How Privacy-Enhanced Technologies (Pets) are Transforming Digital Healthcare Delivery

Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) are playing a crucial role in maturing digital healthcare delivery for mainstream adaption from both a social and regulatory perspective. Different PETs are improving different aspects of digital healthcare delivery, and we have chosen seven of them to observe in the context of their influence on digital healthcare and their use cases. Homomorphic encryption can provide data security when healthcare data is being collected from individuals via IoT or IoMT devices. It’s also a key facilitator for large-scale healthcare data pooling from multiple sources for analytics without compromising privacy. Secure Multi-Party Computation (SMPC) facilitates safe data transfer between patients and healthcare professionals, and other relevant entities. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) can be used to generate larger data sets from smaller training data sets directly obtained from the patients, to train AI and ML algorithms. Differential Privacy (DP) focuses on combining multiple data sets for collective or individual processing without compromising privacy. However, its addition of noise to obscure data has some technical limitations. Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) can facilitate safe verifications/validation protocols to establish connections between healthcare devices without straining their hardware capacities. Federated learning leans quite heavily towards training AI/ML algorithms on multiple data sets without margining or compromising the privacy of the constituents of any dataset. Obfuscation can be used in different stages of healthcare delivery to obscure healthcare data.

An examination of the Asus WL-HDD 2.5 as a nepenthes malware collector

The Linksys WRT54g has been used as a host for network forensics tools for instance Snort for a long period of time. Whilst large corporations are already utilising network forensic tools, this paper demonstrates that it is quite feasible for a non-security specialist to track and capture malicious network traffic. This paper introduces the Asus Wireless Hard disk as a replacement for the popular Linksys WRT54g. Firstly, the Linksys router will be introduced detailing some of the research that was undertaken on the device over the years amongst the security community. It then briefly discusses malicious software and the impact this may have for a home user. The paper then outlines the trivial steps in setting up Nepenthes 0.1.7 (a malware collector) for the Asus WL-HDD 2.5 according to the Nepenthes and tests the feasibility of running the malware collector on the selected device. The paper then concludes on discussing the limitations of the device when attempting to execute Nepenthes

Enhanced image encryption scheme with new mapreduce approach for big size images

Achieving a secured image encryption (IES) scheme for sensitive and confidential data communications, especially in a Hadoop environment is challenging. An accurate and secure cryptosystem for colour images requires the generation of intricate secret keys that protect the images from diverse attacks. To attain such a goal, this work proposed an improved shuffled confusion-diffusion based colour IES using a hyper-chaotic plain image. First, five different sequences of random numbers were generated. Then, two of the sequences were used to shuffle the image pixels and bits, while the remaining three were used to XOR the values of the image pixels. Performance of the developed IES was evaluated in terms of various measures such as key space size, correlation coefficient, entropy, mean squared error (MSE), peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) and differential analysis. Values of correlation coefficient (0.000732), entropy (7.9997), PSNR (7.61), and MSE (11258) were determined to be better (against various attacks) compared to current existing techniques. The IES developed in this study was found to have outperformed other comparable cryptosystems. It is thus asserted that the developed IES can be advantageous for encrypting big data sets on parallel machines. Additionally, the developed IES was also implemented on a Hadoop environment using MapReduce to evaluate its performance against known attacks. In this process, the given image was first divided and characterized in a key-value format. Next, the Map function was invoked for every key-value pair by implementing a mapper. The Map function was used to process data splits, represented in the form of key-value pairs in parallel modes without any communication between other map processes. The Map function processed a series of key/value pairs and subsequently generated zero or more key/value pairs. Furthermore, the Map function also divided the input image into partitions before generating the secret key and XOR matrix. The secret key and XOR matrix were exploited to encrypt the image. The Reduce function merged the resultant images from the Map tasks in producing the final image. Furthermore, the value of PSNR did not exceed 7.61 when the developed IES was evaluated against known attacks for both the standard dataset and big data size images. As can be seen, the correlation coefficient value of the developed IES did not exceed 0.000732. As the handling of big data size images is different from that of standard data size images, findings of this study suggest that the developed IES could be most beneficial for big data and big size images

SLEPX: An Efficient Lightweight Cipher for Visual Protection of Scalable HEVC Extension

This paper proposes a lightweight cipher scheme aimed at the scalable extension of the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) codec, referred to as the Scalable HEVC (SHVC) standard. This stream cipher, Symmetric Cipher for Lightweight Encryption based on Permutation and EXlusive OR (SLEPX), applies Selective Encryption (SE) over suitable coding syntax elements in the SHVC layers. This is achieved minimal computational complexity and delay. The algorithm also conserves most SHVC functionalities, i.e. preservation of bit-length, decoder format-compliance, and error resilience. For comparative analysis, results were taken and compared with other state-of-art ciphers i.e. Exclusive-OR (XOR) and the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). The performance of SLEPX is also compared with existing video SE solutions to confirm the efficiency of the adopted scheme. The experimental results demonstrate that SLEPX is as secure as AES in terms of visual protection, while computationally efficient comparable with a basic XOR cipher. Visual quality assessment, security analysis and extensive cryptanalysis (based on numerical values of selected binstrings) also showed the effectiveness of SLEPX’s visual protection scheme for SHVC compared to previously-employed cryptographic technique

Reflective-Physically Unclonable Function based System for Anti-Counterfeiting

Physically unclonable functions (PUF) are physical security mechanisms, which utilize inherent randomness in processes used to instantiate physical objects. In this dissertation, an extensive overview of the state of the art in implementations, accompanying definitions and their analysis is provided. The concept of the reflective-PUF is presented as a product security solution. The viability of the concept, its evaluation and the requirements of such a system is explored