A Comprehensive Digital Forensic Investigation Model and Guidelines for Establishing Admissible Digital Evidence

Information technology systems are attacked by offenders using digital devices and networks to facilitate their crimes and hide their identities, creating new challenges for digital investigators. Malicious programs that exploit vulnerabilities also serve as threats to digital investigators. Since digital devices such as computers and networks are used by organisations and digital investigators, malicious programs and risky practices that may contaminate the integrity of digital evidence can lead to loss of evidence. For some reasons, digital investigators face a major challenge in preserving the integrity of digital evidence. Not only is there no definitive comprehensive model of digital forensic investigation for ensuring the reliability of digital evidence, but there has to date been no intensive research into methods of doing so. To address the issue of preserving the integrity of digital evidence, this research improves upon other digital forensic investigation model by creating a Comprehensive Digital Forensic Investigation Model (CDFIM), a model that results in an improvement in the investigation process, as well as security mechanism and guidelines during investigation. The improvement is also effected by implementing Proxy Mobile Internet Protocol version 6 (PMIPv6) with improved buffering based on Open Air Interface PIMIPv6 (OAI PMIPv6) implementation to provide reliable services during handover in Mobile Node (MN) and improve performance measures to minimize loss of data which this research identified as a factor affecting the integrity of digital evidence. The advantage of this is to present that the integrity of digital evidence can be preserved if loss of data is prevented. This research supports the integration of security mechanism and intelligent software in digital forensic investigation which assist in preserving the integrity of digital evidence by conducting experiments which carried out two different attack experiment to test CDFIM. It found that when CDFIM used security mechanism and guidelines with the investigation process, it was able to identify the attack and also ensured that the integrity of the digital evidence was preserved. It was also found that the security mechanism and guidelines incorporated in the digital investigative process are useless when the security guidelines are ignored by digital investigators, thus posing a threat to the integrity of digital evidence

Multimedia

The nowadays ubiquitous and effortless digital data capture and processing capabilities offered by the majority of devices, lead to an unprecedented penetration of multimedia content in our everyday life. To make the most of this phenomenon, the rapidly increasing volume and usage of digitised content requires constant re-evaluation and adaptation of multimedia methodologies, in order to meet the relentless change of requirements from both the user and system perspectives. Advances in Multimedia provides readers with an overview of the ever-growing field of multimedia by bringing together various research studies and surveys from different subfields that point out such important aspects. Some of the main topics that this book deals with include: multimedia management in peer-to-peer structures & wireless networks, security characteristics in multimedia, semantic gap bridging for multimedia content and novel multimedia applications

Smart Wireless Sensor Networks

The recent development of communication and sensor technology results in the growth of a new attractive and challenging area - wireless sensor networks (WSNs). A wireless sensor network which consists of a large number of sensor nodes is deployed in environmental fields to serve various applications. Facilitated with the ability of wireless communication and intelligent computation, these nodes become smart sensors which do not only perceive ambient physical parameters but also be able to process information, cooperate with each other and self-organize into the network. These new features assist the sensor nodes as well as the network to operate more efficiently in terms of both data acquisition and energy consumption. Special purposes of the applications require design and operation of WSNs different from conventional networks such as the internet. The network design must take into account of the objectives of specific applications. The nature of deployed environment must be considered. The limited of sensor nodes� resources such as memory, computational ability, communication bandwidth and energy source are the challenges in network design. A smart wireless sensor network must be able to deal with these constraints as well as to guarantee the connectivity, coverage, reliability and security of network's operation for a maximized lifetime. This book discusses various aspects of designing such smart wireless sensor networks. Main topics includes: design methodologies, network protocols and algorithms, quality of service management, coverage optimization, time synchronization and security techniques for sensor networks

Intelligent Circuits and Systems

ICICS-2020 is the third conference initiated by the School of Electronics and Electrical Engineering at Lovely Professional University that explored recent innovations of researchers working for the development of smart and green technologies in the fields of Energy, Electronics, Communications, Computers, and Control. ICICS provides innovators to identify new opportunities for the social and economic benefits of society.　 This conference bridges the gap between academics and R&D institutions, social visionaries, and experts from all strata of society to present their ongoing research activities and foster research relations between them. It provides opportunities for the exchange of new ideas, applications, and experiences in the field of smart technologies and finding global partners for future collaboration. The ICICS-2020 was conducted in two broad categories, Intelligent Circuits & Intelligent Systems and Emerging Technologies in Electrical Engineering

Definitive Consensus for Distributed Data Inference

Inference from data is of key importance in many applications of informatics. The current trend in performing such a task of inference from data is to utilise machine learning algorithms. Moreover, in many applications that it is either required or is preferable to infer from the data in a distributed manner. Many practical difficulties arise from the fact that in many distributed applications we avert from transferring data or parts of it due to costs, privacy and computation considerations. Admittedly, it would be advantageous if the final knowledge, attained through distributed data inference, is common to every participating computing node. The key in achieving the aforementioned task is the distributed average consensus algorithm or simply the consensus algorithm herein. The latter has been used in many applications. Initially the main purpose has been for the estimation of the expectation of scalar valued data distributed over a network of machines without a central node. Notably, the algorithm allows the final outcome to be the same for every participating node. Utilising the consensus algorithm as the centre piece makes the task of distributed data inference feasible. However, there are many difficulties that hinder its direct applicability. Thus, we concentrate on the consensus algorithm with the purpose of addressing these difficulties. There are two main concerns. First, the consensus algorithm has asymptotic convergence. Thus, we may only achieve maximum accuracy if the algorithm is left to run for a large number of iterations. Second, the accuracy attained at any iteration during the consensus algorithm is correlated with the standard deviation of the initial value distribution. The consensus algorithm is inherently imprecise at finite time and this hardens the learning process. We solve this problem by introducing the definitive consensus algorithm. This algorithm attains maximum precision in a finite number of iterations, namely in a number of iterations equal to the diameter of the graph in a distributed and decentralised manner. Additionally, we introduce the nonlinear consensus algorithm and the adaptive consensus algorithm. These are modifications of the original consensus algorithm that allow improved precision with fewer iterations in cases of unknown, partially known and stochastically time-varying network topologies. The definitive consensus algorithm can be incorporated in a distributed data inference framework. We approach the problem of data inference from the perspective of machine learning. Specifically, we tailor this distributed inference framework for machine learning on a communication network with data partitioned on the participating computing nodes. Particularly, the distributed data inference framework is detailed and applied to the case of a multilayer feed forward neural network with error back-propagation. A substantial examination of its performance and its comparison with the non-distributed case, is provided. Theoretical foundation for the definitive consensus algorithm is provided. Moreover, its superior performance is validated by numerical experiments. A brief theoretical examination of the nonlinear and the adaptive consensus algorithms is performed to justify their improved performance with respect to the original consensus algorithm. Moreover, extensive numerical simulations are given to compare the nonlinear and the adaptive algorithm with the original consensus algorithm. The most important contributions of this research are principally the definitive consensus algorithm and the distributed data inference framework. Their combination yields a decentralised distributed process over a communication network capable for inference in agreement over the entire network