Biblio

This article proposes a method for determining the intruder type in the systems of physical protection of objects. An intruder trying to enter the territory, buildings or premises of the facility has to overcome typical engineering reinforcement elements of building structures. Elements of building structures are equipped with addressable alarm sensors. The intruder type is proposed to be determined according to its equipment by comparing the time of actually overcoming the building structure elements with the expert estimates. The time to overcome the elements of building structures is estimated by the time between successive responses of the security alarm address sensors. The intruder's awareness of the protection object is proposed to be assessed by tracking the route of its movement on the object using address sensors. Determining the intruder type according to the data of the security alarm systems can be used for the in-process tactics control of the security group actions.

State-of-the-art approaches in gait analysis usually rely on one isolated tracking system, generating insufficient data for complex use cases such as sports, rehabilitation, and MedTech. We address the opportunity to comprehensively understand human motion by a novel data model combining several motion-tracking methods. The model aggregates pose estimation by captured videos and EMG and EIT sensor data synchronously to gain insights into muscle activities. Our demonstration with biceps curl and sitting/standing pose generates time-synchronous data and delivers insights into our experiment’s usability, advantages, and challenges.

CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) is an important security technique designed to deter bots from abusing software systems, which has broader applications in cyberspace. CAPTCHAs come in a variety of forms, including the deciphering of obfuscated text, transcribing of audio messages, and tracking mouse movement, among others. This paper focuses on using deep learning techniques to recognize text-based CAPTCHAs. In particular, our work focuses on generating training datasets using different CAPTCHA schemes, along with a pre-processing technique allowing for character-based recognition. We have encapsulated the CRABI (CAPTCHA Recognition with Attached Binary Images) framework to give an image multiple labels for improvement in feature extraction. Using real-world datasets, performance evaluations are conducted to validate the efficacy of our proposed approach on several neural network architectures (e.g., custom CNN architecture, VGG16, ResNet50, and MobileNet). The experimental results confirm that over 90% accuracy can be achieved on most models.

A human-swarm cooperative system, which mixes multiple robots and a human supervisor to form a mission team, has been widely used for emergent scenarios such as criminal tracking and victim assistance. These scenarios are related to human safety and require a robot team to quickly transit from the current undergoing task into the new emergent task. This sudden mission change brings difficulty in robot motion adjustment and increases the risk of performance degradation of the swarm. Trust in human-human collaboration reflects a general expectation of the collaboration; based on the trust humans mutually adjust their behaviors for better teamwork. Inspired by this, in this research, a trust-aware reflective control (Trust-R), was developed for a robot swarm to understand the collaborative mission and calibrate its motions accordingly for better emergency response. Typical emergent tasks “transit between area inspection tasks”, “response to emergent target - car accident” in social security with eight fault-related situations were designed to simulate robot deployments. A human user study with 50 volunteers was conducted to model trust and assess swarm performance. Trust-R's effectiveness in supporting a robot team for emergency response was validated by improved task performance and increased trust scores.

Augmented Reality has a long history and has seen major technical advantages in the last years. With WebXR, a new web standard, Mobile Augmented Reality (MAR) applications are now available in the web browser. With our work, we implemented an Augmented Reality Information System and conducted a case study to evaluate the user acceptance of such an application build with WebXR. Our results indicate that the user acceptance regarding web-based MAR applications for our specific use case seems to be given. With our proposed architecture we also lay the foundation for other AR information systems.

Device-Free Localization and Tracking (DFLT) acts as a key component for the contactless awareness applications such as elderly care and home security. However, the random phase errors in WiFi signal and weak target echoes submerged in background clutter signals are mainly obstacles for current DFLT systems. In this paper, we propose the design and implementation of MuTrack, a multiparameter based DFLT system using commodity WiFi devices with a single link. Firstly, we select an antenna with maximum reliability index as the reference antenna for signal sanitization in which the conjugate operation removes the random phase errors. Secondly, we design a multi-dimensional parameters estimator and then refine path parameters by optimizing the complete data of path components. Finally, the Hungarian Kalman Filter based tracking method is proposed to derive accurate locations from low-resolution parameter estimates. We extensively validate the proposed system in typical indoor environment and these experimental results show that MuTrack can achieve high tracking accuracy with the mean error of 0.82 m using only a single link.

