Biblio

Here we explore the applicability of traditional sliding window based convolutional neural network (CNN) detection pipeline and region based object detection techniques such as Faster Region-based CNN (R-CNN) and Region-based Fully Convolutional Networks (R-FCN) on the problem of object detection in X-ray security imagery. Within this context, with limited dataset availability, we employ a transfer learning paradigm for network training tackling both single and multiple object detection problems over a number of R-CNN/R-FCN variants. The use of first-stage region proposal within the Faster RCNN and R-FCN provide superior results than traditional sliding window driven CNN (SWCNN) approach. With the use of Faster RCNN with VGG16, pretrained on the ImageNet dataset, we achieve 88.3 mAP for a six object class X-ray detection problem. The use of R-FCN with ResNet-101, yields 96.3 mAP for the two class firearm detection problem requiring 0.1 second computation per image. Overall we illustrate the comparative performance of these techniques as object localization strategies within cluttered X-ray security imagery.

We propose a method for comparative analysis of evaluation of the cryptographic strength of the asymmetric encryption algorithms RSA and the existing GOST R 34.10-2001. Describes the fundamental design ratios, this method is based on computing capacity used for decoding and the forecast for the development of computer technology.

We present a system for identifying interesting social media posts on Twitter and delivering them to users' mobile devices in real time as push notifications. In our problem formulation, users are interested in broad topics such as politics, sports, and entertainment: our system processes tweets in real time to identify relevant, novel, and salient content. There are three interesting aspects to our work: First, instead of attempting to tame the cacophony of unfiltered tweets, we exploit a smaller, but still sizeable, collection of curated tweet streams corresponding to the Twitter accounts of different media outlets. Second, we apply distant supervision to extract topic labels from curated streams that have a specific focus, which can then be leveraged to build high-quality topic classifiers essentially "for free". Finally, our system delivers content via Twitter direct messages, supporting in situ interactions modeled after conversations with intelligent agents. These ideas are demonstrated in an end-to-end working prototype.

The Internet of Things (IoT) comes together with the connection between sensors and devices. These smart devices have been upgraded from a standalone device which can only handle a specific task at one time to an interactive device that can handle multiple tasks in time. However, this technology has been exposed to many vulnerabilities especially on the malicious attacks of the devices. With the IoT constraints and low-security mechanisms applied, the malicious attacks could exploit the sensor vulnerability to provide wrong data where it can lead to wrong interpretation and actuation to the users. Due to this problems, this short paper presents an event-based access control framework that considers integrity, privacy and the authenticity in the IoT devices.

This paper identifies trust factor and rewarding nature of bitcoin system, and analyzes bitcoin features which may facilitate bitcoin to emerge as a universal currency. Paper presents the gap between proposed theoretical-architecture and current practical-implementation of bitcoin system in terms of achieving decentralization, anonymity of users, and consensus. Paper presents three different ways in which a user can manage bitcoins. We attempt to identify the security risk and feasible attacks on these configurations of bitcoin management. We have shown that not all bitcoin wallets are safe against all possible types of attacks. Bitcoin core is only safest mode of operating bitcoin till date as it is secure against all feasible attacks, and is vulnerable only against block-chain rewriting.

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are one of the most rapidly developing information technologies and promise to have a variety of applications in Next Generation Networks (NGNs) including the IoT. In this paper, the focus will be on developing new methods for efficiently managing such large-scale networks composed of homogeneous wireless sensors/devices in urban environments such as homes, hospitals, stores and industrial compounds. Heterogeneous networks were proposed in a comparison with the homogeneous ones. The efficiency of these networks will depend on several optimization parameters such as the redundancy, as well as the percentages of coverage and energy saved. We tested the algorithm using different densities of sensors in the network and different values of tuning parameters for the optimization parameters. Obtained results show that our proposed algorithm performs better than the other greedy algorithm. Moreover, networks with more sensors maintain more redundancy and better percentage of coverage. However, it wastes more energy. The same method will be used for heterogeneous wireless sensors networks where devices have different characteristics and the network acts more efficient.

We propose to use a genetic algorithm to evolve novel reconfigurable hardware to implement elliptic curve cryptographic combinational logic circuits. Elliptic curve cryptography offers high security-level with a short key length making it one of the most popular public-key cryptosystems. Furthermore, there are no known sub-exponential algorithms for solving the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem. These advantages render elliptic curve cryptography attractive for incorporating in many future cryptographic applications and protocols. However, elliptic curve cryptography has proven to be vulnerable to non-invasive side-channel analysis attacks such as timing, power, visible light, electromagnetic, and acoustic analysis attacks. In this paper, we use a genetic algorithm to address this vulnerability by evolving combinational logic circuits that correctly implement elliptic curve cryptographic hardware that is also resistant to simple timing and power analysis attacks. Using a fitness function composed of multiple objectives - maximizing correctness, minimizing propagation delays and minimizing circuit size, we can generate correct combinational logic circuits resistant to non-invasive, side channel attacks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to evolve a cryptography circuit using a genetic algorithm. We implement evolved circuits in hardware on a Xilinx Kintex-7 FPGA. Results reveal that the evolutionary algorithm can successfully generate correct, and side-channel resistant combinational circuits with negligible propagation delay.

