I am proud to announce you that RESCUEIT received two best paper awards at WSNSCM'11 workshop for the following publications: 

• M. Khalfaoui, K. ELkhiyaoui, R. Molva "Privacy Preserving Products Tracking in Clustered Supply Chain"

Abstract:One  of  the  main  applications  of  supply  chain management is product tracking. We define it as tracing the product path along the supply chain. In this paper, we propose
a  solution  to  track  the  product  while  preserving  the  privacy of  the  supply  chain  actors  involved  and  the  path  traced. More  precisely,  this  solution  allows  to  identify  which  path a  product  has  taken  in  the  supply  chain,  without  disclosing sensitive information. To allow product tracking, the product are attached to a sensor node. This latter stores a trace of the product  path  along  the  supply  chain.  The  trace  is  computed
using polynomial based signature techniques. We restrict the visibility  of  the  manager  of  the  supply  chain  by  organizing the supply  chain  facilities into clusters. Also,  we encrypt the path traces to ensure security against adversaries. To perform access control in the sensor nodes we use randomized Rabin scheme which is known for being efficient and lightweight. In this  paper,  sensor  nodes  are  not  required  to  perform  heavy computation,  which  makes  our  solution  feasible.  The  main achievement of this work is a cryptographic mechanism that allows to the supply chain manager to trace the supply chain
entities  that  product  went  through,  without  disclosing  the identity of those entities.

• L. Gomez, M. Laurent, E. El Moustaine, "Integration of RFID and Wireless Sensor Networks into a Supply Chain Management System".

Abstract: Wireless  Sensor  Networks  together  with  Radio Frequency   Identification   are   promising   technologies   for supply   chain   management   systems.   They   both   provide supply  chain  players  with  goods  tracking  and  monitoring functions   along   the   chain.   Whereas   RFIDs   are   rather focusing   on   identification   of   goods   (e.g.,   identification, classification),  WSNs  are  meant  to  monitor  and  control  the supply chain environment. Nevertheless, despite the interest for the supply chain  management systems, their integration is  often  deterred  due  to  the  lack  of  interoperability.  In  this paper,  we  propose  a  software  framework  which  makes easier the integration of both RFIDs and WSNs into supply chain management systems. 

In addition, the paper has been invited to the "Sensors and Transducers" and IARA journal.

Those publications are available upon request.

We proudly organised the WSNSCM workshop related to the integration of Wireless Sensor Networks into Supply Chain Management systems. This workshop has been held jointly with the NetWare conference, in Saint Laurent du Var, France, from the 21st to the 27th of August. (http://www.iaria.org/conferences2011/WSNSCM.html).

With the growing pressure from regulations to enhance security, while needing to control and lower the costs, Supply Chain Management (SCM) has to face an end-to-end problematic: the proper modeling of complete supply chain, while including relevant security requirements, and leveraging real world information to both assess the security level and enforce the security requirements. In this context, sensors and RFIDs appear as an important assets for securing and optimizing of Supply Chain Management Systems. We have already identified important challenges that need to be addressed, and this will allow us to drive this workshop towards a constructive outcome, as listed on the topics:

These challenges require identified experts from fields which are not necessarily correlated (SCM and WSNs). Our workshop will close this gap. These issues are also inline with the EU roadmap, with their planned call for proposals in 2012 for a 40 M euros research demonstration project on this topic.

The WSNSCM workshop provides a constructive environment to reach a stimulating and productive interaction between researchers and industrial partners who work on very different aspects for the integration of WSNs and RFIDs for secure SCMs. The workshop intended to identify issues, methodologies and directions for future research, together with experience of industrial partners and encourage cooperation in this areas.

The three following publications attracted our attention:

1. Trabelsi S. and Boasso L., The KPI-Based Reputation Policy Language 

 Trust  policy  languages  are  implemented  to  express the  trust  requirements  of  the  users.  These  requirements  are represented by a set of rules specifying the necessary conditions that should be fulfilled by an entity in order to gain the trust of the  evaluator.  Most  of  the  known  trust  policy  languages  are designed  to  express  credential,  authorization  and  access  control requirements  for  the  trust  establishment.  The  credential  based approach  represents  only  one  aspect  of  trust.  The  other  main aspects like reputation and recommendation are  not covered  by these  policy  languages.    In  this  paper  we  propose  a  new  policy language   for   expressing   trust   requirements   for   reputation models, and particularly for the KPI-based reputation model in a supply chain scenario.

