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Recent advances in hardware technology have led to the development of low cost, power efficient and more feature rich devices that are amongst the most critical parts of communication networks. These devices or sensors can now sense data with more accuracy, process it by themselves and send it to the neighboring node or the sink node. However, robust and reliable security mechanisms are not yet properly implemented on these sensors due to their limited energy and computation power. Sensors also play a very important role in eHealthcare systems where ubiquitous patient monitoring is performed. As data is generated from the sensor nodes, reliable, secure and attack-resistant data acquisition and transmission is important for an efficient eHealthcare systems. This survey focuses on security issues of sensors data acquisition and transmission protocols, describing their main security features and comparing them in the context of a secure eHealthcare system. A taxonomy of open issues and future challenges is also discussed with respect to specific security metrics described in the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays, mobile devices have become an integral part of our daily life. These have proven to be an advantageous scientific invention that fillspersonal and business needs in a very efficient manner. In this era, the availability of mobile services has significantly increasedbecause of the rich variety of mobile devices and essential applications provided by mobile device manufacturers. At the same time, numerous mobile security issues and data privacy threats are challenging both manufacturers and users. Therefore, mobile devices are an ideal target for various security issues and data privacy threats in a mobile ecosystem. In this paper, we provide a brief survey of the security challenges, threats, and vulnerabilities of amobile ecosystem. Furthermore, we discussed some key points required to ensure mobile security and defend against data privacy threats. The emphasis of the discussion is, strong protection and the restriction of malicious activity at theapplication developer end, application stores end, and operating system and mobile device manufactures end bypreventing the user from usingnon-recommended applications (which may be malicious) and consideringbiometric features for the authentication of real users in the mobile devices. Alsobriefly discussing the defense mechanismsthat are considered to bea relatively better approach for securing personal and business related data or information in the mobile devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Ubiquitous computing is revolutionizing the way humans interact with machines and carry out everyday tasks. It extends everyday computing into the physical world, creating computationally smart environments that feature seamless interactions and automation. As a result of the highly distributed nature of ubiquitous computing, it is essential to develop security mechanisms that lend themselves well to the delicate properties of smart ubiquitous computing environments. In this paper, we introduce a context-aware access control mechanism that utilizes threshold cryptography and multilayer encryption to provide a dynamic and truly distributed method for access control. We simulate our access control scheme and show that access control decisions can be made in a timely manner even as we increase key and file sizes. This mechanism is closely coupled with the context-capturing services and security policy service resulting in a fully context-aware and seamless access control mechanism for typical ubiquitous computing scenarios. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

• Smart environments should protect sensitive information from exposure or monitoring. • A lightweight cyber security framework with context-awareness for pervasive computing environment is proposed. • Symmetric key encryption leverages the data confidentiality and digital signature-based hash function ensures the integrity. • Implementation of the proposed framework is performed in a real cloud environment. • Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. Internet of things (IoT) plays a key role in enabling smart sustainable cities. Pervasive computing over the IoT platform makes life more convenient by embedding sensors based on context-aware computing devices in the physical environment for the ubiquitous availability of computing resources. The sensors gather contextual information from the physical world and transmit it to receivers as per requirements or in case of environmental changes, such as temperature and humidity. However, the combination of dynamic operation and the need to handle sensitive and private data make the pervasive computing environment and IoT devices vulnerable to numerous attacks. Smart environments require a maximum level of safety assurance, such as trusted context producers and customers, which should protect sensitive information from exposure or monitoring. This paper discusses the major cyber threats in smart environments and proposes a novel lightweight security framework that authenticates and maintains the context providers and receivers. The cloud environment is adopted for user authentication at the user layer to implement access control and role assignment. Finally, the proposed security framework is implemented in the IBM cloud platform with six devices to evaluate its efficiency, sustainability, and secure communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose OnDroid , a prevention system to defend against outgoing malicious SMSs in Android devices. OnDroid is user-friendly as it considers the user's little understanding of the Android system. It also considers multiple threat scenarios and requires less interaction with the user. For each SMS-sending operation, OnDroid first checks if the mobile device state mismatches the user's behavior. If so, the operation is blocked. Otherwise, it is delayed for a while and the user is notified to confirm or reject the operation. If the SMS is considered normal, the user does not need to take any action and the SMS is sent when the delay expires. Efficiency analysis shows that malicious SMS operations might be missed when the user is unavailable. To deal with this issue, we propose a method by which the user behavior can be adjusted to achieve 100 % of malicious SMS prevention. Formal analysis as well as comparative study show that OnDroid offers a good tradeoff between security efficiency and usability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A critical issue in