CERIAS FUNDED PROJECTS

A. Faculty Involved

1. Bharat Bhargava
2. Sanjay Kumar Madria (University of Missouri-Rolla)
3. Mukesh Mohania (West Michigan University)

B. Graduate Students Involved (Not necessarily paid from CERIAS due to use of another expiring grant fund)

• Ahsan Habib (Project 1)
• Yi Lu (Project 1)
• David McClure (Project 1)
• Yuhui Zhong (Project 2)
• Kyung Lyung Hong (Project 2)
• Haiqi Wei (University of Missouri-Rolla) (Project 2)
• Sha Tang, Weizhen Tu, Vishal Lodha (West Michigan University) (Project 2)

C. Undergraduate Students

• James Kornelsen
• Reginald Robinson
• Daniel Aaron Noland
• Chin-Ying Wang
• Jeff Hanson

D. Proposals Submitted to Funding Agencies

• Secure Mobile Systems, funded by NSF, PI:  Bharat Bhargava
• Experimental Studies in Security for Mobile Systems, submitted to NSF, PI: Bharat Bhargava, Sunil Prabhakar, Jan Vitek and Mike Attalah
• Experiments in Security and QoS in Mobile Systems, submitted to NSF, PI: Bharat Bhargava
• Secure Network Architectures and Services for Emerging Distributed Applications, submitted to NSF, PI: S. Fahmy and B. Bharagava
• Time-based Coordination of Networked Embedded Nodes, submitted  to DARPA, PI: K. Kim and B. Bhargava
• Collaborative Technology Alliance:  Wireless Communications and Networks, submitted to Army Research Office, PI: W.G.Irby at Northrop Grumman, Co PIs: Bhargava and many others
• A Warehouse Approach to Web data management and Security, submitted to NSF, PI: Bharat Bhargava, Co PIs: Sanjay Madria and Mukesh Mohania

 

E. Info on any Papers or Reports written/submitted/published

• Papers related with "Security Issues in Mobile Networks with Movable Base Stations" (Project 1)
  

Experiments in Adaptability and Security in Multimedia Systems, in Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. , in proceedings of 10th DEXA'99, Florence, Italy, pp. 1096- 1011

Fault-tolerant authentication and group key management in mobile computing, B. Bhargava, S. Kamisetty and S. Madria, in International Conference on Internet Computing (LC 2000), Las Vegas, June 2000

Adaptability and Security in Multimedia Systems, B. Bhargava, in Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Database Expert Systems (DEXA-99), Florence, 1999, pp. 1-5

An Adaptable Network Architecture for Multi-media Traffic Management and Control, S. Wang and B. Bhargava, in Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Multimedia System, New York, August 2000, pp 670-675

Secure Mobile Networks, B. Bhargava, to appear in Proceedings of Conference on Dependable Computing, Los Angeles, Dec. 2000
 

• Papers related with "Static and Dynamic Security in Web Data Management" (Project 2)
  

Data Organization Issues in Location-dependent Query Processing in Mobile Computing, S. Madria, B. Bhargava, E. Pitoura and V. Kumar, in Proceeding of International Conference, ADBIS-DASFAA 2000, Prague, Sept. 2000.

Web Schema in WHOWEDA, S. Sourav,W. Ne and S. Madria, in Proceedings of ACM workshop on DOLAP, Washington DC, Nov. 2000.

Secured Web Access, M. Mohania, V. Kumar, Y. Kambayashi and B. Bhargava, in International Conference on Digital Libraries: Research and Practice, Nov 13-16, Kyoto, Japan

Security in Data Warehousing, B. Bhargava, in International Conference on Data Warehouse & Knowledge Discover, DaWak-2000, Sept. 2000, London, UK

    Reports: The following reports are in progress:

• Reports related with "Security Issues in Mobile Networks with Movable Base Stations" (Project 1)
  
  
• Authentication and Secure Group Key Management in Mobile Environments, S. Kamisetty, B. Bhargava and S. Madria Abstract: Survivability and secure communications are essential in a mobile computing environment. In this report, we identify various security threats and performance issues in group communications. We propose a solution for efficient key management and distribution for mobile environment using key graph technique. We also propose a solution for providing fault tolerant authentication using hierarchical tree structures.
• Achieving Flexibility and Scalability: A New Architecture for Wireless Network, Y. Lu and B. Bhargava  Abstract: We present a new wireless network architecture Hierarchical Hybrid Network. In such a network, mobile nodes are hierarchically organized into groups. Different groups can have different wireless architectures and different routing protocols. Mobile nodes communicate with nodes outside their groups through the group leaders. This architecture is flexible and scalable. The groups are highly autonomous. We conduct experiments to compare the new architecture with Ad Hoc networks. The results indicate that the new architecture has a better performance in terms of link change rate.
• Security in QoS, A. Kenghe and B. Bhargava. Abstract : Interest in Quality of Service (QoS) has increased with the advent of applications which expect more than just Best Effort service from computer networks. Security plays a major role in ensuring the proper functioning of the QoS mechanism in place. In this report, we look at the security issues in QoS enabled networks to avoid theft-of-service and man-in-the-middle attacks. Also, we propose the use of security (level of security for communication) as a QoS parameter. We briefly introduce the notion of adaptive security in case of a mobile host.
  