2. Khalfaoui M. and Elkhiyaoui K. and Molva R., Privacy Preserving Products Tracking in Clustered Supply Chain

One  of  the  main  applications  of  supply  chain management is product tracking. We define it as tracing the product path along the supply chain. In this paper, we propose a  solution  to  track  the  product  while  preserving  the  privacy of  the  supply  chain  actors  involved  and  the  path  traced. More  precisely,  this  solution  allows  to  identify  which  path a  product  has  taken  in  the  supply  chain,  without  disclosing sensitive information. To allow product tracking, the product are attached to a sensor node. This latter stores a trace of the product  path  along  the  supply  chain.  The  trace  is  computed using polynomial based signature techniques. We restrict the visibility  of  the  manager  of  the  supply  chain  by  organizing the supply  chain  facilities into clusters. Also,  we encrypt the path traces to ensure security against adversaries. To perform access control in the sensor nodes we use randomized Rabin scheme which is known for being efficient and lightweight. In this  paper,  sensor  nodes  are  not  required  to  perform  heavy computation,  which  makes  our  solution  feasible.  The  main achievement of this work is a cryptographic mechanism that allows to the supply chain manager to trace the supply chain entities  that  product  went  through,  without  disclosing  the identity of those entities.

3. Serme G. and Idrees M.S. Adaptive, Security on Service-based SCM Control System

On  a  large-scale  application  subject  to  dynamic interactions, the description and enforcement of security rules are  complex  tasks  to  handle,  as  they  involve  heterogeneous entities that do not have the same capabilities. In the context of SCM-application for example, we have different goods that are being transported across different systems. At one point, items  and  systems  communicate  together  to  signal  presence, report  issues  during  transport,  certify  validity  of  previous checks,  etc.  Security  capabilities  of  the  involved  parties  are heterogeneous and one might want to specify security policies on an abstract level and let the involved systems enforce them according to their contexts and the specific capabilities of each party.  In  this  paper,  we  propose  a  framework  for  security mechanisms  adaptation  when  services  are  involved  by  using Aspect-Oriented-Programming  (AOP)  concepts  that  can  be applied  to  SCM  applications.  The  novelty  is  the  expressivity of  security  policy  at  a  global  level  and  the  enforcement  at  a local level, through a specific and distributed aspect model that has a larger semantic to catch up events relevant for business usage and dedicated to security concerns.
 

We, together with Cedric Ulmer, got a paper related to "Secure Sensor Networks for Critical Infrastructure Protection" accepted to the SensorComm'10 International Conference on Sensor Technologies and Applications.

This paper is a first research result of a joint French German research project RESCUEIT.

Abstract: Wireless Sensor Networks raise the interest of different business domains, including public security. The ability of Wireless Sensor Networks to  monitor and control physical environments such as football stadiums makes them very attractive. The integration of Wireless Sensor Networks into Command and Control (C2) systems aims at avoiding catastrophes such as the Heysel Stadium disaster. In this paper, the architecture and  implementation of a prototype for stadium surveillance is presented. We demonstrate the notification of alerts processed on sensor nodes and routed toward a Command and Control system. The prototype aims at increasing situational awareness of decision makers and at providing real time information related to the occurrence of incidents within the stadium. Decision makers can react accordingly by assigning available first responders to the incidents. Such integration comes along with security requirements; the use of encryption-based access control and trustworthiness evaluation for the generated alerts is therefore proposed to ensure their confidentiality and reliability. In this paper, we demonstrate
the integration of a wireless sensor into a real Command and Control system, and the security requirements raised by such integration.

We identified confidentiality and trustworthiness of alerts as the most important for our scenario. Alert confidentiality aims at ensuring that only authorized users have access to the alerts. Alert trustworthiness evaluates the confidence that decision maker can have in the alert. We propose to apply two existing security and trust mechanisms in order to fulfill the identified security requirements.

Reference

[4] Wikipedia, “Heysel stadium disaster.” [Online]. Available: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heysel Stadium Disaster

Laurent Gomez is a Senior Researcher in Security & Trust at SAP Research. He joined SAP Research in Sophia Antipolis in October 2001. He is participating to the EU WASP, Ginseng, and RESCUEIT Projects for secure and trusted integration of wireless sensor networks into business applications.

