Biblio

Differential privacy, which is due to its rigorous mathematical proof and strong privacy guarantee, has become a standard for the release of statistics with privacy protection. Recently, a lot of dynamic data publishing algorithms based on differential privacy have been proposed, but most of the algorithms use a native method to allocate the privacy budget. That is, the limited privacy budget is allocated to each time point uniformly, which may result in the privacy budget being unreasonably utilized and reducing the utility of data. In order to make full use of the limited privacy budget in the dynamic data publishing and improve the utility of data publishing, we propose a dynamic data publishing algorithm based on reinforcement learning in this paper. The algorithm consists of two parts: privacy budget allocation and data release. In the privacy budget allocation phase, we combine the idea of reinforcement learning and the changing characteristics of dynamic data, and establish a reinforcement learning model for the allocation of privacy budget. Finally, the algorithm finds a reasonable privacy budget allocation scheme to publish dynamic data. In the data release phase, we also propose a new dynamic data publishing strategy to publish data after the privacy budget is exhausted. Extensive experiments on real datasets demonstrate that our algorithm can allocate the privacy budget reasonably and improve the utility of dynamic data publishing.

Cloud computing can be described as a distributed design that is accessible to different forms of security intrusions. An encoding technique named homomorphic encoding is used for the encoding of entities which are utilized for the accession of data from cloud server. The main problems of homomorphic encoding scheme are key organization and key allocation. Because of these issues, effectiveness of homomorphic encryption approach decreases. The encoding procedure requires the generation of input, and for this, an approach named Particle swarm optimization is implemented in the presented research study. PSO algorithms are nature encouraged meta-heuristic algorithms. These algorithms are inhabitant reliant. In these algorithms, societal activities of birds and fishes are utilized as an encouragement for the development of a technical mechanism. Relying on the superiority of computations, the results are modified with the help of algorithms which are taken from arbitrarily allocated pattern of particles. With the movement of particles around the searching area, the spontaneity is performed by utilizing a pattern of arithmetical terminology. For the generation of permanent number key for encoding, optimized PSO approach is utilized. MATLAB program is used for the implementation of PSO relied homomorphic algorithm. The investigating outcomes depicts that this technique proves very beneficial on the requisites of resource exploitation and finishing time. PSO relied homomorphic algorithm is more applicable in terms of completion time and resource utilization in comparison with homomorphic algorithm.

The next generation military environment requires a delay-tolerant network for sharing data and resources using an interoperable computerized, Command, Control, Communications, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (C4ISR) infrastructure. In this paper, we propose a new distributed SDN (Software-Defined Networks) architecture for tactical environments based on distributed cloudlets. The objective is to reduce the end-to-end delay of tactical traffic flow, and improve management capabilities, allowing flexible control and network resource allocation. The proposed SDN architecture is implemented over three layers: decentralized cloudlets layer where each cloudlet has its SDRN (Software-Defined Radio Networking) controller, decentralized MEC (Mobile Edge Computing) layer with an SDN controller for each MEC, and a centralized private cloud as a trusted third-part authority controlled by a centralized SDN controller. The experimental validations are done via relevant and realistic tactical scenarios based on strategic traffics loads, i.e., Tactical SMS (Short Message Service), UVs (Unmanned Vehicle) patrol deployment and high bite rate ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance) video.

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is a recent concept where virtualization enables the shift from network functions (e.g., routers, switches, load-balancers, proxies) on specialized hardware appliances to software images running on all-purpose, high-volume servers. The resource allocation problem in the NFV environment has received considerable attention in the past years. However, little attention was paid to the security aspects of the problem in spite of the increasing number of vulnerabilities faced by cloud-based applications. Securing the services is an urgent need to completely benefit from the advantages offered by NFV. In this paper, we show how a network service request, composed of a set of service function chains (SFC) should be modified and enriched to take into consideration the security requirements of the supported service. We examine the well-known security best practices and propose a two-step algorithm that extends the initial SFC requests to a more complex chaining model that includes the security requirements of the service.

