Biblio

Nowadays, the principle of image mining plays a vital role in various areas of our life, where numerous frameworks based on image mining are proposed for object recognition, object tracking, sensing images and medical image diagnosis. Nevertheless, the research in the image authentication based on image mining is still confined. Therefore, this paper comes to present an efficient engagement between the frequent pattern mining and digital watermarking to contribute significantly in the authentication of images transmitted via public networks. The proposed framework exploits some robust features of image to extract the frequent patterns in the image data. The maximal relevant patterns are used to discriminate between the textured and smooth blocks within the image, where the texture blocks are more appropriate to embed the secret data than smooth blocks. The experiment's result proves the efficiency of the proposed framework in terms of stabilization and robustness against different kind of attacks. The results are interesting and remarkable to preserve the image authentication.

Hardware support for isolated execution (such as Intel SGX) enables development of applications that keep their code and data confidential even while running in a hostile or compromised host. However, automatically verifying that such applications satisfy confidentiality remains challenging. We present a methodology for designing such applications in a way that enables certifying their confidentiality. Our methodology consists of forcing the application to communicate with the external world through a narrow interface, compiling it with runtime checks that aid verification, and linking it with a small runtime that implements the narrow interface. The runtime includes services such as secure communication channels and memory management. We formalize this restriction on the application as Information Release Confinement (IRC), and we show that it allows us to decompose the task of proving confidentiality into (a) one-time, human-assisted functional verification of the runtime to ensure that it does not leak secrets, (b) automatic verification of the application's machine code to ensure that it satisfies IRC and does not directly read or corrupt the runtime's internal state. We present /CONFIDENTIAL: a verifier for IRC that is modular, automatic, and keeps our compiler out of the trusted computing base. Our evaluation suggests that the methodology scales to real-world applications.

User engagement is recognized as an important component of the user experience, but relatively little is known about the effect of engagement on the learning outcomes of such interactions. This experimental user study examines the relationship between user engagement (UE) and comprehension in varied academic reading environments. Forty-one university students interacted with one of two sets of texts presented in 4 conditions in the context of preparing for a class assignment. Employing the User Engagement Scale (UES), we found evidence of a relationship between students' comprehension of the texts and their degree of engagement with them. However, this association was confined to one of the UES subscales and was not consistent across levels of engagement. An examination of additional variables found little evidence that system and content characteristics influenced engagement; however, we noted that all students' reported increased knowledge, but topical interest for non-engaged students declined. Results contribute to existing literature by adding further evidence that the relationship between engagement and comprehension is complex and mediated.

With the increasing capture of photos and their proliferation on social media, there is a pressing need for a more intuitive and versatile image search and exploration system. Image search systems have long been confined to the binds of the 2D legacy screens and the keyword text-box. With the recent advances in Virtual Reality (VR) technology, a move towards an immersive VR environment will redefine the image navigation experience. To this end, we propose a VR platform that gathers images from various sources, and addresses the 5 Ws of image search - what, where, when, who and why. We achieve this by providing the user with two modes of interactive exploration - (i) A mode that allows for a graph based navigation of an image dataset, using a steering wheel visualization, along multiple dimensions of time, location, visual concept, people, etc. and (ii) Another mode that provides an intuitive exploration of the image dataset using a logical hierarchy of visual concepts. Our contributions include creating a VR image exploration experience that is intuitive and allows image navigation along multiple dimensions.

We show for the first time that commodity devices can be used to generate wireless data transmissions that are confined to the human body. Specifically, we show that commodity input devices such as fingerprint sensors and touchpads can be used to transmit information to only wireless receivers that are in contact with the body. We characterize the propagation of the resulting transmissions across the whole body and run experiments with ten subjects to demonstrate that our approach generalizes across different body types and postures. We also evaluate our communication system in the presence of interference from other wearable devices such as smartwatches and nearby metallic surfaces. Finally, by modulating the operations of these input devices, we demonstrate bit rates of up to 50 bits per second over the human body.

System administrators have unlimited access to system resources. As the Snowden case shows, these permissions can be exploited to steal valuable personal, classified, or commercial data. In this work we propose a strategy that increases the organizational information security by constraining IT personnel's view of the system and monitoring their actions. To this end, we introduce the abstraction of perforated containers – while regular Linux containers are too restrictive to be used by system administrators, by "punching holes" in them, we strike a balance between information security and required administrative needs. Our system predicts which system resources should be accessible for handling each IT issue, creates a perforated container with the corresponding isolation, and deploys it in the corresponding machines as needed for fixing the problem. Under this approach, the system administrator retains his superuser privileges, while he can only operate within the container limits. We further provide means for the administrator to bypass the isolation, and perform operations beyond her boundaries. However, such operations are monitored and logged for later analysis and anomaly detection. We provide a proof-of-concept implementation of our strategy, along with a case study on the IT database of IBM Research in Israel.

This paper introduces quarantine, a new security primitive for an operating system to use in order to protect information and isolate malicious behavior. Quarantine's core feature is the ability to fork a protection domain on-the-fly to isolate a specific principal's execution of untrusted code without risk of a compromise spreading. Forking enables the OS to ensure service continuity by permitting even high-risk operations to proceed, albeit subject to greater scrutiny and constraints. Quarantine even partitions executing threads that share resources into isolated protection domains. We discuss the design and implementation of quarantine within the LockDown OS, a security-focused evolution of the Composite component-based microkernel OS. Initial performance results for quarantine show that about 98% of the overhead comes from the cost of copying memory to the new protection domain.

Recent literature on iOS security has focused on the malicious potential of third-party applications, demonstrating how developers can bypass application vetting and code-level protections. In addition to these protections, iOS uses a generic sandbox profile called "container" to confine malicious or exploited third-party applications. In this paper, we present the first systematic analysis of the iOS container sandbox profile. We propose the SandScout framework to extract, decompile, formally model, and analyze iOS sandbox profiles as logic-based programs. We use our Prolog-based queries to evaluate file-based security properties of the container sandbox profile for iOS 9.0.2 and discover seven classes of exploitable vulnerabilities. These attacks affect non-jailbroken devices running later versions of iOS. We are working with Apple to resolve these attacks, and we expect that SandScout will play a significant role in the development of sandbox profiles for future versions of iOS.