Data Mining in Electronic Commerce

Modern business is rushing toward e-commerce. If the transition is done properly, it enables better management, new services, lower transaction costs and better customer relations. Success depends on skilled information technologists, among whom are statisticians. This paper focuses on some of the contributions that statisticians are making to help change the business world, especially through the development and application of data mining methods. This is a very large area, and the topics we cover are chosen to avoid overlap with other papers in this special issue, as well as to respect the limitations of our expertise. Inevitably, electronic commerce has raised and is raising fresh research problems in a very wide range of statistical areas, and we try to emphasize those challenges.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/088342306000000204 in the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Dynamic real-time risk analytics of uncontrollable states in complex internet of things systems, cyber risk at the edge

The Internet of Things (IoT) triggers new types of cyber risks. Therefore, the integration of new IoT devices and services requires a self-assessment of IoT cyber security posture. By security posture this article refers to the cybersecurity strength of an organisation to predict, prevent and respond to cyberthreats. At present, there is a gap in the state of the art, because there are no self-assessment methods for quantifying IoT cyber risk posture. To address this gap, an empirical analysis is performed of 12 cyber risk assessment approaches. The results and the main findings from the analysis is presented as the current and a target risk state for IoT systems, followed by conclusions and recommendations on a transformation roadmap, describing how IoT systems can achieve the target state with a new goal-oriented dependency model. By target state, we refer to the cyber security target that matches the generic security requirements of an organisation. The research paper studies and adapts four alternatives for IoT risk assessment and identifies the goal-oriented dependency modelling as a dominant approach among the risk assessment models studied. The new goal-oriented dependency model in this article enables the assessment of uncontrollable risk states in complex IoT systems and can be used for a quantitative self-assessment of IoT cyber risk posture

Quality of Information in Mobile Crowdsensing: Survey and Research Challenges

Smartphones have become the most pervasive devices in people's lives, and are clearly transforming the way we live and perceive technology. Today's smartphones benefit from almost ubiquitous Internet connectivity and come equipped with a plethora of inexpensive yet powerful embedded sensors, such as accelerometer, gyroscope, microphone, and camera. This unique combination has enabled revolutionary applications based on the mobile crowdsensing paradigm, such as real-time road traffic monitoring, air and noise pollution, crime control, and wildlife monitoring, just to name a few. Differently from prior sensing paradigms, humans are now the primary actors of the sensing process, since they become fundamental in retrieving reliable and up-to-date information about the event being monitored. As humans may behave unreliably or maliciously, assessing and guaranteeing Quality of Information (QoI) becomes more important than ever. In this paper, we provide a new framework for defining and enforcing the QoI in mobile crowdsensing, and analyze in depth the current state-of-the-art on the topic. We also outline novel research challenges, along with possible directions of future work.Comment: To appear in ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks (TOSN

Context Aware Computing for The Internet of Things: A Survey

As we are moving towards the Internet of Things (IoT), the number of sensors deployed around the world is growing at a rapid pace. Market research has shown a significant growth of sensor deployments over the past decade and has predicted a significant increment of the growth rate in the future. These sensors continuously generate enormous amounts of data. However, in order to add value to raw sensor data we need to understand it. Collection, modelling, reasoning, and distribution of context in relation to sensor data plays critical role in this challenge. Context-aware computing has proven to be successful in understanding sensor data. In this paper, we survey context awareness from an IoT perspective. We present the necessary background by introducing the IoT paradigm and context-aware fundamentals at the beginning. Then we provide an in-depth analysis of context life cycle. We evaluate a subset of projects (50) which represent the majority of research and commercial solutions proposed in the field of context-aware computing conducted over the last decade (2001-2011) based on our own taxonomy. Finally, based on our evaluation, we highlight the lessons to be learnt from the past and some possible directions for future research. The survey addresses a broad range of techniques, methods, models, functionalities, systems, applications, and middleware solutions related to context awareness and IoT. Our goal is not only to analyse, compare and consolidate past research work but also to appreciate their findings and discuss their applicability towards the IoT.Comment: IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials Journal, 201