Peer-to-Peer networks are designed to rely on the resources of their own users. Therefore, resource management plays an important role in P2P protocols. Early P2P networks did not use proper mechanisms to manage fairness. However, after seeing difficulties and rise of freeloaders in networks like Gnutella, the importance of providing fairness for users have become apparent. In this paper, we propose an incentive-based security model which leads to a network infrastructure that lightens the work of Seeders and makes Leechers to contribute more. This method is able to prevent betrayals in Leecher-to-Leecher transactions and helps Seeders to be treated more fairly. This is what other incentive methods such as Bittorrent are incapable of doing. Additionally, by getting help from cryptography and combining it with our method, it is also possible to achieve secure channels, immune to spying, next to a fair network. This is the first protocol designed for P2P networks which has separated Leechers and Seeders without the need to a central server. The simulation results clearly show how our proposed approach can overcome free-riding issue. In addition, our findings revealed that our approach is able to provide an appropriate level of fairness for the users and can decrease the download time.

Serving heterogeneous traffic demand requires efficient resource utilization to deliver the promises of 5G wireless network towards enhanced mobile broadband, massive machine type communication and ultra-reliable low-latency communication. In this paper, an integrated user application-specific demand characteristics as well as network characteristics evaluation based online slice allocation model for 5G wireless network is proposed. Such characteristics include, available bandwidth, power, quality of service demand, service priority, security sensitivity, network load, predictive load etc. A degree of intra-slice resource sharing elasticity has been considered based on their availability. The availability has been assessed based on the current availability as well as forecasted availability. On the basis of application characteristics, an admission control strategy has been proposed. An interactive AMF (Access and Mobility Function)- RAN (Radio Access Network) information exchange has been assumed. A cost function has been derived to quantify resource allocation decision metric that is valid for both static and dynamic nature of user and network characteristics. A dynamic intra-slice decision boundary estimation model has been proposed. A set of analytical comparative results have been attained in comparison to the results available in the literature. The results suggest the proposed resource allocation framework performance is superior to the existing results in the context of network utility, mean delay and network grade of service, while providing similar throughput. The superiority reported is due to soft nature of the decision metric while reconfiguring slice resource block-size and boundaries.

This paper considers one of the methods of efficient allocation of limited resources in special-purpose devices (sensors) to monitor complex network unit cybersecurity.

We propose a reinforcement learning based online multi-tenant secret-key assignment algorithm for quantum key distribution networks, capable of reducing tenant-request blocking probability more than half compared to the benchmark heuristics.

Multi-Agent Task Allocation is a pre-requisite for many autonomous, real-world systems because of the need for intelligent task assignment amongst a team for maximum efficiency. Similarly, agent failure, task, failure, and a lack of state information are inherent challenges when operating in complex environments. Many existing solutions make simplifying assumptions regarding the modeling of these factors, e.g., Markovian state information. However, it is not clear that this is always the appropriate approach or that results from these approaches are necessarily representative of performance in the natural world. In this work, we demonstrate that there exists a class of problems for which non-Markovian state modeling is beneficial. Furthermore, we present and characterize a novel heuristic for task allocation that incorporates realistic state and uncertainty modeling in order to improve performance. Our quantitative analysis, when tested in a simulated search and rescue (SAR) mission, shows a decrease in performance of more than 57% when a representative method with Markovian assumptions is tested in a non-Markovian setting. Our novel heuristic has shown an improvement in performance of 3-15%, in the same non-Markovian setting, by modeling probabilistic failure and making fewer assumptions.

Least-recently-used (LRU) caching and its variants have conventionally been used as a fundamental and critical method to ensure fast and efficient data access in computer and communication systems. Emerging data-intensive applications over unreliable channels, e.g., mobile edge computing and wireless content delivery networks, have imposed new challenges in optimizing LRU caching systems in environments prone to failures. Most existing studies focus on reliable channels, e.g., on wired Web servers and within data centers, which have already yielded good insights with successful algorithms on how to reduce cache miss ratios. Surprisingly, we show that these widely held insights do not necessarily hold true for unreliable channels. We consider a single-hop multi-cache distributed system with data items being dispatched by random hashing. The objective is to achieve efficient cache organization and data placement. The former allocates the total memory space to each of the involved caches. The latter decides data routing strategies and data replication schemes. Analytically we characterize the unreliable LRU caches by explicitly deriving their asymptotic miss probabilities. Based on these results, we optimize the system design. Remarkably, these results sometimes are counterintuitive, differing from the ones obtained for reliable caches. We discover an interesting phenomenon: asymmetric cache organization is optimal even for symmetric channels. Specifically, even when channel unreliability probabilities are equal, allocating the cache spaces unequally can achieve a better performance. We also propose an explicit unequal allocation policy that outperforms the equal allocation. In addition, we prove that splitting the total cache space into separate LRU caches can achieve a lower asymptotic miss probability than resource pooling that organizes the total space in a single LRU cache. These results provide new and even counterintuitive insights that motivate novel designs for caching systems over unreliable channels. They can potentially be exploited to further improve the system performance in real practice.

