Engineering Papers⌕ Search

SEARCH · Engineering Papers

Results for “Authentication”

Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

283 records · Page 16

Harnessing the Power of AI: Status and Expansion of Current Domestic Transport Security Through Flexible Embedded Hardware

As applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) continue to expand, there are increasing opportunities to leverage applied AI methodologies with mobile transportation focused embedded systems. Current applications of AI in transportation focus on a variety of areas, including fuel efficiency, safety, security, and other broad fields of optimization or detection. To leverage these AI workflows and methodologies in the field, teams must utilize complex embedded systems capable of implementing these AI-enabled algorithms in real-time. In this paper, we will investigate how these algorithms can be integrated into existing technologies leveraging vehicle data - such as the Controller Area Network Transport Security Tracking and Reporting Unit (C-STAR). The C-STAR technology is an embedded platform with onboard computation capable of running next generation algorithms in vehicle systems AI, such as preventative maintenance, driver authentication, and transport security. As deployed in the field, the C-STAR has a limited AI functionality –this paper will directly discuss how a device like C-STAR can be utilized and the advantages of integrating these new technologies. We will open with relevant background information and transportation projects that leverage AI, focusing specifically on those around transport security such as vehicle identification, anomaly detection, and deterrence. We will then extend this into potential opportunities and scaling for AI methodologies using platforms like the C-STAR. Finally, we will speak directly to the challenges of deploying AI-powered workflows, such as computing power needs, bandwidth, hallucinations, and other regulatory considerations.

Cook, Adian [ORNL] (ORCID:0000000160825395)↗

DeepLynx Ecosystem 2025

Poor data integration and governance continue to plague complex engineering projects, resulting in missed cost, schedule, and performance targets. Departments operate in isolated systems with manual data exchange, creating fragmented information that compounds errors and leads to significant delays and cost overruns. The DeepLynx ecosystem addresses these challenges through an open-source, modular data management platform that transforms fragmented project data into an integrated digital thread. Built on a federated microservice architecture, the ecosystem comprises seven specialized tools centered around DeepLynx Nexus, a unified data catalog with hierarchical organization and graph-based navigation capabilities. The ecosystem includes: DeepLynx Stream for real-time timeseries data ingestion from industrial sources; DeepLynx Ingest for governed data uploads with formal review workflows; DeepLynx Lattice for ontology-based entity and relationship extraction; DeepLynx Run for workflow orchestration and secure AI/ML compute; DeepLynx Visualize for 3D digital twin visualization; and DeepLynx Insight for AI-assisted document analysis with traceable, grounded responses. Deployable in cloud, on-premise, or hybrid environments using containerized Docker applications and Helm charts, the DeepLynx ecosystem provides flexible infrastructure that adapts to organizational requirements. By consolidating project data into a unified data lake with role-based access controls and OAuth2 authentication, DeepLynx enables digital thread and digital twin capabilities that improve decision-making, reduce risk, and support complex engineering workflows throughout the project lifecycle.

42 - ENGINEERING↗

Portable and Cost-Effective Device for Reliable Detection of Counterfeit and Non-compliant Refrigerants in Diverse Applications

Counterfeit refrigerants pose significant challenges to safety, system reliability, and operational effectiveness due to their harmful contaminants or incompatible chemical compositions. Utilizing these noncompliant products can lead to reduced efficiency, equipment failures, and expensive repairs. Additionally, heightened demand for alternative refrigerants during the industry's transition has created supply gaps, enabling counterfeit products to proliferate. Accurate detection and analysis tools are therefore essential to verify refrigerant authenticity and ensure system integrity in diverse applications. This paper presents the development of a portable device designed for reliable identification and detailed analysis of refrigerant composition. By integrating precision gas sampling, controlled pressure regulation, and automated sensor technology, the device not only detects deviations from standard refrigerant properties but also provides a comprehensive composition breakdown. Pre-calibrated sensors measure the refrigerant gas to identify specific concentrations and contaminants, with an intuitive LED-based indicator system ensuring quick interpretation of results. The user-friendly interface enables operators to select refrigerant types for targeted testing, further enhancing accuracy and usability for field technicians. Comprehensive testing was conducted on mildly flammable A2L refrigerants, showcasing the device’s robustness and adaptability in analyzing composition and detecting discrepancies. The device demonstrated consistent accuracy across a range of refrigerant samples, affirming its reliability in diverse operational environments. Its design minimizes contamination risks during sampling and provides detailed composition results within 90 seconds, ensuring efficient and precise analysis. With a projected price point under $150, the proposed solution delivers affordability alongside its lightweight portability and straightforward operation. Unlike complex and costly alternatives, such as gas chromatography systems, this device provides an accessible option for technicians, customs personnel, and industry operators in need of quick and effective refrigerant verification. Compatible with both current formulations and emerging refrigerant technologies, the device addresses critical counterfeit detection needs across a range of applications. By delivering accurate composition analysis and counterfeit identification, this innovation enhances system performance, safety, and operational reliability in crucial industries.