Location privacy is one of most frequently discussed terms in the mobile devices security breaches and data leaks. With the expected growth of the number of IoT devices, which is 20 billions by 2020., location privacy issues will be further brought to focus. In this paper we give an overview of location privacy implications in wireless networks, mainly focusing on user's Preferred Network List (list of previously used WiFi Access Points) contained within WiFi Probe Request packets. We will showcase the existing work and suggest interesting topics for future work. A chronological overview of sensitive location data we collected on a musical festival in years 2014, 2015, 2017 and 2018 is provided. We conclude that using passive WiFi monitoring scans produces different results through years, with a significant increase in the usage of a more secure Broadcast Probe Request packets and MAC address randomizations by the smartphone operating systems.

As Blockchain technology become more understood in recent years and its capability to solve enterprise business use cases become evident, technologist have been exploring Blockchain technology to solve use cases that have been daunting industries for years. Unlike existing technologies, one of the key features of blockchain technology is its unparalleled capability to provide, traceability, accountability and immutable records that can be accessed at any point in time. One application area of interest for blockchain is securing heterogenous networks. This paper explores the security challenges in a heterogonous network of IoT devices and whether blockchain can be a viable solution. Using an experimental approach, we explore the possibility of using blockchain technology to secure IoT devices, validate IoT device transactions, and establish a chain of trust to secure an IoT device mesh network, as well as investigate the plausibility of using immutable transactions for forensic analysis.

Over the past few years, virtual and mixed reality systems have evolved significantly yielding high immersive experiences. Most of the metaphors used for interaction with the virtual environment do not provide the same meaningful feedback, to which the users are used to in the real world. This paper proposes a cyber-glove to improve the immersive sensation and the degree of embodiment in virtual and mixed reality interaction tasks. In particular, we are proposing a cyber-glove system that tracks wrist movements, hand orientation and finger movements. It provides a decoupled position of the wrist and hand, which can contribute to a better embodiment in interaction and manipulation tasks. Additionally, the detection of the curvature of the fingers aims to improve the proprioceptive perception of the grasping/releasing gestures more consistent to visual feedback. The cyber-glove system is being developed for VR applications related to real estate promotion, where users have to go through divisions of the house and interact with objects and furniture. This work aims to assess if glove-based systems can contribute to a higher sense of immersion, embodiment and usability when compared to standard VR hand controller devices (typically button-based). Twenty-two participants tested the cyber-glove system against the HTC Vive controller in a 3D manipulation task, specifically the opening of a virtual door. Metric results showed that 83% of the users performed faster door pushes, and described shorter paths with their hands wearing the cyber-glove. Subjective results showed that all participants rated the cyber-glove based interactions as equally or more natural, and 90% of users experienced an equal or a significant increase in the sense of embodiment.

Web attacks have increased rapidly in recent years. However, traditional methods are useless to track web attackers. Browser fingerprint, as a stateless tracking technique, can be used to solve this problem. Given browser fingerprint changes easily and frequently, it is easy to lose track. Therefore, we need to improve the stability of browser fingerprint by linking the new one to the previous chain. In this paper, we propose LSTM model to learn the potential relationship of browser fingerprint evolution. In addition, we adjust the input feature vector to time series and construct training set to train the model. The results show that our model can construct the tracking chain perfectly well with average ownership up to 99.3%.

Today an increasing number of consumer devices such as head phones, wearables, light bulbs and even baseball bats, are Bluetooth-enabled thanks to the widespread support of the technology by phone manufacturers and mobile operating system vendors. The ability for any device to seamlessly connect and exchange information with smartphones via Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) protocol promises unlimited room for innovation. However, it also brings about new privacy challenges. We show that the BLE protocol together with the Bluetooth permission model implemented in the Android and iOS operating systems can be used for cross-app tracking unbeknownst to the individuals. Specifically, through experiments and analyses based on real-world smartphone data we show that by listening to advertising packets broadcasted by nearby BLE-enabled devices and recording information contained in them, app developers can derive fairly unique "fingerprints" for their users, which can be used for cross-app tracking, i.e., linking pseudonymous users of different apps to each other. We demonstrate that privacy protections put in place by the Bluetooth Special Interest Group, Google, and Apple are not sufficient to prevent such fingerprinting or to make cross-app tracking difficult to execute. Our main contribution is to demonstrate the feasibility of cross-app tracking using nearby BLE and raise awareness that changes are needed in order to prevent it from becoming widespread. We also propose mitigation strategies to decrease the feasibility of tracking using nearby BLE devices while preserving the utility of the BLE technology.