More and more industrial devices are expected to connect to the internet seamlessly. IPv6-based industrial wireless network can solve the address resources limitation problem. It is a challenge about how to ensure the wireless node join security after introducing the IPv6. In this paper, we propose a multiple nodes join mechanism, which includes a timeslot allocation method and secure join process for the IPv6 over IEEE 802.15.4e network. The timeslot allocation method is designed in order to configure communication resources in the join process for the new nodes. The test platform is implemented to verify the feasibility of the mechanism. The result shows that the proposed mechanism can reduce the communication cost for multiple nodes join process and improve the efficiency.

How to protect users' private data during network data mining has become a hot issue in the fields of big data and network information security. Most current researches on differential privacy k-means clustering algorithms focus on optimizing the selection of initial centroids. However, the traditional privacy budget allocation has the problem that the random noise becomes too large as the number of iterations increases, which will reduce the performance of data clustering. To solve the problem, we improved the way of privacy budget allocation in differentially private clustering algorithm DPk-means, and proposed APDPk-means, a new differential privacy clustering algorithm based on arithmetic progression privacy budget allocation. APDPk-means decomposes the total privacy budget into a decreasing arithmetic progression, allocating the privacy budgets from large to small in the iterative process, so as to ensure the rapid convergence in early iteration. The experiment results show that compared with the other differentially private k-means algorithms, APDPk-means has better performance in availability and quality of the clustering result under the same level of privacy protection.

Several efforts are currently active in dealing with scenarios combining fog, cloud computing, out of which a significant proportion is devoted to control, and manage the resulting scenario. Certainly, although many challenging aspects must be considered towards the design of an efficient management solution, it is with no doubt that whatever the solution is, the quality delivered to the users when executing services and the security guarantees provided to the users are two key aspects to be considered in the whole design. Unfortunately, both requirements are often non-convergent, thus making a solution suitably addressing both aspects is a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a decoupled transversal security strategy, referred to as DCF, as a novel architectural oriented policy handling the QoS-Security trade-off, particularly designed to be applied to combined fog-to-cloud systems, and specifically highlighting its impact on the delivered QoS.

Social media have become increasingly popular for the sharing and spreading of user-generated content due to their easy access, fast dissemination, and low cost. Meanwhile, social media also enable the wide propagation of cyber frauds, which leverage fake information sources to reach an ulterior goal. The prevalence of untrustworthy information sources on social media can have significant negative societal effects. In a trustworthy social media system, trust calculation technology has become a key demand for the identification of information sources. Trust, as one of the most complex concepts in network communities, has multi-criteria properties. However, the existing work only focuses on single trust factor, and does not consider the complexity of trust relationships in social computing completely. In this paper, a multi-criteria trustworthiness calculation mechanism called Info-Trust is proposed for information sources, in which identity-based trust, behavior-based trust, relation-based trust, and feedback-based trust factors are incorporated to present an accuracy-enhanced full view of trustworthiness evaluation of information sources. More importantly, the weights of these factors are dynamically assigned by the ordered weighted averaging and weighted moving average (OWA-WMA) combination algorithm. This mechanism surpasses the limitations of existing approaches in which the weights are assigned subjectively. The experimental results based on the real-world datasets from Sina Weibo demonstrate that the proposed mechanism achieves greater accuracy and adaptability in trustworthiness identification of the network information.

Cloud Computing is an important term of modern technology. The usefulness of Cloud is increasing day by day and simultaneously more and more security problems are arising as well. Two of the major threats of Cloud are improper authentication and multi-tenancy. According to the specialists both pros and cons belong to multi-tenancy. There are security protocols available but it is difficult to claim these protocols are perfect and ensure complete protection. The purpose of this paper is to propose an integrated model to ensure better Cloud security for Authentication and multi-tenancy. Multi-tenancy means sharing of resources and virtualization among clients. Since multi-tenancy allows multiple users to access same resources simultaneously, there is high probability of accessing confidential data without proper privileges. Our model includes Kerberos authentication protocol to enhance authentication security. During our research on Kerberos we have found some flaws in terms of encryption method which have been mentioned in couple of IEEE conference papers. Pondering about this complication we have elected Elliptic Curve Cryptography. On the other hand, to attenuate arose risks due to multi-tenancy we are proposing a Resource Allocation Manager Unit, a Control Database and Resource Allocation Map. This part of the model will perpetuate resource allocation for the users.

