Big Data Security (Volume 3)

After a short description of the key concepts of big data the book explores on the secrecy and security threats posed especially by cloud based data storage. It delivers conceptual frameworks and models along with case studies of recent technology

Spread spectrum-based video watermarking algorithms for copyright protection

Merged with duplicate record 10026.1/2263 on 14.03.2017 by CS (TIS)Digital technologies know an unprecedented expansion in the last years. The consumer can now benefit from hardware and software which was considered state-of-the-art several years ago. The advantages offered by the digital technologies are major but the same digital technology opens the door for unlimited piracy. Copying an analogue VCR tape was certainly possible and relatively easy, in spite of various forms of protection, but due to the analogue environment, the subsequent copies had an inherent loss in quality. This was a natural way of limiting the multiple copying of a video material. With digital technology, this barrier disappears, being possible to make as many copies as desired, without any loss in quality whatsoever. Digital watermarking is one of the best available tools for fighting this threat. The aim of the present work was to develop a digital watermarking system compliant with the recommendations drawn by the EBU, for video broadcast monitoring. Since the watermark can be inserted in either spatial domain or transform domain, this aspect was investigated and led to the conclusion that wavelet transform is one of the best solutions available. Since watermarking is not an easy task, especially considering the robustness under various attacks several techniques were employed in order to increase the capacity/robustness of the system: spread-spectrum and modulation techniques to cast the watermark, powerful error correction to protect the mark, human visual models to insert a robust mark and to ensure its invisibility. The combination of these methods led to a major improvement, but yet the system wasn't robust to several important geometrical attacks. In order to achieve this last milestone, the system uses two distinct watermarks: a spatial domain reference watermark and the main watermark embedded in the wavelet domain. By using this reference watermark and techniques specific to image registration, the system is able to determine the parameters of the attack and revert it. Once the attack was reverted, the main watermark is recovered. The final result is a high capacity, blind DWr-based video watermarking system, robust to a wide range of attacks.BBC Research & Developmen

Eurolanguages-2011: Innovations and Development

Збірник наукових студентських робіт призначено для широкого кола читачів, які цікавляться проблемами вивчення іноземних мов та перекладу в Україн

Towards secure web services: Performance analysis, decision making and steganography approaches

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.Web services provide a platform neutral and programming language independent technology that supports interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network. Clients and other systems interact with Web services using a standardised XML messaging system, such as the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), typically conveyed using HTTP with an XML serialisation in conjunction with other related Web standards. Nevertheless, the idea of applications from different parties communicating together raises a security threat. The challenge of Web services security is to understand and consider the risks of securing a Web-based service depending on the existing security techniques and simultaneously follow evolving standards in order to fill the gap in Web services security. However, the performance of the security mechanisms is fraught with concerns due to additional security contents in SOAP messages, the higher number of message exchanges to establish trust, as well as the extra CPU time to process these additions. As the interaction between service providers and requesters occurs via XML-based SOAP messages, securing Web services tends to make these messages longer than they would be otherwise and consequently requires interpretation by XML parsers on both sides, which reduces the performance of Web services. The work described in this thesis can be broadly divided into three parts, the first of which is studying and comparing the performance of various security profiles applied on a Web service tested with different initial message sizes. The second part proposes a multi-criteria decision making framework to aid Web services developers and architects in selecting the best suited security profile that satisfies the different requirements of a given application during the development process in a systematic, manageable, and effective way. The proposed framework, based on the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) approach, incorporates not only the security requirements, but also the performance considerations as well as the configuration constraints of these security profiles. The framework is then validated and evaluated using a scenario-driven approach to demonstrate situations where the decision making framework is used to make informed decisions to rank various security profiles in order to select the most suitable one for each scenario. Finally, the last part of this thesis develops a novel steganography method to be used for SOAP messages within Web services environments. This method is based on changing the order of XML elements according to a secret message. This method has a high imperceptibility; it leaves almost no trail because it uses the communication protocol as a cover medium, and keeps the structure and size of the SOAP message intact. The method is empirically validated using a feasible scenario so as to indicate its utility and value

Preserving privacy in edge computing

Edge computing or fog computing enables realtime services to smart application users by storing data and services at the edge of the networks. Edge devices in the edge computing handle data storage and service provisioning. Therefore, edge computing has become a  new norm for several delay-sensitive smart applications such as automated vehicles, ambient-assisted living, emergency response services, precision agriculture, and smart electricity grids. Despite having great potential, privacy threats are the main barriers to the success of edge computing. Attackers can leak private or sensitive information of data owners and modify service-related data for hampering service provisioning in edge computing-based smart applications. This research takes privacy issues of heterogeneous smart application data into account that are stored in edge data centers. From there, this study focuses on the development of privacy-preserving models for user-generated smart application data in edge computing and edge service-related data, such as Quality-of-Service (QoS) data, for ensuring unbiased service provisioning. We begin with developing privacy-preserving techniques for user data generated by smart applications using steganography that is one of the data hiding techniques. In steganography, user sensitive information is hidden within nonsensitive information of data before outsourcing smart application data, and stego data are produced for storing in the edge data center. A steganography approach must be reversible or lossless to be useful in privacy-preserving techniques. In this research, we focus on numerical (sensor data) and textual (DNA sequence and text) data steganography. Existing steganography approaches for numerical data are irreversible. Hence, we introduce a lossless or reversible numerical data steganography approach using Error Correcting Codes (ECC). Modern lossless steganography approaches for text data steganography are mainly application-specific and lacks imperceptibility, and DNA steganography requires reference DNA sequence for the reconstruction of the original DNA sequence. Therefore, we present the first blind and lossless DNA sequence steganography approach based on the nucleotide substitution method in this study. In addition, a text steganography method is proposed that using invisible character and compression based encoding for ensuring reversibility and higher imperceptibility.  Different experiments are conducted to demonstrate the justification of our proposed methods in these studies. The searching capability of the stored stego data is challenged in the edge data center without disclosing sensitive information. We present a privacy-preserving search framework for stego data on the edge data center that includes two methods. In the first method, we present a keyword-based privacy-preserving search method that allows a user to send a search query as a hash string. However, this method does not support the range query. Therefore, we develop a range search method on stego data using an order-preserving encryption (OPE) scheme. In both cases, the search service provider retrieves corresponding stego data without revealing any sensitive information. Several experiments are conducted for evaluating the performance of the framework. Finally, we present a privacy-preserving service computation framework using Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) based cryptosystem for ensuring the service provider's privacy during service selection and composition. Our contributions are two folds. First, we introduce a privacy-preserving service selection model based on encrypted Quality-of-Service (QoS) values of edge services for ensuring privacy. QoS values are encrypted using FHE. A distributed computation model for service selection using MapReduce is designed for improving efficiency. Second, we develop a composition model for edge services based on the functional relationship among edge services for optimizing the service selection process. Various experiments are performed in both centralized and distributed computing environments to evaluate the performance of the proposed framework using a synthetic QoS dataset

Introductory Computer Forensics

INTERPOL (International Police) built cybercrime programs to keep up with emerging cyber threats, and aims to coordinate and assist international operations for ?ghting crimes involving computers. Although signi?cant international efforts are being made in dealing with cybercrime and cyber-terrorism, ?nding effective, cooperative, and collaborative ways to deal with complicated cases that span multiple jurisdictions has proven dif?cult in practic