware must manage multiple types of credentials associated with different resource providers. Second, the separation of the user interface and middleware layers means that security credentials must be securely delegated from the user interface to the middleware. Third, the same middleware may serve multiple gateways, so the middleware must correctly isolate user credentials associated with different gateways. We examine each of these three scenarios, concentrating on the requirements and implementation of the middleware layer. We propose and investigate the use of a Credential Store to solve the three security challenges.

This paper presents a middleware solution to secure data and network in the e-healthcare system. The e-Healthcare Systems are a primary concern due to the easiest deployment area accessibility of the sensor devices. Furthermore, they are often interacting closely in cooperation with the physical environment and the surrounding people, where such exposure increases security vulnerabilities in cases of improperly managed security of the information sharing among different healthcare organizations. Hence, healthcare-specific security standards such as authentication, data integrity, system security and internet security are used to ensure security and privacy of patients' information. This paper discusses security threats on e-Healthcare Systems where an attacker can access both data and network using masquerade attack Moreover, an efficient and cost effective approach middleware solution is discussed for the delivery of secure services.

Revolution in the field of technology leads to the development of cloud computing which delivers on-demand and easy access to the large shared pools of online stored data, softwares and applications. It has changed the way of utilizing the IT resources but at the compromised cost of security breaches as well such as phishing attacks, impersonation, lack of confidentiality and integrity. Thus this research work deals with the core problem of providing absolute security to the mobile consumers of public cloud to improve the mobility of user's, accessing data stored on public cloud securely using tokens without depending upon the third party to generate them. This paper presents the approach of simplifying the process of authenticating and authorizing the mobile user's by implementing middleware-centric framework called MiLAMob model with the huge online data storage system i.e. HDFS. It allows the consumer's to access the data from HDFS via mobiles or through the social networking sites eg. facebook, gmail, yahoo etc using OAuth 2.0 protocol. For authentication, the tokens are generated using one-time password generation technique and then encrypting them using AES method. By implementing the flexible user based policies and standards, this model improves the authorization process.

The term Cloud Computing is not something that appeared overnight, it may come from the time when computer system remotely accessed the applications and services. Cloud computing is Ubiquitous technology and receiving a huge attention in the scientific and industrial community. Cloud computing is ubiquitous, next generation's in-formation technology architecture which offers on-demand access to the network. It is dynamic, virtualized, scalable and pay per use model over internet. In a cloud computing environment, a cloud service provider offers “house of resources” includes applications, data, runtime, middleware, operating system, virtualization, servers, data storage and sharing and networking and tries to take up most of the overhead of client. Cloud computing offers lots of benefits, but the journey of the cloud is not very easy. It has several pitfalls along the road because most of the services are outsourced to third parties with added enough level of risk. Cloud computing is suffering from several issues and one of the most significant is Security, privacy, service availability, confidentiality, integrity, authentication, and compliance. Security is a shared responsibility of both client and service provider and we believe security must be information centric, adaptive, proactive and built in. Cloud computing and its security are emerging study area nowadays. In this paper, we are discussing about data security in cloud at the service provider end and proposing a network storage architecture of data which make sure availability, reliability, scalability and security.