Privacy is a matter of widespread societal concern, which will be further exacerbated by the ongo... more Privacy is a matter of widespread societal concern, which will be further exacerbated by the ongoing effort to connect billions of data-generating devices to the Internet. The promise of large-scale social and economic benefits motivates the development of the Internet of Things. As a primary engine of personal data production in the near future it also carries with it real threats to privacy. Proposed legislation seeks to tackle these threats head-on. This paper seeks to explore principled ways in which systems design might engage with and respond to legal requirements to enable effective data protection and the projected utility of personal data in the digital economy. Key to this is the need to build accountability into the IoT to ensure compliance.
Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices are known to be the source of many security problems, and as suc... more Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices are known to be the source of many security problems, and as such, they would greatly benefit from automated management. This requires robustly identifying devices so that appropriate network security policies can be applied. We address this challenge by exploring how to accurately identify IoT devices based on their network behavior, while leveraging approaches previously proposed by other researchers. We compare the accuracy of four different previously proposed machine learning models (tree-based and neural network-based) for identifying IoT devices. We use packet trace data collected over a period of six months from a large IoT test-bed. We show that, while all models achieve high accuracy when evaluated on the same dataset as they were trained on, their accuracy degrades over time, when evaluated on data collected outside the training set. We show that on average the models' accuracy degrades after a couple of weeks by up to 40 percentage po...
Due to the continuous growth of web database, automatic identification of category for the newly ... more Due to the continuous growth of web database, automatic identification of category for the newly published web documents is very important now-a-days. Accordingly, variety of algorithms has been developed in the literature for automatic categorization of web document to easy retrieval of web documents. In this paper, Document-Document similarity matrix and Naive-Bayes classification is combined to do web information retrieval. At first, web documents are pre-processed to extract the features which are then utilized to find document-document similarity matrix where every element within matrix is similarity between two web documents using semantic entropy measure. Subsequently, D-D matrix is used to create a training table which contains the frequency of every attributes and its probability. In the testing phase, relevant category is found for the input web document using the trained classification model to obtain the relevant categorized documents from the database. The relevant category identified from the classifier model is used to retrieve the relevant categorized documents which are already stored in the web database semantically. The experimentation is performed using 100 web documents of two different categories and the evaluation is done using sensitivity, specificity and accuracy.
Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Gender Equality in Software Engineering, 2018
There has been a significant increase in the number of initiatives to raise awareness of diversit... more There has been a significant increase in the number of initiatives to raise awareness of diversity-related challenges in technology worldwide within the past decade. Multiple organizations now emphasize a need for a close to 50%-50% male to female workforce distribution. Example of proposed activities include introducing quotas for women on board positions, promoting equal opportunities for employment in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) jobs and creating a woman-friendly work environment. However, despite these efforts, the growth of number of women working in STEM is still slow. To understand the impact of various initiatives and how they influence the work environment in universities in the UK, we conducted a survey to record responses from multiple women groups, so that we can identify the issues that they have been facing. This paper presents the insights drawn from the survey, along with recommendations for STEM and computing fields in order to increase female numbers in their programs. The survey presents qualitative measures of initiatives addressing the gender gap in the UK. The results show a clear need for prominent role models, mentoring, and promoting engagement of women in STEM subjects from an early age.
Volunteer computing (VC) or distributed computing projects are common in the citizen cyberscience... more Volunteer computing (VC) or distributed computing projects are common in the citizen cyberscience (CCS) community and present extensive opportunities for scientists to make use of computing power donated by volunteers to undertake large-scale scientific computing tasks. Volunteer computing is generally a non-interactive process for those contributing computing resources to a project whereas volunteer thinking (VT) or distributed thinking, which allows volunteers to participate interactively in citizen cyberscience projects to solve human computation tasks. In this paper we describe the integration of three tools, the Virtual Atom Smasher (VAS) game developed by CERN, LiveQ, a job distribution middleware, and CitizenGrid, a online platform for hosting and providing computation to CCS projects. This integration demonstrates the combining of volunteer computing and volunteer thinking to help address the scientific and educational goals of games like VAS. The paper introduces the three ...
