Biblio

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2023-01-06
Shaikh, Rizwan Ahmed, Sohaib Khan, Muhammad, Rashid, Imran, Abbas, Haidar, Naeem, Farrukh, Siddiqi, Muhammad Haroon.  2022.  A Framework for Human Error, Weaknesses, Threats & Mitigation Measures in an Airgapped Network. 2022 2nd International Conference on Digital Futures and Transformative Technologies (ICoDT2). :1—8.

Many organizations process and store classified data within their computer networks. Owing to the value of data that they hold; such organizations are more vulnerable to targets from adversaries. Accordingly, the sensitive organizations resort to an ‘air-gap’ approach on their networks, to ensure better protection. However, despite the physical and logical isolation, the attackers have successfully manifested their capabilities by compromising such networks; examples of Stuxnet and Agent.btz in view. Such attacks were possible due to the successful manipulation of human beings. It has been observed that to build up such attacks, persistent reconnaissance of the employees, and their data collection often forms the first step. With the rapid integration of social media into our daily lives, the prospects for data-seekers through that platform are higher. The inherent risks and vulnerabilities of social networking sites/apps have cultivated a rich environment for foreign adversaries to cherry-pick personal information and carry out successful profiling of employees assigned with sensitive appointments. With further targeted social engineering techniques against the identified employees and their families, attackers extract more and more relevant data to make an intelligent picture. Finally, all the information is fused to design their further sophisticated attacks against the air-gapped facility for data pilferage. In this regard, the success of the adversaries in harvesting the personal information of the victims largely depends upon the common errors committed by legitimate users while on duty, in transit, and after their retreat. Such errors would keep on repeating unless these are aligned with their underlying human behaviors and weaknesses, and the requisite mitigation framework is worked out.

2021-09-07
Khan, Humayun Zubair, Ali, Mudassar, Naeem, Muhammad, Rashid, Imran, Siddiqui, Adil Masood, Imran, Muhammad, Mumtaz, Shahid.  2020.  Resource Allocation and Throughput Maximization in Decoupled 5G. 2020 IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC). :1–6.
Traditional downlink (DL)-uplink (UL) coupled cell association scheme is suboptimal solution for user association as most of the users are associated to a high powered macro base station (MBS) compared to low powered small base station (SBS) in heterogeneous network. This brings challenges like multiple interference issues, imbalanced user traffic load which leads to a degraded throughput in HetNet. In this paper, we investigate DL-UL decoupled cell association scheme to address these challenges and formulate a sum-rate maximization problem in terms of admission control, cell association and power allocation for MBS only, coupled and decoupled HetNet. The formulated optimization problem falls into a class of mixed integer non linear programming (MINLP) problem which is NP-hard and requires an exhaustive search to find the optimal solution. However, computational complexity of the exhaustive search increases exponentially with the increase in number of users. Therefore, an outer approximation algorithm (OAA), with less complexity, is proposed as a solution to find near optimal solution. Extensive simulations work have been done to evaluate proposed algorithm. Results show effectiveness of proposed novel decoupled cell association scheme over traditional coupled cell association scheme in terms of users associated/attached, mitigating interference, traffic offloading to address traffic imbalances and sum-rate maximization.