Cheekatamarla, Praveen [ORNL] (ORCID:0000000248827↗

Latency Analysis of the Nexus Digital Twin Framework

Real-time digital catalogs are increasingly relied upon to track metadata and connect disparate data sources for cloud-based data integration efforts. One such tool, Deeplynx Nexus is supporting real-time digital twin efforts through event-driven data integration and time-series queries. Nexus’s usefulness for these applications depends critically on how quickly individual records can be uploaded and downloaded, since delays directly affect the responsiveness of any system built on top of it. However, the actual latency a user should expect from Nexus has not been systematically measured before, particularly for the small, frequent transactions typical of live sensor feeds. Here we show that single-record round-trip latency is 61.1 ms on a local Nexus instance and 391.7 ms on the hosted production infrastructure, a roughly 6.4x difference driven primarily by fixed per-request overhead rather than data volume. This overhead dominates at small scale: comparing single-record and ten-record trials suggests approximately 56 ms of each single-record request is fixed connection and authentication cost rather than data-transfer time, meaning batching even a handful of records is substantially more efficient than transmitting them individually. At large batch sizes, this pattern reverses for uploads, which converge to near parity between local and hosted environments by 25,000-50,000 records, while download latency remains persistently 5.7-6.4x slower on hosted infrastructure even at scale. These results suggest that Nexus deployments intended for real-time digital twin applications should prioritize record batching over single-record transactions, and that download-path optimization on hosted infrastructure offers the largest remaining opportunity to reduce latency at scale. We anticipate these baseline measurements will serve as a reference point for future digital twin projects evaluating whether Nexus’s latency profile meets their real-time requirements, and as a benchmark for tracking the effect of future infrastructure or API changes.

99 - GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗

Database-Agnostic Log Analysis and Monitoring Framework

Prior to my internship, I was informed that a previous intern had built a tool to analyse MongoDB logs and look for invalid access attempts, which served as a great reference point for my project. I was initially tasked with expanding on her prototype and filling in the gaps such as integrating it with the main monitoring tool the lab uses. Eventually, the scope grew, expanding to support other databases and a growing collection of tools. I organized the framework around an observer pattern, meaning one point in the program sending updates to the rest of the framework. Every time a log was read and parsed, it was sent to be processed by the tools, using the type of event as a means to determine which tools should get a chance to act on the log. This decouples the tools from the log reader, making future updates and additions much easier. The framework processes MongoDB logs at ~135,000 entries per second and PostgreSQL logs at ~170,500 entries per second, accurately detecting anomalies such as slow queries and connections from unknown addresses. This framework serves to fill gaps in database monitoring tools currently implemented at the lab, such as tracking failed authentication for PostgreSQL and MongoDB which had very minimal or none before this framework. National labs such as Fermilab hold sensitive data and valuable computing resources, making them attractive targets. Monitoring intrusion attempts on databases is made much easier by this comprehensive monitoring suite.

Clark, Dylan [Unlisted, US, IL; Fermilab]↗

Proactive Intrusion Detection and Mitigation System

SAND2023-05661O The proactive intrusion detection and mitigation system (PIDMS) provides grid-edge situational awareness for cybersecurity defense by capturing real-time distributed energy resource (DER) network traffic and performance data with a novel approach that improves the detection and prevention of cyber-physical attacks. The PIDMS addresses the grid-edge security gap with real-time analysis of both network traffic and photovoltaic performance data to deliver a novel, cyber-physical intrusion detection system (IDS) approach that increases the accuracy and effectiveness of detection and mitigation. This hybrid IDS analysis enables dual monitoring that increases the workload of the adversary; both cyber and physical data would have to be simultaneously spoofed to evade detection. Furthermore, monitoring and analyzing cyber data are insufficient in some cases. For example, in an insider threat aimed at disrupting inverter grid-support functions where proper credentials and authentication are achieved, only the altered PV performance would indicate abnormal behavior. All in all, the PIDMS provides novel capabilities for: • Distributed, real-time cyber-physical detection and mitigation analysis • Cybersecurity defense for grid-edge systems • Analysis framework that can provide situational awareness across the transmission, distribution, and DER systems The PIDMS sensor is designed to collect cyber-physical data, process the data using machine-learning algorithms, detect abnormal events, and deploy mitigations. With these goals, the main functional PIDMS objectives are: • Capability to collect cyber-physical data • Onboard storage of cyber-physical data • Peer-to-peer communication • Computationally efficient machine-learning algorithms • Online cyber-physical data analysis • Alerting/visualization capabilities • Mitigation deployment capability with bump-in-the-wire (BITW) implementation Each of these functional objectives enable PIDMS to perform effective cyber-physical intrusion detection and mitigation. Sandia National Laboratories is a multimission laboratory managed and operated by National Technology & Engineering Solutions of Sandia, LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Honeywell International Inc., for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration under contract DE-NA0003525.

