Abstract

Due to the widespread popularity in both academia and industry, vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have been used in a wide range of applications starting from intelligent transportation to e-health and itinerary planning. This paper proposes a new decentralized lightweight authentication and key agreement scheme for VANETs. In the proposed scheme, there are three types of mutual authentications: 1) between vehicles; 2) between vehicles and their respective cluster heads; and 3) between cluster heads and their respective roadside units. Apart from these authentications, the proposed scheme also maintains secret keys between roadside units for their secure communications. The rigorous formal and informal security analysis shows that the proposed scheme is capable to defend various malicious attacks. Moreover, the ns-2 simulation demonstrates the practicability of the proposed scheme in VANET environment.

Abstract

Smart grid (SG) technology has recently received significant attention due to its usage in maintaining demand response management in power transmission systems. In SG, charging of electric vehicles becomes one of the emerging applications. However, authentication between a vehicle user and a smart meter is required so that both of them can securely communicate for managing demand response during peak hours. To address the above mentioned issues, in this paper, we propose a new efficient three-factor user authentication scheme for a renewable energy-based smart grid environment (TUAS-RESG), which uses the lightweight cryptographic computations such as one-way hash functions, bitwise XOR operations, and elliptic curve cryptography. The detailed security analysis shows the robustness of TUAS-RESG against various well-known attacks. Moreover, TUAS-RESG provides superior security with additional features, such as dynamic smart meter addition, flexibility for password and biometric update, user and smart meter anonymity, and untraceability as compared to other related existing schemes. The practical demonstration of TUAS-RESG is also proved using the widely accepted NS2 simulation.

Abstract

The growth of the Internet and telecommunication technology has facilitated remote access. During the last decade, numerous remote user authentication schemes based on dynamic ID have been proposed for the multi-server environment using smart cards. Recently, Shunmuganathan et al. pointed out that Li et al.’s scheme is defenseless in resisting the password guessing attack, stolen smart card attack and forgery attack. Furthermore, they showed the poor repairability and no two-factor security in Li et al.’s scheme. To surmount these security disadvantages, Shunmuganathan et al. proposed a remote user authentication scheme using smart card for multi-server environment and claimed that their scheme is secure and efficient. In this paper, we show that Shunmuganathan et al.’s scheme is also defenseless in resisting the password guessing attack, stolen smart card attack, user impersonation attack, forgery attack, forward secrecy and session key secrecy. Moreover, the two-factor security is also not preserved in their scheme. In our proposed scheme, a user is free to choose his/her login credentials such as user id and password. And also a user can regenerate the password any time. Simultaneously the proposed scheme preserves the merits of Shunmuganathan et al.’s scheme and also provides better functionality and security features, such as mutual authentication, session key agreement and perfect forward secrecy. The security analysis using the widely accepted Burrows–Abadi–Needham logic shows that the proposed scheme provides the mutual authentication proof between a user and a server. Through the rigorous formal and informal security analysis, we show that the proposed scheme is secure against possible known attacks. In addition, we carry out the simulation of the proposed scheme using the most-widely accepted and used Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications tool and the simulation results clearly indicate that our scheme is secure.

Abstract

Ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) scheme can be deployed in a mobile cloud environment to ensure that data outsourced to the cloud will be protected from unauthorized access. Since mobile devices are generally resource-constrained, CP-ABE schemes designed for a mobile cloud deployment should have constant sizes for secret keys and ciphertexts. However, most existing CP-ABE schemes do not provide both constant size ciphertexts and secret keys. Thus, in this paper, we propose a new pairing-based CP-ABE scheme, which offers both constant size ciphertexts and secret keys (CSCTSK) with an expressive AND gate access structure. We then show that the proposed CP-ABE-CSCTSK scheme is secure against chosen-ciphertext adversary in the selective security model, and present a comparative summary to demonstrate the utility of the scheme.