environmental decision making is how to trust the monitoring information gathered by a multitude of devices at remote locations. The accuracy of information helps in enhancing the effectiveness of decisions, whether it is made by human beings or by an intelligent system. The researchers and practitioners from disciplines such as climatology, agriculture, and meteorology, which depend on the environmental data, are heavily affected in the case of inaccurate information. In order to deal with the above problem, in this paper a data encryption algorithm inspired by the blood brain barrier (BBB) system. A real scenario to irrigate a remote location based on a wireless sensor network (WSN) is simulated in network simulator 2 (ns-2) to study the performance of the encryption algorithm. Our result and analysis show that the proposed encryption mechanism can efficiently protect the data communication from brute-force search or exhaustive key search, eavesdropping, spoofed, altered or replayed routing information, selective forwarding, acknowledgement spoofing, sybil and hello flood attacks. Hence, the proposed data encryption algorithm ensures the confidentiality of critical information from source to a given destination, which ultimately helps in enhancing the human decision accuracy and learning environmental conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a Machine to Machine (M2M) Low Cost and Secure (LCS) communication system for e-Healthcare society. The system is designed to take into consideration the psychological issues related to all actors in the e-Healthcare society such as: stress due to high workload, anxiety, and loneliness. The system is capable of performing most of the tasks in an autonomous and intelligent manner, which minimizes the workload of medical staffs, and consequently minimizes the associated psychological stress and improves the quality of patient care as well as the system performance. We show how the different actors in the e-Healthcare society can interact with each other in a secure manner. To ensure data privacy, the mechanism involves intelligent authentication based on random distributive key management, electronic certificate distribution, and modified realm Kerberos. The system handles dynamic assignments of doctors to specific patients. It also addresses the need for patients to share their health information with strangers while dealing with the privacy preservation issue. Finally, the simulation type implementation is performed on Visual Basic .net 2013 that shows the success of the proposed Low Cost and Secure (LCS) algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the ant colony optimization (ACO) based routing protocol against holes (or voids) to address user’s connectivity via Pervasive Wireless Sensor Networks (PWSNs). A hole is an area that has no active sensors, which makes a connection between one side of the network and the other side impossible. To avoid such holes, prior works detected them only when packets reached nodes near the hole, called dead-ends. In this case, the packets need to be rerouted, which results in additional communication cost. The ant colony optimization (ACO) approach is known to be suitable for dynamic environments, which makes it a good choice to deal with the hole problem. We study the capability of an ACO-based routing protocol, called the biologically inspired secure autonomous routing protocol (BIOSARP), for resolving this issue. Because of its routing criteria, BIOSARP does not try to detect the holes after their appearance, but rather avoids them. Network simulator 2 (ns-2) is utilized to perform an analysis by adopting a flag-based feedback mechanism in BIOSARP and is further compared with on-demand routing with the void avoidance (ODVA) protocol in terms of the delivery ratio and energy consumption. Findings clearly demonstrate that BIOSARP can efficiently maintain the network prior to any possible hole problems, by switching data forwarding to the most optimal neighboring node. Thus, it can self-adapt to faults appearing in PWSN and efficiently maintains the network communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Intelligent Energy Networks are comprised of devices capable of fulfilling their functions in an energy-efficient fashion and with communication and remote control capabilities. Therefore, some of these devices, such as smart energy meters, become attractive for use in the power generation and distribution industry, achieving the vision of Smart Grids. However, many are the challenges that need to be overcome in order to reach a fully-functional and security-aware smart grid. Providing measurement, control, communication, power, display, and synchronization capabilities shall be no easy task for smart meters. In this context, this paper elaborates on a detailed description of the main functionalities that smart meters must provide, along with the analysis of existing solutions that make use of smart meters for smart grids. Moreover, open challenges in the topic are identified and discussed. By the end of this research piece, the reader should be able to have a detailed view of the capabilities already offered by smart meters and the ones they will have available in order to tackle the challenges smart grids present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Internet-of-Things (IoT) represents the next groundbreaking change in information and communication technology (ICT) after the Internet. IoT is concerned with making everything connected and accessible through the Internet. However, IoT objects (things) are characterized by constrained computing and storage resources. Therefore, the Cloud of Things (CoT) paradigm that integrates the Cloud with IoT is proposed to meet the IoT requirements. In CoT, the IoT capabilities (e.g., sensing) are provisioned as services. Unfortunately, the two-tier CoT model is not efficient in the use cases sensitive to delays and energy consumption (e.g., in healthcare). Consequently, Fog Computing is proposed to support such IoT services and applications. This paper reviews the most relevant Fog-enabled CoT system models and proposes an energy-aware allocation strategy for placing application modules (tasks) on Fog devices. Finally, the performance of the proposed strategy is evaluated in comparison with the default allocation and Cloud-only policies, using the iFogSim simulator. The proposed solution was observed to be more energy-efficient, saving approximately 2.72% of the energy compared to Cloud-only and approximately 1.6% of the energy compared to the Fog-default. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]