New security and control protocol for VoIP based on steganography and digital watermarking

In this paper new security and control protocol for Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service is presented. It is the alternative for the IETF's (Internet Engineering Task Force) RTCP (Real-Time Control Protocol) for real-time application's traffic. Additionally this solution offers authentication and integrity, it is capable of exchanging and verifying QoS and security parameters. It is based on digital watermarking and steganography that is why it does not consume additional bandwidth and the data transmitted is inseparably bound to the voice content.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures, 1 tabl

Integrating the common variability language with multilanguage annotations for web engineering

Web applications development involves managing a high diversity of files and resources like code, pages or style sheets, implemented in different languages. To deal with the automatic generation of custom-made configurations of web applications, industry usually adopts annotation-based approaches even though the majority of studies encourage the use of composition-based approaches to implement Software Product Lines. Recent work tries to combine both approaches to get the complementary benefits. However, technological companies are reticent to adopt new development paradigms such as feature-oriented programming or aspect-oriented programming. Moreover, it is extremely difficult, or even impossible, to apply these programming models to web applications, mainly because of their multilingual nature, since their development involves multiple types of source code (Java, Groovy, JavaScript), templates (HTML, Markdown, XML), style sheet files (CSS and its variants, such as SCSS), and other files (JSON, YML, shell scripts). We propose to use the Common Variability Language as a composition-based approach and integrate annotations to manage fine grained variability of a Software Product Line for web applications. In this paper, we (i) show that existing composition and annotation-based approaches, including some well-known combinations, are not appropriate to model and implement the variability of web applications; and (ii) present a combined approach that effectively integrates annotations into a composition-based approach for web applications. We implement our approach and show its applicability with an industrial real-world system.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Adaptive Educational Hypermedia based on Multiple Student Characteristics

The learning process in Adaptive Educational Hypermedia (AEH) environments is complex and may be influenced by aspects of the student, including prior knowledge, learning styles, experience and preferences. Current AEH environments, however, are limited to processing only a small number of student characteristics. This paper discusses the development of an AEH system which includes a student model that can simultaneously take into account multiple student characteristics. The student model will be developed to use stereotypes, overlays and perturbation techniques. Keywords: adaptive educational hypermedia, multiple characteristics, student model

THE ART OF WAR: PATTERNS AND MECHANISMS UNDERLYING PREDATOR-INDUCED PLASTICITY OF AMPHIBIANS

Organisms often employ phenotypic plasticity as a strategy to cope with variable environments. This is particularly true of predation threats, wherein prey induce defenses to reduce detection or capture by predators. In order to produce appropriate defenses, prey must be able to discern useful information from environmental cues. Despite the pervasive production of inducible defenses, we understand very little of how much useful information is conveyed to organisms in cues, or how the subsequent plastic responses vary within groups of organisms. To address the need for comparative studies of phenotypic plasticity, we sought to examine morphological and behavioral defenses of five species of Ambystoma salamander larvae in response to larval dragonfly (Anax junius) chemical cues in a common garden environment. Dragonfly cues induced relatively few morphological changes across species. Likewise, salamanders did not vary in their refuge use during the experiment, though several species reduced their activity in the presence of predators early in development. Our results suggest that behavioral and morphological defenses in Ambystoma are highly variable among species and the genus appears to be less plastic than tadpoles and other salamander species. To understand what types of information prey are capable of responding to in their environment, we raised grey treefrog tadpoles (Hyla verisciolor) in the presence of cues isolated from different stages of an attack sequence by larval dragonflies (A. junius) or larval dragonflies THE ART OF WAR: PATTERNS AND MECHANISMS UNDERLYING PREDATOR-INDUCED PLASTICITY OF AMPHIBIANS Heather Michelle Shaffery, M.S. University of Pittsburgh, 2013 iv consuming different combinations of grey treefrog tadpoles and snails (Helisoma trivolvis) across different temporal sequences. When exposed to a predator consuming grey treefrogs, tadpoles reduced their activity, increased their hiding behavior, and induced deeper tails. As we exposed prey to more types of cues from an attack sequence, they also increased tail depth and hiding behavior but did not change their activity. Additionally, treefrog tadpoles generally increased their defense as the biomass of treefrogs consumed increased, regardless of whether heterospecifics were being consumed. Our results suggest that treefrogs can gain cue information from all portions of an attack sequence, and that both temporal patterns of feeding and diet content of predators influence the type and magnitude of induced prey defenses

