Earticle

The growth in the variety and use of wireless networks has greatly increased the urgency to identify and devise security approaches to protect them. In this article, we first propose a secure assisted handover decision. This mechanism is carried out while the mobile station (MS) moves between different domains, to allow users to fulfil an effective and reliable handover as well as a secure access to services offered by the wireless local area network. Second, we propose a new scheme, called Selective Pipelined Packet Marking for WLAN Networks (SPMW). This scheme is used for IP traffic source identification for tracing denial of service (DoS) attacks. The approach follows the IP traceback approach proposed in wired networks. Our analysis study shows that the traffic overhead introduced by the traceback scheme does not affect the network performance.

Concept hierarchies are important in many generalised data mining applications, such as multi-level association rule mining. There are drawbacks in using concept hierarchies constructed by domain experts. Therefore, we need automatic methods. We focus on situations where attributes of objects are useless for such a task. The attributes, such as price and size, are not relevant in the hierarchical structure of items when mining association rules from market basket data. Instead, the similarity between items from the point of view of customers is essential for organising the items. Assuming the availability of a distance matrix, our approach modifies the traditional hierarchical clustering algorithms to build a concept hierarchy. With some decision rules, a concept can be generalised from more than two specific concepts. Furthermore, the objects may be pre-processed, such that objects with high similarities are clustered into a ground concept. We formulate some evaluation criteria for the quality of constructed concept hierarchy.

The issue of privacy has become a crucial concern when carrying out identity verification using biometrics. It is necessary for a biometrics verification system to provide full privacy of biometric data. Full privacy means that the verification server performs biometrics matching algorithms without the knowledge of the users' biometric data, including templates and samples. Due to efficiency and low cost, fingerprints are the biometric characteristic most commonly used for identity verification. In this manuscript we propose a fingerprint verification scheme with full privacy. In this scheme, the honest-but-curious server, which is not given users’ fingerprint templates and samples, can perform a minutiae-based fingerprint matching algorithm. Finally, we will demonstrate the efficiency and the privacy of the verification process.

Mobile devices (e.g., PDAs, mobile phones and note book PCs) are a necessary convenience in modern life. They can be used to access many applications, such as online shopping, mobile pay TV and internet banking, which are easily accessible on the internet or wireless networks. Therefore, secure communication in such wireless environments is increasingly important because it protects transactions between users and servers from illegal adversaries. Users are people vulnerable to attack and there have been many authentication schemes proposed to guarantee their security. Recently, Islam and Biswas have proposed a more efficient and secure ID-based scheme to enhance security and authentication for mobile devices on ECC. They claim that their scheme is more secure and able to resist various attacks than previous ones. However, thisisn’t true, because their scheme is vulnerable to known session-specific temporary information attack and denial of service resulting from leaking server’s database attacks. In this paper, we present an improvement to their scheme in order to overcome such problems

This paper addresses how mobile and wireless technologies can play a role in Ubiquitous Healthcare systems. First, we discuss background information and the differences between traditional computing, location-aware computing and ubiquitous computing. Then, we introduce what is meant by Ubiquitous Healthcare and using a network centric approach we describe the infrastructure and system architecture of the system involved. In the latter part of this paper we present a prototype environment for building systems and applications related to ubiquitous healthcare systems. We make use of mobile phones, off the shelf components and existing technologies in ubiquitous computing (i.e., wireless and mobile positioning technology, data acquisition from sensor and ad hoc networks) and data management (i.e., data capturing, data storage and retrieval, data/signal processing) to build middleware, APIs and tools for the development of systems and applications for ubiquitous healthcare systems. Finally, we discuss the functions and features of mobile phones and use examples to illustrate how mobile and wireless technologies can enable ubiquitous healthcare. Some of these examples are: Location Tracking, Vital Signs and Well-being Data Acquisition and Analysis, Fall Detection and Behaviour Tracking and Sleep Analysis. To conclude the paper we discuss the difficulties we encountered and the major obstacles in research and development on ubiquitous healthcare systems.

Sharing resources and information on the Internet is becoming a popular and essential activity, requiring the development of methods to achieve collective intelligence. Our repository has been developed for managing and sharing resources that are collected from the Internet and number approximately 300,000 items. The resources are created and reused by users for specific purposes. In this research, the inner attributes of Internet resources and their correlations with others are investigated in a federated repository. An approach integrating the concept of graph model and social network analysis is proposed, in order to achieve efficient representation of resources over the Internet. In addition, two automated mechanisms concerning the resources discovery and reuse are implemented, to facilitate the usage scenario. Experiment results, including several self-evaluations and an empirical study with 40 users, demonstrate the performance and feasibility of this research.

Many components are used to control and manage factory automation. Networks and remote monitoring processes can be used for efficient management from distant locations. In this research, we develop a remote information management system using network for manufacturing systems. The target system is an integrated circuit (IC) test handler for semiconductor processes. The system consists of two classes: an actuator process for control sensors, motors and cylinders and a monitoring process (i.e., GUI: graphical user interface) for displaying operational status on the screen. The component logic makes up the remote status view of the GUI communication modules, which has an associated message interrupt method and timer. This research targeted the IC test handler system, which can be displayed over the web for review and analysis. The proposed method improves the analysability by capturing the operational data between the monitoring process and the actuator process and through its supported function that allows operators or users