arXiv subjects

Farhan Ahmad

Publications and source records attributed to Farhan Ahmad.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2024

An Efficient and Scalable Auditing Scheme for Cloud Data Storage using an Enhanced B-tree

An efficient, scalable, and provably secure dynamic auditing scheme is highly desirable in the cloud storage environment for verifying the integrity of the outsourced data. Most of the existing work on remote integrity checking focuses on static archival data and therefore cannot be applied to cases where dynamic data updates are more common. Additionally, existing auditing schemes suffer from performance bottlenecks and scalability issues. To address these issues, in this paper, we present a novel dynamic auditing scheme for centralized cloud environments leveraging an enhanced version of the B-tree. Our proposed scheme achieves the immutable characteristic of a decentralized system (i.e., blockchain technology) while effectively addressing the synchronization and performance challenges of such systems. Unlike other static auditing schemes, our scheme supports dynamic insert, update, and delete operations. Also, by leveraging an enhanced B-tree, our scheme maintains a balanced tree after any alteration to a certain file, improving performance significantly. Experimental results show that our scheme outperforms both traditional Merkle Hash Tree-based centralized auditing and decentralized blockchain-based auditing schemes in terms of block modifications (e.g., insert, delete, update), block retrieval, and data verification time.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2022

A Secure and Trusted Mechanism for Industrial IoT Network using Blockchain

Industrial Internet-of-Things (IIoT) is a powerful IoT application which remodels the growth of industries by ensuring transparent communication among various entities such as hubs, manufacturing places and packaging units. Introducing data science techniques within the IIoT improves the ability to analyze the collected data in a more efficient manner, which current IIoT architectures lack due to their distributed nature. From a security perspective, network anomalies/attackers pose high security risk in IIoT. In this paper, we have addressed this problem, where a coordinator IoT device is elected to compute the trust of IoT devices to prevent the malicious devices to be part of network. Further, the transparency of the data is ensured by integrating a blockchain-based data model. The performance of the proposed framework is validated extensively and rigorously via MATLAB against various security metrics such as attack strength, message alteration, and probability of false authentication. The simulation results suggest that the proposed solution increases IIoT network security by efficiently detecting malicious attacks in the network.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2020

A First Look at Privacy Analysis of COVID-19 Contact Tracing Mobile Applications

Today's smartphones are equipped with a large number of powerful value-added sensors and features such as a low power Bluetooth sensor, powerful embedded sensors such as the digital compass, accelerometer, GPS sensors, Wi-Fi capabilities, microphone, humidity sensors, health tracking sensors, and a camera, etc. These value-added sensors have revolutionized the lives of the human being in many ways such, as tracking the health of the patients and movement of doctors, tracking employees movement in large manufacturing units, and monitoring the environment, etc. These embedded sensors could also be used for large-scale personal, group, and community sensing applications especially tracing the spread of certain diseases. Governments and regulators are turning to use these features to trace the people thought to have symptoms of certain diseases or virus e.g. COVID-19. The outbreak of COVID-19 in December 2019, has seen a surge of the mobile applications for tracing, tracking and isolating the persons showing COVID-19 symptoms to limit the spread of disease to the larger community. The use of embedded sensors could disclose private information of the users thus potentially bring threat to the privacy and security of users. In this paper, we analyzed a large set of smartphone applications that have been designed to contain the spread of the COVID-19 virus and bring the people back to normal life. Specifically, we have analyzed what type of permission these smartphone apps require, whether these permissions are necessary for the track and trace, how data from the user devices is transported to the analytic center, and analyzing the security measures these apps have deployed to ensure the privacy and security of users.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2017

Mobile Phone Based Portable Field Sensor System for Real-Time In-situ River Water Quality Monitoring During Endangered Dolphin Monitoring Surveys

Mobile phone based potable water quality assessment device is developed to analyze and study water pollution level at Indus river. Indus river is habitat of endangered Indus river dolphin and water pollution is one of major causes of survivability threats for this specie. We tested device performance at the six locations of Lahore canal. pH of canal water deviates from the normal range of the irrigation water. In future, we will study correlation between water pollution level and habitat usage of Indus river dolphin using water quality assessment device and hydrophone array based passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) system.

cs.CY↗