Web attacks have proliferated across the whole Internet in recent years. To protect websites, security vendors and researchers collect attack information using web honeypots. However, web attackers can hide themselves by using stepping stones (e.g., VPN, encrypted proxy) or anonymous networks (e.g., Tor network). Conventional web honeypots lack an effective way to gather information about an attacker's identity, which raises a big obstacle for cybercrime traceability and forensics. Traditional forensics methods are based on traffic analysis; it requires that defenders gain access to the entire network. It is not suitable for honeypots. In this paper, we present the design, implementation, and deployment of the Micro-Honeypot, which aims to use the browser fingerprinting technique to track a web attacker. Traditional honeypot lure attackers and records attacker's activity. Micro-Honeypot is deployed in a honeypot. It will run and gather identity information when an attacker visits the honeypot. Our preliminary results show that Micro-Honeypot could collect more information and track attackers although they might have used proxies or anonymous networks to hide themselves.

As safety-critical systems become increasingly interconnected, a system's operations depend on the reliability and security of the computing components and the interconnections among them. Therefore, a growing body of research seeks to tie safety analysis to security analysis. Specifically, it is important to analyze system safety under different attacker models. In this paper, we develop generic parameterizable state automaton templates to model the effects of an attack. Then, given an attacker model, we generate a state automaton that represents the system operation under the threat of the attacker model. We use a railway signaling system as our case study and consider threats to the communication protocol and the commands issued to physical devices. Our results show that while less skilled attackers are not able to violate system safety, more dedicated and skilled attackers can affect system safety. We also consider several countermeasures and show how well they can deter attacks.

We formulate a tracker which performs incessant decision making in order to track objects where the objects may undergo different challenges such as partial occlusions, moving camera, cluttered background etc. In the process, the agent must make a decision on whether to keep track of the object when it is occluded or has moved out of the frame temporarily based on its prediction from the previous location or to reinitialize the tracker based on the belief that the target has been lost. Instead of the heuristic methods we depend on reward and penalty based training that helps the agent reach an optimal solution via this partially observable Markov decision making (POMDP). Furthermore, we employ deeply learned compositional model to estimate human pose in order to better handle occlusion without needing human inputs. By learning compositionality of human bodies via deep neural network the agent can make better decision on presence of human in a frame or lack thereof under occlusion. We adapt skeleton based part representation and do away with the large spatial state requirement. This especially helps in cases where orientation of the target in focus is unorthodox. Finally we demonstrate that the deep reinforcement learning based training coupled with pose estimation capabilities allows us to train and tag multiple large video datasets much quicker than previous works.

With the advancement of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), 3D wireless mesh networks will play a crucial role in next generation mission critical wireless networks. Along with providing coverage over difficult terrain, it provides better spectral utilization through 3D spatial reuse. However, being a wireless network, 3D meshes are vulnerable to jamming/disruptive attacks. A jammer can disrupt the communication, as well as control of the network by intelligently causing interference to a set of nodes. This paper presents a distributed mechanism of avoiding jamming attacks by means of 3D spatial filtering where adaptive beam nulling is used to keep the jammer in null region in order to bypass jamming. Kalman filter based tracking mechanism is used to estimate the most likely trajectory of the jammer from noisy observation of the jammer's position. A beam null border is determined by calculating confidence region of jammer's current and next position estimates. An optimization goal is presented to calculate optimal beam null that minimizes the number of deactivated links while maximizing the higher value of confidence for keeping the jammer inside the null. The survivability of a 3D mesh network with a mobile jammer is studied through simulation that validates an 96.65% reduction in the number of jammed nodes.