Having significant role in the storing, delivering and conversion of the energy, the permanent magnets are key elements in the actual technology. In many applications, the gap between ferrites and rare earths (RE) based sintered permanent magnets is nowadays filled by RE bonded magnets, used in more applications, below their magnetic performances. Therewith, the recent trends in the RE market concerning their scarcity, impose EU to consider alternative magnets (without RE) to fill such gap. The paper presents the chemical synthesis of the exchange coupled SrFe12O19/CoFe2O4 nanocomposites, based on nanoferrites. The appropriate annealing leads to the increasing of the main magnetic characteristics, saturation magnetization MS and intrinsic coercivity Hc, in the range of 49 - 53 emu/g, respectively 126.5 - 306 kA/m. The value reached for the ratio between remanent magnetization and saturation magnetization is higher than 0.5, fact that proved that between the two magnetic phases occurred exchange interaction.

On May 11, 2017, the President of the United States issued the Executive Order on Strengthening the Cybersecurity of Federal Networks and Critical Infrastructure. In part, the order states that it is the policy of the United States “to support the growth and sustainment of a workforce that is skilled in cybersecurity and related fields as the foundation for achieving our objectives in cyberspace.”  Consequently, the Secretary of Commerce and Secretary of Homeland Security are directed to:

1) “assess the scope and sufficiency of efforts to educate and train the American cybersecurity workforce of the future, including cybersecurity-related education curricula, training, and apprenticeship programs, from primary through higher education”; and,

2) “provide a report to the President with findings and recommendations regarding how to support the growth and sustainment of the Nation's cybersecurity workforce in both the public and private sectors.”  

With the active involvement of more than a dozen federal departments agencies, and with public input, the Commerce and Homeland Security Secretaries submitted a report to the President, Supporting the Growth and Sustainment of the Nation's Cybersecurity Workforce. A full list of federal contributors and details about private sector input is included in the report.

Key findings and recommendations from that report are available here.

Service composition is currently done by (hierarchical) orchestration and choreography. However, these approaches do not support explicit control flow and total compositionality, which are crucial for the scalability of service-oriented systems. In this paper, we propose exogenous connectors for service composition. These connectors support both explicit control flow and total compositionality in hierarchical service composition. To validate and evaluate our proposal, we present a case study based on the popular MusicCorp.

According to the 2016 Internet Security Threat Report by Symantec, there are around 431 million variants of malware known. This effort focuses on malware used for spying on user's activities, remotely controlling devices, and identity and credential theft within a Windows based operating system. As Windows operating systems create and maintain a log of all events that are encountered, various malware are tested on virtual machines to determine what events they trigger in the Windows logs. The observations are compiled into Operating System specific lookup tables that can then be used to find the tested malware on other computers with the same Operating System.

6L0WPAN is a communication protocol for Internet of Things. 6LoWPAN is IPv6 protocol modified for low power and lossy personal area networks. 6LoWPAN inherits threats from its predecessors IPv4 and IPv6. IP spoofing is a known attack prevalent in IPv4 and IPv6 networks but there are new vulnerabilities which creates new paths, leading to the attack. This study performs the experimental study to check the feasibility of performing IP spoofing attack on 6LoWPAN Network. Intruder misuses 6LoWPAN control messages which results into wrong IPv6-MAC binding in router. Attack is also simulated in cooja simulator. Simulated results are analyzed for finding cost to the attacker in terms of energy and memory consumption.

Today's mobile applications increasingly rely on communication with a remote backend service to perform many critical functions, including handling user-specific information. This implies that some form of authentication should be used to associate a user with their actions and data. Since schemes involving tedious account creation procedures can represent "friction" for users, many applications are moving toward alternative solutions, some of which, while increasing usability, sacrifice security. This paper focuses on a new trend of authentication schemes based on what we call "device-public" information, which consists of properties and data that any application running on a device can obtain. While these schemes are convenient to users, since they require little to no interaction, they are vulnerable by design, since all the needed information to authenticate a user is available to any app installed on the device. An attacker with a malicious app on a user's device could easily hijack the user's account, steal private information, send (and receive) messages on behalf of the user, or steal valuable virtual goods. To demonstrate how easily these vulnerabilities can be weaponized, we developed a generic exploitation technique that first mines all relevant data from a victim's phone, and then transfers and injects them into an attacker's phone to fool apps into granting access to the victim's account. Moreover, we developed a dynamic analysis detection system to automatically highlight problematic apps. Using our tool, we analyzed 1,000 popular applications and found that 41 of them, including the popular messaging apps WhatsApp and Viber, were vulnerable. Finally, our work proposes solutions to this issue, based on modifications to the Android API.