Abstract

Parallel algorithms on large graphs play a prominent role in various problems from several domains of sciences and engineering. Of these, symmetry breaking problems such as matchings and colorings are fundamental owing to a large number of applications. Algorithms for symmetry breaking problems are studied in several parallel/distributed settings over the decades. However, as the size of graphs corresponding to real-world phenomenon increase, it is imperative to use not only just parallelism but also algorithmic enhancements based on the structure of real-world graphs. A popular approach in this context is to use a graph decomposition to break the problem into multiple subproblems the solutions of which can be used to solve the original problem. A big question in this direction that is left unanswered by current research is to study which decomposition is appropriate for a given computation and a target architecture. In this context, we address the above question with respect to three problems: Maximal Matching (MM), Vertex Coloring (COLOR), and Maximal Independent Set (MIS). For these three problems, we study three different decomposition techniques including one based on bridges, one based on a random partitioning, and one based on vertices of degree k for a given k. We show that existing algorithms for the above computations on a multi-core CPU and a GPU can be significantly improved by making use of an appropriate decomposition of the input graph. Our study indicates that the exact decomposition to use depends more on the problem and is largely independent of target architecture between the CPU and the GPU.

Abstract

Finding the articulation points and the biconnected components of an undirected graph has been a problem of huge interest in graph theory. Over the years, several sequential and parallel algorithms have been presented for this problem. Our paper here presents and implements a fast parallel algorithm on GPU which is to the best of our knowledge the first such attempt and also the fastest implementation across architectures. The implementation is on an average 4× faster then the next best implementation. We also apply an edge-pruning technique which results in a further 2× speedup for dense graphs

Abstract

Over the past few years, there is a significant shift from web to mobile devices. In addition, the success of HTML5 has negatively impacted the usage and support for Adobe Flash. This has resulted in unmaintained Flash assets and code bases. In this paper, we discuss the feasibility of a semi-automated technique to transform Flash based animations to HTML5 and JavaScript against re-writing the same animations from scratch. Writing animations from scratch in JavaScript is a time taking effort due to adherence to aesthetic details of the animation, domain knowledge and enumeration of all states. Our approach addresses these challenges by providing techniques to transform the Small Web Format (SWF) files to JavaScript. We validate our approach by conducting an experimental study to measure the efforts for a set of animations with respect to transformation from scratch, and transformation using our proposed

Abstract

The ability to modify the existing published web pages is what we are calling Renarration of the web. Such a mechanism is useful for improving accessibility and personalization of the content currently on the web. There are many techniques in place for enabling both Web Accessibility and Web Personalization. In this paper we propose a novel approach: an Aspects inspired design of renarration. Aspects have traditionally been applied to programming. Here we reinterpret concepts like Join Points, Point-cuts and Advices and apply them to web documents. To validate our approach, we designed a framework called Rennaration Studio that is built using microservices based architecture pattern and implemented using Python's flask platform. We demonstrate the feasibility of our proposal by renarrating different Aspects (text, language, phonetics) of two specific web documents.

Abstract

Researchers have supported the idea of gamification to enhance students' interest in activities like code reviews, change management, knowledge management, issue tracking, etc. which might otherwise be repetitive and monotonous. We performed an experimental study consisting of nearly 180+ participants to measure the impact of gamification on code review process using 5 different code review tools, including one gamified code review instance from our extensible architectural framework. We assess the impact of gamification based on the code smells and bugs identified in a gamified and non-gamified environment as per code inspection report. Further, measurement and comparison of the quantity and usefulness of code review comments was done using machine learning techniques.

Abstract

In India, a large number of engineering undergraduates are adopting eLearning as it provides access to best faculty and reduces concerns on inadequate physical infrastructure at colleges. Virtual Labs is a Government of India eLearning initiative containing simulation and remote triggered labs for engineering students. Virtual Labs developed over a period of 6 years is used by more than a million undergraduate students across nine engineering disciplines. The software used for developing these experiments requires substantial effort for maintenance due to deprecation, compatibility, etc. We propose a targeted crowdsourcing approach for maintenance of Virtual Labs with sustainable quality. The targeted crowdsourcing involves the large number of engineering students who are also the major stakeholders of these labs. Our quality enhancement using crowdsourcing approach was validated for 14 labs and …