Recent advancement of smart devices and wearable tech-nologies greatly enlarges the variety of personal data people can track. Applications and services can leverage such data to provide better life support, but also impose privacy and security threats. Obfuscation schemes, consequently, have been developed to retain data access while mitigate risks. Compared to offering choices of releasing raw data and not releasing at all, we examine the effect of adding a data obfuscation option on users' disclosure decisions when configuring applications' access, and how that effect varies with data types and application contexts. Our online user experiment shows that users are less likely to block data access when the obfuscation option is available except for locations. This effect significantly differs between applications for domain-specific dynamic tracking data, but not for generic personal traits. We further unpack the role of context and discuss the design opportunities.

An Egyptian statue on display at the Manchester Museum mysteriously spins on its axis every day; it is eventually discovered that this is due to anisotropic friction forces, and that the motile power comes from imperceptible mechanical waves caused by visitors' footsteps and nearby traffic. This phenomena involves microscopic ratchets, and is pervasive in the microscopic world - this is basically how muscles contract. It was the source of inspiration to think about everyday objects that move by harvesting external vibration rather than using mechanical traction and steering wheels. We propose here a strategy for displacing objects by attaching relatively small vibration sources. After learning how several random bursts of vibration affect its pose, an optimization algorithm discovers the optimal sequence of vibration patterns required to (slowly but surely) move the object to a very different specified position. We describe and demonstrate two application scenarios, namely assisted transportation of heavy objects with little effort on the part of the human and self arranging furniture, useful for instance to clean classrooms or restaurants during vacant hours.

Machine-based tracking is a type of behavior that extracts information on a user's machine, which can then be used for fingerprinting, tracking, or profiling purposes. In this paper, we focus on JavaScript-oriented machine-based tracking as JavaScript is widely accessible in all browsers. We find that coarse features related to JavaScript access, cookie access, and URL length subdomain information can perform well in creating a classifier that can identify these machine-based trackers with 97.7% accuracy. We then use the classifier on real-world datasets based on 30-minute website crawls of different types of websites – including websites that target children and websites that target a popular audience – and find 85%+ of all websites utilize machine-based tracking, even when they target a regulated group (children) as their primary audience.

Ubiquitous WiFi infrastructure and smart phones offer a great opportunity to study physical activities. In this paper, we present MobiCamp, a large-scale testbed for studying mobility-related activities of residents on a campus. MobiCamp consists of \textasciitilde2,700 APs, \textasciitilde95,000 smart phones, and an App with \textasciitilde2,300 opt-in volunteer users. More specifically, we capture how mobile users interact with different types of buildings, with other users, and with classroom courses, etc. To achieve this goal, we first obtain a relatively complete coverage of the users' mobility traces by utilizing four types of information from SNMP and by relaxing the location granularity to roughly at the room level. Then the popular App provides user attributes (grade, gender, etc.) and fine-grained behavior information (phone usages, course timetables, etc.) of the sampled population. These detailed mobile data is then correlated with the mobility traces from the SNMP to estimate the entire campus population's physical activities. We use two applications to show the power of MobiCamp.

Browser fingerprinting is a widely used technique to uniquely identify web users and to track their online behavior. Until now, different tools have been proposed to protect the user against browser fingerprinting. However, these tools have usability restrictions as they deactivate browser features and plug-ins (like Flash) or the HTML5 canvas element. In addition, all of them only provide limited protection, as they randomize browser settings with unrealistic parameters or have methodical flaws, making them detectable for trackers. In this work we demonstrate the first anti-fingerprinting strategy, which protects against Flash fingerprinting without deactivating it, provides robust and undetectable anti-canvas fingerprinting, and uses a large set of real word data to hide the actual system and browser properties without losing usability. We discuss the methods and weaknesses of existing anti-fingerprinting tools in detail and compare them to our enhanced strategies. Our evaluation against real world fingerprinting tools shows a successful fingerprinting protection in over 99% of 70.000 browser sessions.