Proceedings of the International Conference on Internet of Things Design and Implementation, 2019
We continue to see increasingly widespread deployment of IoT devices, with apparent intent to emb... more We continue to see increasingly widespread deployment of IoT devices, with apparent intent to embed them in our built environment likely to accelerate if smart city and related programmes succeed. In this paper we are concerned with the ways in which current generation IoT devices are being designed in terms of their ill-considered dependencies on network connectivity and services. Our hope is to provide evidence that such dependencies need to be better thought through in design, and better documented in implementation so that those responsible for deploying these devices can be properly informed as to the impact of device deployment (at scale) on infrastructure resilience. We believe this will be particularly relevant as we feel that commodity IoT devices are likely to be commonly used to retrofit "smart" capabilities to existing buildings, particularly domestic buildings. To the existing body of work on network-level behaviour of IoT devices, we add (i) a protocol-level breakdown and analysis of periodicity, (ii) an exploration of the service and infrastructure dependencies that will implicitly be taken in "smart" environments when IoT devices are deployed, and (iii) examination of the robustness of device operation when connectivity is disrupted. We find that many devices make use of services distributed across the planet and thus appear dependent on the global network infrastructure even when carrying out purely local actions. Some devices cease to operate properly without network connectivity (even where their behaviour appears, on the face of it, to require only local information, e.g., the Hive thermostat). Further, they exhibit quite different network behaviours, typically involving significantly more traffic and possibly use of otherwise unobserved protocols, when connectivity is recovered after some disruption. CCS CONCEPTS • Networks → Network measurement.
In the last few years, contributions of the general public in scientific projects has increased d... more In the last few years, contributions of the general public in scientific projects has increased due to the advancement of communication and computing technologies. Internet played an important role in connecting scientists and volunteers who are interested in participating in their scientific projects. However, despite potential benefits, only a limited number of crowdsourcing based large-scale science (citizen science) projects have been deployed due to the complexity involved in setting them up and running them. In this paper, we present CitizenGrid - an online middleware platform which addresses security and deployment complexity issues by making use of cloud computing and virtualisation technologies. CitizenGrid incentivises scientists to make their small-to-medium scale applications available as citizen science projects by: 1) providing a directory of projects through a web-based portal that makes applications easy to discover; 2) providing flexibility to participate in, monito...
Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices are known to be the source of many security problems, and as suc... more Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices are known to be the source of many security problems, and as such they would greatly benefit from automated management. This requires robustly identifying devices so that appropriate network security policies can be applied. We address this challenge by exploring how to accurately identify IoT devices based on their network behavior, using resources available at the edge of the network. In this paper, we compare the accuracy of five different machine learning models (tree-based and neural network-based) for identifying IoT devices by using packet trace data from a large IoT test-bed, showing that all models need to be updated over time to avoid significant degradation in accuracy. In order to effectively update the models, we find that it is necessary to use data gathered from the deployment environment, e.g., the household. We therefore evaluate our approach using hardware resources and data sources representative of those that would be available at...
Due to the advancement of IoT devices in both domestic and industrial environments, the need to i... more Due to the advancement of IoT devices in both domestic and industrial environments, the need to incorporate a mechanism to build accountability in the IoT ecosystem is paramount. In the last few years, various initiatives have been started in this direction addressing many socio-technical concerns and challenges to build an accountable system. The solution that has received a lot of attention in both industry and academia is the Manufacturer Usage Description (MUD) specification. It gives the possibility to the IoT device manufacturers to describe communications needed by each device to work properly. MUD implementation is challenging not only due to the diversity of IoT devices and manufacturer/operator/regulators but also due to the incremental integration of MUD-based flow control in the already existing Internet infrastructure. To provide a better understanding of these challenges, in this work, we explore and investigate the prototypes of three implementations proposed by diffe...
With the strong development of the Internet of Things (IoT), the definition of IoT devices' inten... more With the strong development of the Internet of Things (IoT), the definition of IoT devices' intended behavior is key for an effective detection of potential cybersecurity attacks and threats in an increasingly connected environment. In 2019, the Manufacturer Usage Description (MUD) was standardized within the IETF as a data model and architecture for defining, obtaining and deploying MUD files, which describe the network behavioral profiles of IoT devices. While it has attracted a strong interest from academia, industry, and Standards Developing Organizations (SDOs), MUD is not yet widely deployed in real-world scenarios. In this work, we analyze the current research landscape around this standard, and describe some of the main challenges to be considered in the coming years to foster its adoption and deployment. Based on the literature analysis and our own experience in this area, we further describe potential research directions exploiting the MUD standard to encourage the development of secure IoTenabled scenarios.
