Preservation of privacy of users’ personal data has always been a critical issue to deal with. Th... more Preservation of privacy of users’ personal data has always been a critical issue to deal with. This issue in the Internet of Things (IoT), which facilitates millions of applications, has become even more challenging. Currently, several approaches and methods are available to safeguard privacy but each of them suffers from one or more anomalies. In particular, Trusted Third-Party approach relies on the trust of a third-party server, Cooperation needs the trust of other peers, Obfuscation is known to return inaccurate results, and Dummy generates too much overhead. Moreover, these and most of the other well-known approaches deal only with specific types of applications linked to the location-based services. In this paper, we present two new methods, namely: Blind Third Party (BTP) and Blind Peers ( B L P ), and combine them to form a new one to be known as the Blind Approach ( B L A ). With the help of simulation results we shall demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of B L A ...
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the private-data pertaining to the interactio... more Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the private-data pertaining to the interaction of users with social media applications that can be recovered from second-hand Android devices. Design/methodology/approach This study uses a black-box testing-principles based methodology to develop use-cases that simulate real-world case-scenarios of the activities performed by the users on the social media application. The authors executed these use-cases in a controlled experiment and examined the Android smartphone to recover the private-data pertaining to these use-cases. Findings The results suggest that the social media data recovered from Android devices can reveal a complete timeline of activities performed by the user, identify all the videos watched, uploaded, shared and deleted by the user, disclose the username and user-id of the user, unveil the email addresses used by the user to download the application and share the videos with other users and expose the social networ...
This paper proposes and presents the details of an agent-based architecture that has the capacity... more This paper proposes and presents the details of an agent-based architecture that has the capacity to model, simulate the movement of, and guide crowds with panic behavior in highly-dense areas in the events of manmade and natural threats. The most populated human gathering in the world, the Muslim pilgrimage event (also known as Hajj) which attracts more than two million people in six days is chosen to guide the identification of the requirements and main concepts of the agent simulation. The inferred requirements are used to guide the selection of an appropriate simulation tool following an extensive survey of potential simulation tools. The architecture uses software agents to represent groups of people along with their real time characteristics such as density, movements and panic levels, collected from various data sources. Support vector machine is combined with the fuzzy logic theory to predict pilgrims' behaviors and movements in case of panic situations. Initial simulati...
In the last few years, the wireless body area network (WBAN) has emerged as an appealing and viab... more In the last few years, the wireless body area network (WBAN) has emerged as an appealing and viable option in the e-health application domain. WBAN technology is primarily used to offer continuous screening of health data to patients, independent of their location, time, or activity. A WBAN, on the other hand, is vulnerable to different cyberattacks due to the openness of the wireless environment and the privacy of people’s physiological data. A highly efficient and secure cryptographic scheme that can fulfill the needs of resource-constrained WBAN sensors and devices is considered necessary. First, we take a look at the most up-to-date security solutions for WBANs. Then, we go through some of the underlying concerns and challenges with WBAN security. We propose a new framework called secure channel free certificateless signcryption scheme for WBANs based on a hyperelliptic curve that can meet security requirements such as confidentiality, anonymity, integrity, resistance against un...
Conventional paper currency and modern electronic currency are two important modes of transaction... more Conventional paper currency and modern electronic currency are two important modes of transactions. In several parts of the world, conventional methodology has clear precedence over its electronic counterpart. However, the identification of forged currency paper notes is now becoming an increasingly crucial problem because of the new and improved tactics employed by counterfeiters. In this paper, a machine assisted system—dubbed DeepMoney—is proposed which has been developed to discriminate fake notes from genuine ones. For this purpose, state-of-the-art models of machine learning called Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are employed. GANs use unsupervised learning to train a model that can then be used to perform supervised predictions. This flexibility provides the best of both worlds by allowing unlabelled data to be trained on whilst still making concrete predictions. This technique was applied to Pakistani banknotes. State-of-the-art image processing and feature recognitio...
Businesses need trust to confidently perform trade among each other. Centralized business models ... more Businesses need trust to confidently perform trade among each other. Centralized business models are the only mature solutions available to perform trades over the Internet. However, they have many problems which includes but are not limited to the fact that these create bottleneck on the server as well as requires trusted third parties. Recently, decentralized solutions have gained significant popularity and acceptance for future businesses. The wide acceptance of such systems is indeed due to the trust management among various untrusted business stakeholders. Many solutions have been proposed in this regard to provide decentralized infrastructure for various business models. A standard solution that is acceptable to the industry is still in demand. Hyperledger umbrella Blockchain projects, that are supported by IBM and many other industry big players are gaining popularity due to its efficient and pluggable design. In this study, the author present the idea of utilizing Blockchain to design a Value-Added Tax (VAT) system for Saudi Arabia's newly introduced tax system. The reason to select this business model for VAT is twofold. First, it provides an untampered distributed ledger, which cannot be deceived by any party. Each transaction in the system cannot go unnoticed by the smart contract. Secondly , it provides a transparent record, and updates all involved parties regarding each activity performed by stakeholders. The newly proposed system will provide a transparent database of VAT transactions according to our smart contract design and at each stage of supply chain, tax will be deducted and stored on peer-to-peer network via consensus process. The author believes that the proposed solution will have significant impact on VAT collection in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
SDL is used increasingly for the development of Real time embedded systems. Nevertheless, the ass... more SDL is used increasingly for the development of Real time embedded systems. Nevertheless, the associated code generators do not integrate the management of temporal constraints. In this paper, we propose a real-time semantics to SDL for the modeling of real-time systems in order to prepare the code generation.