The growing popularity and development of data mining technologies bring serious threat to the security of individual,'s sensitive information. An emerging research topic in data mining, known as privacy-preserving data mining (PPDM), has been extensively studied in recent years. The basic idea of PPDM is to modify the data in such a way so as to perform data mining algorithms effectively without compromising the security of sensitive information contained in the data. Current studies of PPDM mainly focus on how to reduce the privacy risk brought by data mining operations, while in fact, unwanted disclosure of sensitive information may also happen in the process of data collecting, data publishing, and information (i.e., the data mining results) delivering. In this paper, we view the privacy issues related to data mining from a wider perspective and investigate various approaches that can help to protect sensitive information. In particular, we identify four different types of users involved in data mining applications, namely, data provider, data collector, data miner, and decision maker. For each type of user, we discuss his privacy concerns and the methods that can be adopted to protect sensitive information. We briefly introduce the basics of related research topics, review state-of-the-art approaches, and present some preliminary thoughts on future research directions. Besides exploring the privacy-preserving approaches for each type of user, we also review the game theoretical approaches, which are proposed for analyzing the interactions among different users in a data mining scenario, each of whom has his own valuation on the sensitive information. By differentiating the responsibilities of different users with respect to security of sensitive information, we would like to provide some useful insights into the study of PPDM.

In this work we design and develop Montage for real-time multi-user formation tracking and localization by off-the-shelf smartphones. Montage achieves submeter-level tracking accuracy by integrating temporal and spatial constraints from user movement vector estimation and distance measuring. In Montage we designed a suite of novel techniques to surmount a variety of challenges in real-time tracking, without infrastructure and fingerprints, and without any a priori user-specific (e.g., stride-length and phone-placement) or site-specific (e.g., digitalized map) knowledge. We implemented, deployed and evaluated Montage in both outdoor and indoor environment. Our experimental results (847 traces from 15 users) show that the stride-length estimated by Montage over all users has error within 9cm, and the moving-direction estimated by Montage is within 20°. For realtime tracking, Montage provides meter-second-level formation tracking accuracy with off-the-shelf mobile phones.

Detecting stationary crowd groups and analyzing their behaviors have important applications in crowd video surveillance, but have rarely been studied. The contributions of this paper are in two aspects. First, a stationary crowd detection algorithm is proposed to estimate the stationary time of foreground pixels. It employs spatial-temporal filtering and motion filtering in order to be robust to noise caused by occlusions and crowd clutters. Second, in order to characterize the emergence and dispersal processes of stationary crowds and their behaviors during the stationary periods, three attributes are proposed for quantitative analysis. These attributes are recognized with a set of proposed crowd descriptors which extract visual features from the results of stationary crowd detection. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithms is shown through experiments on a benchmark dataset.

The technology of vehicle video detecting and tracking has been playing an important role in the ITS (Intelligent Transportation Systems) field during recent years. The occlusion phenomenon among vehicles is one of the most difficult problems related to vehicle tracking. In order to handle occlusion, this paper proposes an effective solution that applied Markov Random Field (MRF) to the traffic images. The contour of the vehicle is firstly detected by using background subtraction, then numbers of blocks with vehicle's texture and motion information are filled inside each vehicle. We extract several kinds of information of each block to process the following tracking. As for each occlusive block two groups of clique functions in MRF model are defined, which represents spatial correlation and motion coherence respectively. By calculating each occlusive block's total energy function, we finally solve the attribution problem of occlusive blocks. The experimental results show that our method can handle occlusion problems effectively and track each vehicle continuously.
 

Multiple-object tracking is an important task in automated video surveillance. In this paper, we present a multiple-human-tracking approach that takes the single-frame human detection results as input and associates them to form trajectories while improving the original detection results by making use of reliable temporal information in a closed-loop manner. It works by first forming tracklets, from which reliable temporal information is extracted, and then refining the detection responses inside the tracklets, which also improves the accuracy of tracklets' quantities. After this, local conservative tracklet association is performed and reliable temporal information is propagated across tracklets so that more detection responses can be refined. The global tracklet association is done last to resolve association ambiguities. Experimental results show that the proposed approach improves both the association and detection results. Comparison with several state-of-the-art approaches demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed approach.