Trust networks have been widely used to mitigate the data sparsity and cold-start problems of collaborative filtering. Recently, some approaches have been proposed which exploit explicit signed trust relationships, i.e., trust and distrust relationships. These approaches ignore the fact that users despite trusting/distrusting each other in a trust network may have different preferences in real-life. Most of these approaches also handle the notion of the transitivity of distrust as well as trust. However, other existing work observed that trust is transitive while distrust is intransitive. Moreover, explicit signed trust relationships are fairly sparse and may not contribute to infer true preferences of users. In this paper, we propose to create implicit signed trust relationships and exploit them along with explicit signed trust relationship to solve sparsity problem of trust relationships. We also confirm the similarity (resp. dissimilarity) of implicit and explicit trust (resp. distrust) relationships by using the similarity score between users so that users' true preferences can be inferred. In addition to these strategies, we also propose a matrix factorization model that simultaneously exploits implicit and explicit signed trust relationships along with rating information and also handles transitivity of trust and intransitivity of distrust. Extensive experiments on Epinions dataset show that the proposed approach outperforms existing approaches in terms of accuracy.

Industrial control systems are cyber-physical systems that are used to operate critical infrastructures such as smart grids, traffic systems, industrial facilities, and water distribution networks. The digitalization of these systems increases their efficiency and decreases their cost of operation, but also makes them more vulnerable to cyber-attacks. In order to protect industrial control systems from cyber-attacks, the installation of multiple layers of security measures is necessary. In this paper, we study how to allocate a large number of security measures under a limited budget, such as to minimize the total risk of cyber-attacks. The security measure allocation problem formulated in this way is a combinatorial optimization problem subject to a knapsack (budget) constraint. The formulated problem is NP-hard, therefore we propose a method to exploit submodularity of the objective function so that polynomial time algorithms can be applied to obtain solutions with guaranteed approximation bounds. The problem formulation requires a preprocessing step in which attack scenarios are selected, and impacts and likelihoods of these scenarios are estimated. We discuss how the proposed method can be applied in practice.

Information technology graduates reach industry and innovate for the future after completing demanding degrees. Upper division college courses require long hours of work on class projects and exams. Some students have hopes of completing their degrees, but are deterred due to many different issues. Instructors can monitor students' progress based on their assignments, projects, and exams. Judging students' understanding and potential for success becomes more difficult when handling large classes. In this paper we utilize IBM Text Analytics Web Tooling on large amounts of unstructured text data collected from past assignments, exams, and discussions to help professors make assessments faster for large classes. In particular, we focus on an Information Security course offered at San Jose State University and use its classroom-generated data to determine if the extracted information provides strong insights for professors to help struggling students. We examine these issues through exploratory analysis.

Knowledge work such as summarizing related research in preparation for writing, typically requires the extraction of useful information from scientific literature. Nowadays the primary source of information for researchers comes from electronic documents available on the Web, accessible through general and academic search engines such as Google Scholar or IEEE Xplore. Yet, the vast amount of resources makes retrieving only the most relevant results a difficult task. As a consequence, researchers are often confronted with loads of low-quality or irrelevant content. To address this issue we introduce a novel system, which combines a rich, interactive Web-based user interface and different visualization approaches. This system enables researchers to identify key phrases matching current information needs and spot potentially relevant literature within hierarchical document collections. The chosen context was the collection and summarization of related work in preparation for scientific writing, thus the system supports features such as bibliography and citation management, document metadata extraction and a text editor. This paper introduces the design rationale and components of the PaperViz. Moreover, we report the insights gathered in a formative design study addressing usability.

Box queries on a dataset in a multidimensional data space are a type of query which specifies a set of allowed values for each dimension. Indexing a dataset in a multidimensional Non-ordered Discrete Data Space (NDDS) for supporting efficient box queries is becoming increasingly important in many application domains such as genome sequence analysis. The BoND-tree was recently introduced as an index structure specifically designed for box queries in an NDDS. Earlier work focused on developing strategies for building an effective BoND-tree to achieve high query performance. Developing efficient and effective techniques for deleting indexed vectors from the BoND-tree remains an open issue. In this paper, we present three deletion algorithms based on different underflow handling strategies in an NDDS. Our study shows that incorporating a new BoND-tree inspired heuristic can provide improved performance compared to the traditional underflow handling heuristics in NDDSs.

Meta-programs are programs that generate other programs, but in weakly type-safe systems, type-checking a meta-program only establishes its own type safety, and generated programs need additional type-checking after generation. Strong type safety of a meta-program implies type safety of any generated object program, a property with important engineering benefits. Current strongly type-safe systems suffer from expressivity limitations and cannot support many meta-programs found in practice, for example automatic generation of lenses. To overcome this, we move away from the idea of staged meta-programming. Instead, we use an off-the-shelf dependently-typed language as the meta-language and a relatively standard, intrinsically well-typed representation of the object language. We scale this approach to practical meta-programming, by choosing a high-level, explicitly typed intermediate representation as the object language, rather than a surface programming language. We implement our approach as a library for the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC) and evaluate it on several meta-programs, including a deriveLenses meta-program taken from a real-world Haskell lens library. Our evaluation demonstrates expressivity beyond the state of the art and applicability to real settings, at little cost in terms of code size.