SecMon: End-to-End Quality and Security Monitoring System

The Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is becoming a more available and popular way of communicating for Internet users. This also applies to Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems and merging these two have already proven to be successful (e.g. Skype). Even the existing standards of VoIP provide an assurance of security and Quality of Service (QoS), however, these features are usually optional and supported by limited number of implementations. As a result, the lack of mandatory and widely applicable QoS and security guaranties makes the contemporary VoIP systems vulnerable to attacks and network disturbances. In this paper we are facing these issues and propose the SecMon system, which simultaneously provides a lightweight security mechanism and improves quality parameters of the call. SecMon is intended specially for VoIP service over P2P networks and its main advantage is that it provides authentication, data integrity services, adaptive QoS and (D)DoS attack detection. Moreover, the SecMon approach represents a low-bandwidth consumption solution that is transparent to the users and possesses a self-organizing capability. The above-mentioned features are accomplished mainly by utilizing two information hiding techniques: digital audio watermarking and network steganography. These techniques are used to create covert channels that serve as transport channels for lightweight QoS measurement's results. Furthermore, these metrics are aggregated in a reputation system that enables best route path selection in the P2P network. The reputation system helps also to mitigate (D)DoS attacks, maximize performance and increase transmission efficiency in the network.Comment: Paper was presented at 7th international conference IBIZA 2008: On Computer Science - Research And Applications, Poland, Kazimierz Dolny 31.01-2.02 2008; 14 pages, 5 figure

Ambient networks: Bridging heterogeneous network domains

Providing end-to-end communication in heterogeneous internetworking environments is a challenge. Two fundamental problems are bridging between different internetworking technologies and hiding of network complexity and differences from both applications and application developers. This paper presents abstraction and naming mechanisms that address these challenges in the Ambient Networks project. Connectivity abstractions hide the differences of heterogeneous internetworking technologies and enable applications to operate across them. A common naming framework enables end-to-end communication across otherwise independent internetworks and supports advanced networking capabilities, such as indirection or delegation, through dynamic bindings between named entities

Design and rationale of a multi-center, pragmatic, open-label randomized trial of antimicrobial therapy - the study of clinical efficacy of antimicrobial therapy strategy using pragmatic design in Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis (CleanUP-IPF) clinical trial

Compelling data have linked disease progression in patients with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) with lung dysbiosis and the resulting dysregulated local and systemic immune response. Moreover, prior therapeutic trials have suggested improved outcomes in these patients treated with either sulfamethoxazole/ trimethoprim or doxycycline. These trials have been limited by methodological concerns. This trial addresses the primary hypothesis that long-term treatment with antimicrobial therapy increases the time-to-event endpoint of respiratory hospitalization or all-cause mortality compared to usual care treatment in patients with IPF. We invoke numerous innovative features to achieve this goal, including: 1) utilizing a pragmatic randomized trial design; 2) collecting targeted biological samples to allow future exploration of 'personalized' therapy; and 3) developing a strong partnership between the NHLBI, a broad range of investigators, industry, and philanthropic organizations. The trial will randomize approximately 500 individuals in a 1:1 ratio to either antimicrobial therapy or usual care. The site principal investigator will declare their preferred initial antimicrobial treatment strategy (trimethoprim 160 mg/ sulfamethoxazole 800 mg twice a day plus folic acid 5 mg daily or doxycycline 100 mg once daily if body weight is < 50 kg or 100 mg twice daily if ≥50 kg) for the participant prior to randomization. Participants randomized to antimicrobial therapy will receive a voucher to help cover the additional prescription drug costs. Additionally, those participants will have 4-5 scheduled blood draws over the initial 24 months of therapy for safety monitoring. Blood sampling for DNA sequencing and genome wide transcriptomics will be collected before therapy. Blood sampling for transcriptomics and oral and fecal swabs for determination of the microbiome communities will be collected before and after study completion. As a pragmatic study, participants in both treatment arms will have limited in-person visits with the enrolling clinical center. Visits are limited to assessments of lung function and other clinical parameters at time points prior to randomization and at months 12, 24, and 36. All participants will be followed until the study completion for the assessment of clinical endpoints related to hospitalization and mortality events. TRIAL REGISTRATION: ClinicalTrials.gov identifier NCT02759120

Reversible watermarking scheme with image-independent embedding capacity

Permanent distortion is one of the main drawbacks of all the irreversible watermarking schemes. Attempts to recover the original signal after the signal passing the authentication process are being made starting just a few years ago. Some common problems, such as salt-and-pepper artefacts owing to intensity wraparound and low embedding capacity, can now be resolved. However, some significant problems remain unsolved. First, the embedding capacity is signal-dependent, i.e., capacity varies significantly depending on the nature of the host signal. The direct impact of this is compromised security for signals with low capacity. Some signals may be even non-embeddable. Secondly, while seriously tackled in irreversible watermarking schemes, the well-known problem of block-wise dependence, which opens a security gap for the vector quantisation attack and transplantation attack, are not addressed by researchers of the reversible schemes. This work proposes a reversible watermarking scheme with near-constant signal-independent embedding capacity and immunity to the vector quantisation attack and transplantation attack

Names, addresses and identities in ambient networks

Ambient Networks interconnect independent realms that may use different local network technologies and may belong to different administrative or legal entities. At the core of these advanced internetworking concepts is a flexible naming architecture based on dynamic indirections between names, addresses and identities. This paper gives an overview of the connectivity abstractions of Ambient Networks and then describes its naming architecture in detail, comparing and contrasting them to other related next-generation network architectures