Traditional security controls, such as firewalls, anti-virus and IDS, are ill-equipped to help IT security and response teams keep pace with the rapid evolution of the cyber threat landscape. Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) can help remediate this problem by exploiting non-traditional information sources, such as hacker forums and "dark-web" social platforms. Security and response teams can use the collected intelligence to identify emerging threats. Unfortunately, when manual analysis is used to extract CTI from non-traditional sources, it is a time consuming, error-prone and resource intensive process. We address these issues by using a hybrid Machine Learning model that automatically searches through hacker forum posts, identifies the posts that are most relevant to cyber security and then clusters the relevant posts into estimations of the topics that the hackers are discussing. The first (identification) stage uses Support Vector Machines and the second (clustering) stage uses Latent Dirichlet Allocation. We tested our model, using data from an actual hacker forum, to automatically extract information about various threats such as leaked credentials, malicious proxy servers, malware that evades AV detection, etc. The results demonstrate our method is an effective means for quickly extracting relevant and actionable intelligence that can be integrated with traditional security controls to increase their effectiveness.

The importance of peer-to-peer (P2P) network overlays produced enormous interest in the research community due to their robustness, scalability, and increase of data availability. P2P networks are overlays of logically connected hosts and other nodes including servers. P2P networks allow users to share their files without the need for any centralized servers. Since P2P networks are largely constructed of end-hosts, they are susceptible to abuse and malicious activity, such as sybil attacks. Impostors perform sybil attacks by assigning nodes multiple addresses, as opposed to a single address, with the goal of degrading network quality. Sybil nodes will spread malicious data and provide bogus responses to requests. To prevent sybil attacks from occurring, a novel defense mechanism is proposed. In the proposed scheme, the DHT key-space is divided and treated in a similar manner to radio frequency allocation incensing. An overlay of trusted nodes is used to detect and handle sybil nodes with the aid of source-destination pairs reporting on each other. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme detects sybil nodes in large sized networks with thousands of interactions.

As robotic capabilities improve and robots become more capable as team members, a better understanding of effective human-robot teaming is needed. In this paper, we investigate failures by robots in various team configurations in space EVA operations. This paper describes the methodology of extending and the application of Work Models that Compute (WMC), a computational simulation framework, to model robot failures, interruptions, and the resolutions they require. Using these models, we investigate how different team configurations respond to a robot's failure to correctly complete the task and overall mission. We also identify key factors that impact the teamwork metrics for team designers to keep in mind while assembling teams and assigning taskwork to the agents. We highlight different metrics that these failures impact on team performance through varying components of teaming and interaction that occur. Finally, we discuss the future implications of this work and the future work to be done to investigate function allocation in human-robot teams.

To improve customer experience, datacenter operators offer support for simplifying application and resource management. For example, running workloads of workflows on behalf of customers is desirable, but requires increasingly more sophisticated autoscaling policies, that is, policies that dynamically provision resources for the customer. Although selecting and tuning autoscaling policies is a challenging task for datacenter operators, so far relatively few studies investigate the performance of autoscaling for workloads of workflows. Complementing previous knowledge, in this work we propose the first comprehensive performance study in the field. Using trace-based simulation, we compare state-of-the-art autoscaling policies across multiple application domains, workload arrival patterns (e.g., burstiness), and system utilization levels. We further investigate the interplay between autoscaling and regular allocation policies, and the complexity cost of autoscaling. Our quantitative study focuses not only on traditional performance metrics and on state-of-the-art elasticity metrics, but also on time-and memory-related autoscaling-complexity metrics. Our main results give strong and quantitative evidence about previously unreported operational behavior, for example, that autoscaling policies perform differently across application domains and allocation and provisioning policies should be co-designed.

We present a formal method for computing the best security provisioning for Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios characterized by a high degree of mobility. The security infrastructure is intended as a security resource allocation plan, computed as the solution of an optimization problem that minimizes the risk of having IoT devices not monitored by any resource. We employ the shortfall as a risk measure, a concept mostly used in the economics, and adapt it to our scenario. We show how to compute and evaluate an allocation plan, and how such security solutions address the continuous topology changes that affect an IoT environment.