Preservation of privacy of users’ personal data has always been a critical issue to deal with. Th... more Preservation of privacy of users’ personal data has always been a critical issue to deal with. This issue in the Internet of Things (IoT), which facilitates millions of applications, has become even more challenging. Currently, several approaches and methods are available to safeguard privacy but each of them suffers from one or more anomalies. In particular, Trusted Third-Party approach relies on the trust of a third-party server, Cooperation needs the trust of other peers, Obfuscation is known to return inaccurate results, and Dummy generates too much overhead. Moreover, these and most of the other well-known approaches deal only with specific types of applications linked to the location-based services. In this paper, we present two new methods, namely: Blind Third Party (BTP) and Blind Peers ( B L P ), and combine them to form a new one to be known as the Blind Approach ( B L A ). With the help of simulation results we shall demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of B L A ...
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the private-data pertaining to the interactio... more Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the private-data pertaining to the interaction of users with social media applications that can be recovered from second-hand Android devices. Design/methodology/approach This study uses a black-box testing-principles based methodology to develop use-cases that simulate real-world case-scenarios of the activities performed by the users on the social media application. The authors executed these use-cases in a controlled experiment and examined the Android smartphone to recover the private-data pertaining to these use-cases. Findings The results suggest that the social media data recovered from Android devices can reveal a complete timeline of activities performed by the user, identify all the videos watched, uploaded, shared and deleted by the user, disclose the username and user-id of the user, unveil the email addresses used by the user to download the application and share the videos with other users and expose the social networ...
This paper proposes and presents the details of an agent-based architecture that has the capacity... more This paper proposes and presents the details of an agent-based architecture that has the capacity to model, simulate the movement of, and guide crowds with panic behavior in highly-dense areas in the events of manmade and natural threats. The most populated human gathering in the world, the Muslim pilgrimage event (also known as Hajj) which attracts more than two million people in six days is chosen to guide the identification of the requirements and main concepts of the agent simulation. The inferred requirements are used to guide the selection of an appropriate simulation tool following an extensive survey of potential simulation tools. The architecture uses software agents to represent groups of people along with their real time characteristics such as density, movements and panic levels, collected from various data sources. Support vector machine is combined with the fuzzy logic theory to predict pilgrims' behaviors and movements in case of panic situations. Initial simulati...
In the last few years, the wireless body area network (WBAN) has emerged as an appealing and viab... more In the last few years, the wireless body area network (WBAN) has emerged as an appealing and viable option in the e-health application domain. WBAN technology is primarily used to offer continuous screening of health data to patients, independent of their location, time, or activity. A WBAN, on the other hand, is vulnerable to different cyberattacks due to the openness of the wireless environment and the privacy of people’s physiological data. A highly efficient and secure cryptographic scheme that can fulfill the needs of resource-constrained WBAN sensors and devices is considered necessary. First, we take a look at the most up-to-date security solutions for WBANs. Then, we go through some of the underlying concerns and challenges with WBAN security. We propose a new framework called secure channel free certificateless signcryption scheme for WBANs based on a hyperelliptic curve that can meet security requirements such as confidentiality, anonymity, integrity, resistance against un...
Conventional paper currency and modern electronic currency are two important modes of transaction... more Conventional paper currency and modern electronic currency are two important modes of transactions. In several parts of the world, conventional methodology has clear precedence over its electronic counterpart. However, the identification of forged currency paper notes is now becoming an increasingly crucial problem because of the new and improved tactics employed by counterfeiters. In this paper, a machine assisted system—dubbed DeepMoney—is proposed which has been developed to discriminate fake notes from genuine ones. For this purpose, state-of-the-art models of machine learning called Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are employed. GANs use unsupervised learning to train a model that can then be used to perform supervised predictions. This flexibility provides the best of both worlds by allowing unlabelled data to be trained on whilst still making concrete predictions. This technique was applied to Pakistani banknotes. State-of-the-art image processing and feature recognitio...
Businesses need trust to confidently perform trade among each other. Centralized business models ... more Businesses need trust to confidently perform trade among each other. Centralized business models are the only mature solutions available to perform trades over the Internet. However, they have many problems which includes but are not limited to the fact that these create bottleneck on the server as well as requires trusted third parties. Recently, decentralized solutions have gained significant popularity and acceptance for future businesses. The wide acceptance of such systems is indeed due to the trust management among various untrusted business stakeholders. Many solutions have been proposed in this regard to provide decentralized infrastructure for various business models. A standard solution that is acceptable to the industry is still in demand. Hyperledger umbrella Blockchain projects, that are supported by IBM and many other industry big players are gaining popularity due to its efficient and pluggable design. In this study, the author present the idea of utilizing Blockchain to design a Value-Added Tax (VAT) system for Saudi Arabia's newly introduced tax system. The reason to select this business model for VAT is twofold. First, it provides an untampered distributed ledger, which cannot be deceived by any party. Each transaction in the system cannot go unnoticed by the smart contract. Secondly , it provides a transparent record, and updates all involved parties regarding each activity performed by stakeholders. The newly proposed system will provide a transparent database of VAT transactions according to our smart contract design and at each stage of supply chain, tax will be deducted and stored on peer-to-peer network via consensus process. The author believes that the proposed solution will have significant impact on VAT collection in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
SDL is used increasingly for the development of Real time embedded systems. Nevertheless, the ass... more SDL is used increasingly for the development of Real time embedded systems. Nevertheless, the associated code generators do not integrate the management of temporal constraints. In this paper, we propose a real-time semantics to SDL for the modeling of real-time systems in order to prepare the code generation.
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