  
• Reports related with "Static and Dynamic Security in Web Data Management" (Project 2)
  
  
• The Content of User Profile for Web Security, S. Madria
• Authorization of Web Access, Y. Zhong and B. Bhargava. We present our current research on authorization of web access. We introduce the new authorization requirements in WWW environment. The mismatch between traditional authorization subsystems and new authorization requirements are discussed. We focus on five aspects of our research: design consideration, authorization model, conflict resolution, violate processing, architecture and algorithm.
• Unauthorized Access Agent, M. Mohania. Many organizations have confidential and sensitive data on their web pages that need to be protected and allow access to only some subset of users. We have studied discuss various secured web access schemes using dynamic and static approaches.  In a static approach the access environment, that is, set of authorized users, the mode of access, their access rights, etc., are redefined.  This approach is suitable only for a static set up where the user requirements do not change frequently.  In the dynamic approach, on the other hand, the authorized user set is defined then web pages access requests appear.  An interested user to the web is authenticated by necessary information provided by the user.  Once the information is verified, the user is either given conditional access, timed access, or full access only to the information relevant to the user.

 

F. Public Presentations

• 10th International Database and Expert Systems Applications (DEXA'99), Florence, Italy, Sept. 1999
• Workshop at University of California at Irvine, Oct. 1999.
• APICS (Atlantic Province Information and Computing Society) conference, Canada, Nov. 1999
• Experiments in Adaptable and Secure Multimedia Database Systems, Florence, Italy, Sept. 1999
• Key note speaker, Mobile Distributed Database Conference
• Fault-Tolerant Authentication and Group Key Management in Mobile Computing, Advances in Security in Internet Computing, Las Vegas, June 2000
• Key note speaker, "Secure Mobile System" in Workshop on Mobile Distributed Data Systems, London, UK, Sep. 2000
• Invited speaker, "Security in Data Warehousing" in Workshop on DaWak-2000 (Data Warehouse & Knowledge Discovery, London, UK, Sep. 2000
• "Secured Web Access" Kyoto International Conference on Digital Libraries: Research and Practice, Japan, Nov. 2000
• TRW, July 2000
• Cambridge University, Sep. 2000
• University of Cincinnati, Nov. 2000
• University of Kentucky, Nov. 2000
• Northwestern University, Nov. 2000

•  Secure Mobile Systems

Survivability and secure communications are essential in a mobile computing environment. We propose to conduct a series of experiments that will lead to the development of new authentication and key management techniques for wireless communications. We study the implementation of various authentication schemes on the overall system performance. We propose a technique to achieve fault-tolerant mobile node authentication in an efficient way. We will evaluate how various secure group communication and access control techniques fit into the wireless world by conducting scientific experiments in a systematic way.

Students: Yi Lu, David Mcclure
 

We are doing research to design an intelligent and efficient Traffic Conditioner for Differentiated Services Network. Security is treated as a Quality of Service (QoS) parameter. Traffic Conditioner (TC) is an important part of Differentiated Services (DiffServ) networks. TC marks packets as IN or OUT profile or set the drop precedences. Based on this core routers give services to packets. There are several techniques for conditioning. TCP is a very conservative protocol and we can utilize some of it's features to develop a good TC. TC also should consider the current measured rate and target rate of an aggregated flow to set drop precedence. We explore several ideas to improve the performance of existing TC.

Student: Ahsan Habib

 

• Web and Data Warehousing Security

Data warehouse is an integrated repository derived from multiple source (operational and legacy) databases. The data warehouse is created byeither replicating the different source data or transforming them to new representation. This process involves reading, cleaning, aggregating and storing the data in the warehouse model. The software tools are used to access the warehouse for strategic analysis, decision-making, marketing types of applications. It can be used for inventory control of shelf stock in many departmental stores.

We focus on the following ideas that can contribute towards warehouse security:
1. Replication control
2. Aggregation and Generalization
3. Exaggeration and Misleading
4. Anonymity
5. User Profile Based Security

This project aims at developing and implementing efficient authorization and access control mechanisms for web document and content of the document so that the legitimate users can access the right data. We plan to investigate user identification, authentication and access control as important security issue.  Mechanisms will be developed and implemented for both  static and dynamic security.

Students: Yuhui Zhong, Kyung Lyung Hong, Haiqin Wei, Sha Tang, Weizhen Tu, Vishal Lodha