In this paper, we address the physical layer security problem for Wireless Sensor Networks in the presence of passive eavesdroppers, i.e., the eavesdroppers' channels are unknown to the transmitter. We use a multi-antenna relay to guarantee physical layer security. Different from the existing work, we consider that the relay works in full duplex mode and transmits artificial noise (AN) in both stages of the decode-and-forward (DF) cooperative strategy. We proposed two optimal power allocation strategies for power constrained and power unconstrained systems respectively. For power constrained system, our aim is to minimize the secrecy rate outage probability. And for power unconstrained systems, we obtain the optimal power allocation to minimize the total power under the quality of service and secrecy constraints. We also consider the secrecy outage probability for different positions of eavesdropper. Simulation results are presented to show the performance of the proposed strategies.

With the repaid growth of social tagging users, it becomes very important for social tagging systems how the required resources are recommended to users rapidly and accurately. Firstly, the architecture of an agent-based intelligent social tagging system is constructed using agent technology. Secondly, the design and implementation of user interest mining, personalized recommendation and common preference group recommendation are presented. Finally, a self-adaptive recommendation strategy for social tagging and its implementation are proposed based on the analysis to the shortcoming of the personalized recommendation strategy and the common preference group recommendation strategy. The self-adaptive recommendation strategy achieves equilibrium selection between efficiency and accuracy, so that it solves the contradiction between efficiency and accuracy in the personalized recommendation model and the common preference recommendation model.

Dynamic spectrum sharing techniques applied in the UHF TV band have been developed to allow secondary WiFi transmission in areas with active TV users. This technique of dynamically controlling the exclusion zone enables vastly increasing secondary spectrum re-use, compared to the "TV white space" model where TV transmitters determine the exclusion zone and only "idle" channels can be re-purposed. However, in current such dynamic spectrum sharing systems, the sensitive operation parameters of both primary TV users (PUs) and secondary users (SUs) need to be shared with the spectrum database controller (SDC) for the purpose of realizing efficient spectrum allocation. Since such SDC server is not necessarily operated by a trusted third party, those current systems might cause essential threatens to the privacy requirement from both PUs and SUs. To address this privacy issue, this paper proposes a privacy-preserving spectrum sharing system between PUs and SUs, which realizes the spectrum allocation decision process using efficient multi-party computation (MPC) technique. In this design, the SDC only performs secure computation over encrypted input from PUs and SUs such that none of the PU or SU operation parameters will be revealed to SDC. The evaluation of its performance illustrates that our proposed system based on efficient MPC techniques can perform dynamic spectrum allocation process between PUs and SUs efficiently while preserving users' privacy.

In this paper, we introduce a secure energy trading auction approach to schedule the power plant limited resources during peak hours time slots. In the proposed auction model, the power plant serving a power grid shares with the smart meters its available amount of resources that is expected during the next future peak time slot; smart meters expecting a demand for additional power participate in the power auction by submitting bids of their offered price for their requested amount of power. In order to secure the power auction and protect smart meters' privacy, homomorphic encryption through Paillier cryptosystem is used to secure the bidding values and ensure avoiding possible insincere behaviors of smart meters or the grid operator (i.e. the auctioneer) to manipulate the auction for their own benefits. In addition, we use a payment rule that maximizes the power plant's revenue. We propose an efficient power scheduling mechanism to distribute the operator's limited resources among smart meters participating in the power auction. Finally, we present simulation results for the performance of our secure power scheduling auction mechanism.

The ability to discover patterns of interest in criminal networks can support and ease the investigation tasks by security and law enforcement agencies. By considering criminal networks as a special case of social networks, we can properly reuse most of the state-of-the-art techniques to discover patterns of interests, i.e., hidden and potential links. Nevertheless, in time-sensible scenarios, like the one involving criminal actions, the ability to discover patterns in a (near) real-time manner can be of primary importance.In this paper, we investigate the identification of patterns for link detection and prediction on an evolving criminal network. To extract valuable information as soon as data is generated, we exploit a stream processing approach. To this end, we also propose three new similarity social network metrics, specifically tailored for criminal link detection and prediction. Then, we develop a flexible data stream processing application relying on the Apache Flink framework; this solution allows us to deploy and evaluate the newly proposed metrics as well as the ones existing in literature. The experimental results show that the new metrics we propose can reach up to 83% accuracy in detection and 82% accuracy in prediction, resulting competitive with the state of the art metrics.