Proceedings of the Third ACM International Workshop on Edge Systems, Analytics and Networking, 2020
Edge computing and Federated Learning (FL) can work in tandem to address issues related to privac... more Edge computing and Federated Learning (FL) can work in tandem to address issues related to privacy and collaborative distributed learning in untrusted IoT environments. However, deployment of FL in resource-constrained IoT devices faces challenges including asynchronous participation of such devices in training, and the need to prevent malicious devices from participating. To address these challenges we present CoLearn, which build on the open-source Manufacturer Usage Description (MUD) implementation osMUD and the FL framework PySyft. We deploy CoLearn on resourceconstrained devices in a lab environment to demonstrate (i) an asynchronous participation mechanism for IoT devices in machine learning model training using a publish/subscribe architecture, (ii) a mechanism for reducing the attack surface in FL architecture by allowing only IoT MUD-compliant devices to participate in the training phases, and (iii) a trade-off between communication bandwidth usage, training time and device temperature (thermal fatigue). CCS CONCEPTS • Networks → Network algorithms; Network experimentation; Network privacy and anonymity; • Computer systems organization → Embedded and cyber-physical systems; • Computing methodologies → Neural networks; Machine learning.
At 2010, we are at the effective end of the first decade of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) researc... more At 2010, we are at the effective end of the first decade of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) research and that the aspects such as energy efficient routing have pretty much had their day as the sensing, computing and energy technologies have now moved on. There now seems to be a consensus in the field as to what the next challenges are. This paper will describe some of those challenges for the next decade and discuss some of the key impediments hindering WSN research. From this we report a small experiment whereby we try to take on board some of the critiques we put forward to see what we come up with. To this end, we indeed show how a simple solution can help to solve many of the problems we list, and in doing so, highlight some of the difficulties in keeping to our own recommendations regarding the future direction of WSN research.
In recent years, the networks of low-power devices have gained popularity. Typically these device... more In recent years, the networks of low-power devices have gained popularity. Typically these devices are wireless and interact to form large networks such as the Machine to Machine (M2M) networks, Internet of Things (IoT), Wearable Computing, and Wireless Sensor Networks. The collaboration among these devices is a key to achieving the full potential of these networks. A major problem in this field is to guarantee robust communication between elements while keeping the whole network energy efficient. In this paper, we introduce an extended and improved emergent broadcast slot (EBS) scheme, which facilitates collaboration for robust communication and is energy efficient. In the EBS, nodes communication unit remains in sleeping mode and are awake just to communicate. The EBS scheme is fully decentralized, that is, nodes coordinate their wake-up window in partially overlapped manner within each duty-cycle to avoid message collisions. We show the theoretical convergence behavior of the scheme, which is confirmed through real test-bed experimentation.
In recent years, citizen science has grown in popularity due to a number of reasons, including th... more In recent years, citizen science has grown in popularity due to a number of reasons, including the emphasis on informal learning and creativity potential associated with these initiatives. Citizen science projects address research questions from various domains, ranging from Ecology to Astronomy. Due to the advancement of communication technologies, which makes outreach and engagement of wider communities easier, scientists are keen to turn their own research into citizen science projects. However, the development, deployment and management of these projects remains challenging. One of the most important challenges is building the project itself. There is no single tool or framework, which guides the step-by-step development of the project, since every project has specific characteristics, such as geographical constraints or volunteers' mode of participation. Therefore, in this article, we present a series of conceptual frameworks for categorisation, decision and deployment, wh...
2011 International Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems and Workshops (DCOSS), 2011
This paper introduces YA-MAC, an agile Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol to provide high throu... more This paper introduces YA-MAC, an agile Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol to provide high throughput for both unicast and broadcast traffic in Duty-Cycled Multihop Wireless Sensor Networks (DCM-WSN). YA-MAC is implemented under the UPMA framework in TinyOS and is evaluated on TelosB and MicaZ testbeds. We observe that YA-MAC significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art SCP-MAC protocol in terms of throughput by 60%, while tolerating a more dynamic network, at a small cost to duty-cycle performance. Further, we show that YA-MAC's idle listening radio power consumption is 35% less than RI-MAC's, while achieving similar throughput and latency.
In this paper, we present a decentralised scheme that facilitates reliable network wide broadcast... more In this paper, we present a decentralised scheme that facilitates reliable network wide broadcast messaging without the requirement of strict time synchronisation, for duty-cycled low-power wireless embedded systems. In this emergent broadcast slot (EBS) scheme, devices coordinate their wake-up periods with their neighbours to exchange schedule information locally. This leads to the emergence of local slot synchronisation without the need for either network-wide synchronisation or a centralised time synchronisation element. We theoretically show that this scheme converges faster than similar emergent and gradient-based approaches, which we confirm by evaluation on real test-beds. We also show that our scheme exhibits lower overheads while being more tolerant to disturbances caused by faulty nodes, wireless link failures, contention and interference in presence of deterministic propagation delays.
IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 2015
In a federated database system, each independent party exports some of its data for information s... more In a federated database system, each independent party exports some of its data for information sharing. The information sharing in such a system is very inflexible, as all peer parties access the same set of data exported by a party, while the party may want to authorize different peer parties to access different portions of its information. We propose a novel query evaluation scheme that supports differentiated access control with decentralized query processing. A new efficient join method, named split-join, along with other safe join methods is adopted in the query planning algorithm. The generated query execution reduces the communication cost by pushing partial query computation to data sources in a safe way. The proofs of the correctness and safety of the algorithm are presented. The evaluation demonstrates that the scheme significantly saves the communication cost in a variety of circumstances and settings while enforcing autonomous and differentiated information sharing effectively.
International Journal on Cloud Computing: Services and Architecture, 2013
Cloud computing is simply a metaphor for the internet. User does not required knowledge, control,... more Cloud computing is simply a metaphor for the internet. User does not required knowledge, control, and ownership in the computer infrastructure. User simply access or rent the software and paying only for what they use. Advantage of cloud computing is huge like Broad network access, Cost effectiveness, Rapid elasticity, Measured services, On-Demand service, Resource pooling, Location independence, Reliability, Energy saving and so on. But its global phenomenon that everything in this world has advantage as well as disadvantage, cloud computing also suffering from some drawback like security & privacy, Internet Dependency, Availability, And Current Enterprise Applications Can't Be Migrated Easily. I conclude that security is biggest hurdle in wide acceptance of cloud computing. User of cloud services are in fear of data loss, security and availability issues. At virtual level DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service Attack) is biggest threat of availability in cloud computing. In Denial of service attack an attacker prevent legitimate users of service from using the desired resources by flood a network or by consuming bandwidth .So authentication is need to distinguish legitimated clients from malicious clients, which can be performed through strong cryptographic verification (for a private server) or graphical Turing tests (for a public server). Where the authentication is performed by Graphical Turing Tests, which is widely used to distinguish human users from robots through their reaction. On the other hand, CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Tests to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) is used for Graphical Turing Test. There are many OCR or Non-OCR based CAPTCHA's are used widely but they are vulnerable to many attacks like Pixel-Count Attack, Recognition by using OCR, Dictionary Attack, and Vertical Segmentation. This paper introduces a new CAPTCHA method called Two-Tier CAPTCHA. In this method CLAD node need to generate two things, first a alphanumeric CAPTCHA code with image. Second Query related to that CAPTCHA code. E.g. enter only Digit's .We can increase the rate of its difficulty in order to improve its resistance against the attacks by adding more and more query and combination in database. The algorithm of this method makes it hard for bot programs which mean that it is more secure. This project has been implemented by ASP.NET and PHP Language.
2009 Fifth International Conference on Wireless Communication and Sensor Networks (WCSN), 2009
As Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) become more technically mature, we are observing more deploymen... more As Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) become more technically mature, we are observing more deployment that is widespread. Disaster Monitoring and Recovery is one area receiving recent attention in the field. Here, due to hostile terrains or dangerous settings, standard manual or wired detections are not feasible. In situ WSN have the potential to analyze conditions and make predictions regarding dangerous situations potentially saving lives. However, this situation brings many challenges for the WSN in terms of event detection and the subsequent relaying of that event notification to the devices/systems/people that require it. The latter is the focus of this paper. Given the general unreliability of WSNs, there is a demand for Quality of Service driven mechanisms that can ensure that event data is delivered reliably and timely as required by the application. To this end, we present a novel Priority-Based Random Rerouting protocol (PB-RRR). We evaluate our protocol using both an analytical model and a 34-node proof-of-concept sensor deployment. We introduce five QoS levels that progressively improve high priority message throughput from best-effort to reliable event message delivery. We evaluate how congestion, proportions of priority event nodes/messages, and decision threshold affects message delay for each QoS level.
The Random ReRouting (RRR) algorithm has recently been introduced to provide fast adaptive priori... more The Random ReRouting (RRR) algorithm has recently been introduced to provide fast adaptive priority routing to rapidly convey packets of important events in sensor networks, while forwarding routine and lower priority traffic along some secondary network paths. This technique can be applied for sensor networks which monitor the environment by a large amount of sensors distributed in different locations. Such a network has to report large volumes of slowly varying routine data and must quickly report the rarer but more significant events that require immediate attention. In this paper, the RRR algorithm and its implementation in real sensors are presented. Experimental results are provided to show the performance of the algorithm in our sensor network testbed.
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Papers by Poonam Yadav