IoT trust and reputation: a survey and taxonomy

IoT is one of the fastest-growing technologies and it is estimated that more than a billion devices would be utilized across the globe by the end of 2030. To maximize the capability of these connected entities, trust and reputation among IoT entities is essential. Several trust management models have been proposed in the IoT environment; however, these schemes have not fully addressed the IoT devices features, such as devices role, device type and its dynamic behavior in a smart environment. As a result, traditional trust and reputation models are insufficient to tackle these characteristics and uncertainty risks while connecting nodes to the network. Whilst continuous study has been carried out and various articles suggest promising solutions in constrained environments, research on trust and reputation is still at its infancy. In this paper, we carry out a comprehensive literature review on state-of-the-art research on the trust and reputation of IoT devices and systems. Specifically, we first propose a new structure, namely a new taxonomy, to organize the trust and reputation models based on the ways trust is managed. The proposed taxonomy comprises of traditional trust management-based systems and artificial intelligence-based systems, and combine both the classes which encourage the existing schemes to adapt these emerging concepts. This collaboration between the conventional mathematical and the advanced ML models result in design schemes that are more robust and efficient. Then we drill down to compare and analyse the methods and applications of these systems based on community-accepted performance metrics, e.g. scalability, delay, cooperativeness and efficiency. Finally, built upon the findings of the analysis, we identify and discuss open research issues and challenges, and further speculate and point out future research directions.Comment: 20 pages, 5 Figures, 3 tables, Journal of cloud computin

Machine Learning Aided Static Malware Analysis: A Survey and Tutorial

Malware analysis and detection techniques have been evolving during the last decade as a reflection to development of different malware techniques to evade network-based and host-based security protections. The fast growth in variety and number of malware species made it very difficult for forensics investigators to provide an on time response. Therefore, Machine Learning (ML) aided malware analysis became a necessity to automate different aspects of static and dynamic malware investigation. We believe that machine learning aided static analysis can be used as a methodological approach in technical Cyber Threats Intelligence (CTI) rather than resource-consuming dynamic malware analysis that has been thoroughly studied before. In this paper, we address this research gap by conducting an in-depth survey of different machine learning methods for classification of static characteristics of 32-bit malicious Portable Executable (PE32) Windows files and develop taxonomy for better understanding of these techniques. Afterwards, we offer a tutorial on how different machine learning techniques can be utilized in extraction and analysis of a variety of static characteristic of PE binaries and evaluate accuracy and practical generalization of these techniques. Finally, the results of experimental study of all the method using common data was given to demonstrate the accuracy and complexity. This paper may serve as a stepping stone for future researchers in cross-disciplinary field of machine learning aided malware forensics.Comment: 37 Page

IoT trust and reputation: a survey and taxonomy

IoT is one of the fastest-growing technologies and it is estimated that more than a billion devices would be utilized across the globe by the end of 2030. To maximize the capability of these connected entities, trust and reputation among IoT entities is essential. Several trust management models have been proposed in the IoT environment; however, these schemes have not fully addressed the IoT devices features, such as devices role, device type and its dynamic behavior in a smart environment. As a result, traditional trust and reputation models are insufficient to tackle these characteristics and uncertainty risks while connecting nodes to the network. Whilst continuous study has been carried out and various articles suggest promising solutions in constrained environments, research on trust and reputation is still at its infancy. In this paper, we carry out a comprehensive literature review on state-of-the-art research on the trust and reputation of IoT devices and systems. Specifically, we first propose a new structure, namely a new taxonomy, to organize the trust and reputation models based on the ways trust is managed. The proposed taxonomy comprises of traditional trust management-based systems and artificial intelligence-based systems, and combine both the classes which encourage the existing schemes to adapt these emerging concepts. This collaboration between the conventional mathematical and the advanced ML models result in design schemes that are more robust and efficient. Then we drill down to compare and analyse the methods and applications of these systems based on community-accepted performance metrics, e.g. scalability, delay, cooperativeness and efficiency. Finally, built upon the findings of the analysis, we identify and discuss open research issues and challenges, and further speculate and point out future research directions.Comment: 20 pages, 5 Figures, 3 tables, Journal of cloud computin