Biblio

This paper discusses research-based findings of applying metaheuristic optimization techniques and nature-inspired algorithms to detect and mitigate phishing attacks. The focus will be on the Firefly nature-inspired metaheuristic algorithm optimized with Random Forest and Support Vector Machine (SVM) classification. Existing research recommends the development and use of nature-inspired detection techniques to solve complex real-world problems. Existing research using nature-inspired heuristics appears to be promising in solving NP-hard problems such as the traveling salesperson problem. In the same classification of NP-hard, is that of cyber security existing research indicates that the security threats are complex, and that providing security is an NP-hard problem. This study is expanding the existing research with a hybrid optimization of nature-inspired metaheuristic with existing classifiers (random forest and SVM) for an improvement in results to include increased true positives and decreased false positives. The proposed study will present the importance of nature and natural processes in developing algorithms and systems with high precision and accuracy.

A new method for judging degree sequence is shown by means of perfect ice-flower systems made by operators - stars (particular complete bipartite graphs), and moreover this method can be used to build up degree sequences and perfect ice-flower systems. Graphic lattice, graph-graphic lattice, caterpillar-graphic lattice and topological coding lattice are defined. We establish some connections between traditional lattices and graphic lattices trying to provide new techniques for Lattice-based cryptosystem and post-quantum cryptography, and trying to enrich the theoretical knowledge of topological coding.

Cloud security includes the strategies which works together to guard data and infrastructure with a set of policies, procedures, controls and technologies. These security events are arranged to protect cloud data, support supervisory obedience and protect customers' privacy as well as setting endorsement rules for individual users and devices. The partition-based handling and encryption mechanism which provide fine-grained admittance control and protected data sharing to the data users in cloud computing. Graph partition problems fall under the category of NP-hard problems. Resolutions to these problems are generally imitative using heuristics and approximation algorithms. Partition problems strategy is used in bi-criteria approximation or resource augmentation approaches with a common extension of hyper graphs, which can address the storage hierarchy.

Research on post-quantum cryptography (PQC) to improve the security against quantum computers has been actively conducted. In 2020, NIST announced the final PQC candidates whose design rationales rely on NP-hard or NP-complete problems. It is believed that cryptography based on NP-hard problem might be secure against attacks using quantum computers. N. Koblitz introduced the concept of public-key cryptography using a 3-regular graph with a perfect dominating set in the 1990s. The proposed cryptosystem is based on NP-complete problem to find a perfect dominating set in the given graph. Later, S. Yoon proposed a variant scheme using a perfect minus dominating function. However, their works have not received much attention since these schemes produce huge ciphertexts and are hard to implement efficiently. Also, the security parameters such as key size and plaintext-ciphertext size have not been proposed yet. We conduct security and performance analysis of their schemes and discuss the practical range of security parameters. As an application, the scheme with one-wayness property can be used as an encoding method in the white-box cryptography (WBC).

We consider a two-player zero-sum network routing game in which a router wants to maximize the amount of legitimate traffic that flows from a given source node to a destination node and an attacker wants to block as much legitimate traffic as possible by flooding the network with malicious traffic. We address scenarios with asymmetric information, in which the router must reveal its policy before the attacker decides how to distribute the malicious traffic among the network links, which is naturally modeled by the notion of Stackelberg equilibria. The paper focuses on parallel networks, and includes three main contributions: we show that computing the optimal attack policy against a given routing policy is an NP-hard problem; we establish conditions under which the Stackelberg equilibria lead to no regret; and we provide a metric that can be used to quantify how uncertainty about the attacker's capabilities limits the router's performance.

{With the widespread use of cloud computing, energy consumption of cloud data centers is increasing which mainly comes from IT equipment and cooling equipment. This paper argues that once the number of virtual machines on the physical machines reaches a certain level, resource competition occurs, resulting in a performance loss of the virtual machines. Unlike most papers, we do not impose placement constraints on virtual machines by giving a CPU cap to achieve the purpose of energy savings in cloud data centers. Instead, we use the measure of performance loss to weigh. We propose a reinforcement learning-based virtual machine placement strategy(RLVMP) for energy savings in cloud data centers. The strategy considers the weight of virtual machine performance loss and energy consumption, which is finally solved with the greedy strategy. Simulation experiments show that our strategy has a certain improvement in energy savings compared with the other algorithms.

The unequal area facility layout problem (UA-FLP) is to place some objects in a specified space according to certain requirements, which is a NP-hard problem in mathematics because of the complexity of its solution, the combination explosion and the complexity of engineering system. Particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is a kind of swarm intelligence algorithm by simulating the predatory behavior of birds. Aiming at the minimization of material handling cost and the maximization of workshop area utilization, the optimization mathematical model of UA-FLPP is established, and it is solved by the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm which simulates the design of birds' predation behavior. The improved PSO algorithm is constructed by using nonlinear inertia weight, dynamic inertia weight and other methods to solve static unequal area facility layout problem. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by simulation experiments.

The threats posed by botnets in the cyber-space continues to grow each day and it has become very hard to detect or infiltrate bots given that the botnet developers each day keep changing the propagation and attack techniques. Currently, most of these attacks have been centered on stealing computing energy, theft of personal information and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS attacks). In this paper, the authors propose a novel technique that uses the Non-Deterministic Polynomial-Time Hardness (NP-Hard Problem) based on the Traveling Salesperson Person (TSP) that depicts that a given bot, bj, is able to visit each host on a network environment, NE, and then it returns to the botmaster in form of instruction(command) through optimal minimization of the hosts that are or may be attacked. Given that bj represents a piece of malicious code and based on TSP-NP Hard Problem which forms part of combinatorial optimization, the authors present an effective approach for the detection of the botnet. It is worth noting that the concentration of this study is basically on the centralized botnet architecture. This holistic approach shows that botnet detection accuracy can be increased with a degree of certainty and potentially decrease the chances of false positives. Nevertheless, a discussion on the possible applicability and implementation has also been given in this paper.

This paper considers the physical layer security for the cluster-based cooperative wireless sensor networks (WSNs), where each node is equipped with a single antenna and sensor nodes cooperate at each cluster of the network to form a virtual multi-input multi-output (MIMO) communication architecture. We propose a joint cooperative beamforming and jamming scheme to enhance the security of the WSNs where a part of sensor nodes in Alice's cluster are deployed to transmit beamforming signals to Bob while a part of sensor nodes in Bob's cluster are utilized to jam Eve with artificial noise. The optimization of beamforming and jamming vectors to minimize total energy consumption satisfying the quality-of-service (QoS) constraints is a NP-hard problem. Fortunately, through reformulation, the problem is proved to be a quadratically constrained quadratic problem (QCQP) which can be solved by solving constraint integer programs (SCIP) algorithm. Finally, we give the simulation results of our proposed scheme.