SAP Research Sophia Antipolis (France) is proud to announce that Paul El-Khoury, Gomez Laurent, Dr. Laube Annett and Alessandro Sorniotti won the Best Paper Award at the SecurWare conference for their paper: “A Security Pattern for Untraceable Secret Handshakes“.

This paper is the result of a joint work between two European research project Serenity and WASP.

Abstract: A security pattern describes aparticular recurring security problem that arises in specific contextsand presents a well-proven generic solution for it. This paper describes an Untraceable Secret Handshake, a protocol that allows twousers to mutually verify another’s properties without revealing theiridentity. The complex security solution is split into smaller partswhich are described in an abstract way. The identified securityproblems and their solutions are captured as SERENITY securitypatterns. The structured description together with motivating scenariosmakes the security solution better understandable for non-securityexperts and helps to disseminate the security knowledge to applicationdevelopers.

In the area of healthcare, we present today a novel approach for sensor data processing in order to derive abstract level information (such as health condition) based on patient ‘s physiological data (e.g. pulse, temperature). This work follows our previous WASP monitors elderly people on elderly people monitoring with Wireless Sensor Networks.

We recently released a paper [1] on this work, which has been accepted to the 3rd international conference on sensor technologies and applications (SensorCOMM).   In this paper, we demonstrate the processing of sensor data based on a contextual ontology. In the scope of European funded research project WASP [www.wasp-project.org], we aim at integrating Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) [2] with Healthcare solutions. The ability of WSN to monitor and control physical environment made them very attractive for many application domains. And the healthcare domain is not an exception. Nevertheless, Wireless Sensor Networks encounter several technical obstacles, which may hinder their integration within business applications. Considering the fact that Wireless Sensor Networks produce a large and diverse amount of data, business applications may have difficulties to select and process relevant information. We distinguish two approaches which address this issue: in-network processing and data processing within dedicated middleware. Whereas in-network processing mainly aims at resource saving in Wireless Sensor Networks, middlewares ease the definition and execution of Wireless Sensor Network data processing for business applications. In this paper [1], we propose to enhance the common middleware processing approach with the introduction of a contextual ontology. The purpose of this approach is two-fold:(i) to provide only information that match the business application interests, and (ii) to dynamically process Wireless Sensor Network information in order to provide higher semantic level of information to business application. Following this approach, we ease the definition of data processing which are business domain-dependant. For example, Public Security and Healthcare have different types of requirements on sensor data processing; where Public Security applications would need to know if there is a fire in a building, Healthcare application would require a patient’s health status.

We consider, for example, a remote healthcare monitoring application where a patient is monitored remotely at home after surgery. His pulse, body temperature, ambient temperature and his activities are monitored 24 hours per day using a WSN. The latter is connected to a Medical Emergency Response Center (MERC) through a middleware, partially hosted for example by the patient's PDA. This middleware is in charge of detecting any irregularities in patient health condition. The MERC then registers to the middleware for a set of high level information related to patient health condition. The middleware can for example trigger an alert in case of irregularities to the MERC, which contacts a physician for a home visit.
As depicted in Figure 1, we used the Protégé tool for the contextual ontology related to the healthcare domain.

Figure 1 - Contextual Ontology

We developed a prototype based on the depicted approach in order to validate our ideas. We used a google map application as UI for the display of patients and available physicians in a city. As depicted in Figure 2, several patients are monitored around the city. Based on healthcare related information classified and characterized in an ontology, we establish relationship and rule over basic physiological data in order to infer on the patient health condition. Whenever we acquire from the WSN abnormal physiological information, the health condition is evaluated to critical, and an alert is triggered and sent to the hospital. In the google map, the hospital command center can graphically  assign a physician to the patient in critical health condition.

As future work, one can envision an integration with the Collaborative Healthcare Network in order to maintain patient’s health condition.

Figure 2. Remote Patient Monitoring

References
[1], Gomez L., Laube A., "Ontological Middleware for Dynamic Wireless Sensor Data Processing", International Conference on Sensor Technologies and Applications, 2009
[2], C.-Y. Chong and S. P. Kumar. Sensor networks: evolution, opportunities, and challenges. Proceedings of the IEEE, 91(8):1247–1256, 2003.