Jones, Christian↗

DUFs Demo code

SAND2021-15057 O This code demonstrates server/client authentication using the patented Digital Unclonable Function (DUF) process and protocol. Sandia National Laboratories is a multimission laboratory managed and operated by National Technology & Engineering Solutions of Sandia, LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Honeywell International Inc., for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration under contract DE-NA0003525.

Le, Tam↗

Communication-efficient certificate revocation management for Advanced Metering Infrastructure and IoT Integration

Advanced Metering Infrastructure forms a communication network for the collection of power data from smart meters in Smart Grid. As the communication between smart meters could be secured utilizing public-key cryptography, however, public-key cryptography still has certain challenges in terms of certificate revocation and management particularly related distribution and storage overhead of revoked certificates. To address this challenge, in this work, we propose a novel revocation management approach by utilizing cryptographic accumulators which reduces the space requirements for revocation information significantly and thus enables efficient distribution of such information to all smart meters. We implemented the proposed approach on both ns-3 network simulator and a testbed. We demonstrated its superior performance with respect to traditional methods for revocation management.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Molecular identification of wines using in situ liquid SIMS and PCA analysis

Composition analysis in wine is gaining increasing attention because it can provide information about the wine quality, source, and nutrition. In this work, in situ liquid secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS) was applied to 14 representative wines, including six wines manufactured by a manufacturer in Washington State, United States, four Cabernet Sauvignon wines, and four Chardonnay wines from other different manufacturers and locations. In situ liquid SIMS has the unique advantage of simultaneously examining both organic and inorganic compositions from liquid samples. Principal component analysis (PCA) of SIMS spectra showed that red and white wines can be clearly differentiated according to their aromatic and oxygen-contained organic species. Furthermore, the identities of different wines, especially the same variety of wines, can be enforced with a combination of both organic and inorganic species. Meanwhile, in situ liquid SIMS is sample-friendly, so liquid samples can be directly analyzed without any prior sample dilution or separation. Taken together, we demonstrate the great potential of in situ liquid SIMS in applications related to the molecular investigation of various liquid samples in food science.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗

The Design and Implementation of a Secure Datastore Based on Ethereum Smart Contract

In this paper, we present a secure datastore based on an Ethereum smart contract. Our research is guided by three research questions. First, we will explore to what extend a smart-contract-based datastore should resemble a traditional database system. Second, we will investigate how to store the data in a smart-contract-based datastore for maximum flexibility while minimizing the gas consumption. Third, we seek answers regarding whether or not a smart-contract-based datastore should incorporate complex processing such as data encryption and data analytic algorithms. The proposed smart-contract-based datastore aims to strike a good balance between several constraints: (1) smart contracts are publicly visible, which may create a confidentiality concern for the data stored in the datastore; (2) unlike traditional database systems, the Ethereum smart contract programming language (i.e., Solidity) offers very limited data structures for data management; (3) all operations that mutate the blockchain state would incur financial costs and the developers for smart contracts must make sure sufficient gas is provisioned for every smart contract call, and ideally, the gas consumption should be minimized. Our investigation shows that although it is essential for a smart-contract-based datastore to offer some basic data query functionality, it is impractical to offer query flexibility that resembles that of a traditional database system. Furthermore, we propose that data should be structured as tag-value pairs, where the tag serves as a non-unique key that describes the nature of the value. We also conclude that complex processing should not be allowed in the smart contract due to the financial burden and security concerns. The tag-based secure datastore designed this way also defines its applicative perimeter, i.e., only applications that align with our strategy would find the proposed datastore a good fit. Those that would rather incur higher financial cost for more data query flexibility and/or less user burden on data pre- and post-processing would find the proposed database too restrictive.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗

An Automated Disruption-Tolerant Key Management Framework for Critical Systems

Key management is critical to secure operation. Distributed control systems, such as Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems, have unique operational requirements that make conventional key management solutions less effective and burdensome. This paper presents a novel Kerberos-based framework for automated, disruption-tolerant key management for control system environments. Here, experimental tests and their results are presented to quantify the expected performance overhead of this approach. Additionally, Zeek sensor analytics are presented to aid in monitoring the health and security of the key management framework operation.

96 KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT AND PRESERVATION↗

Final Technical Report

Explore the source record for details and available documents.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