A roadside units positioning framework in the context of vehicle-to-infrastructure based on integrated AHP-entropy and group-VIKOR

The positioning of roadside units (RSUs) in a vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication system may have an impact on network performance. Optimal RSU positioning is required to reduce cost and maintain the quality of service. However, RSU positioning is considered a difficult task due to numerous criteria, such as the cost of RSUs, the intersection area and communication strength, which affect the positioning process and must be considered. Furthermore, the conflict and trade-off amongst these criteria and the significance of each criterion are reflected on the RSU positioning process. Towards this end, a four-stage methodology for a new RSU positioning framework using multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) in V2I communication system context has been designed. Real time V2I hardware for data collection purpose was developed. This hardware device consisted of multi mobile-nodes (in the car) and RSUs and connected via an nRF24L01+ PA/LNA transceiver module with a microcontroller. In the second phase, different testing scenarios were identified to acquire the required data from the V2I devices. These scenarios were evaluated based on three evaluation attributes. A decision matrix consisted of the scenarios as alternatives and its assessment per criterion was constructed. In the third phase, the alternatives were ranked using hybrid of MCDM techniques, specifically the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), Entropy and Vlsekriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje (VIKOR). The result of each decision ranking was aggregated using Borda voting approach towards a final group ranking. Finally, the validation process was made to ensure the ranking result undergoes a systematic and valid rank. The results indicate the following: (1) The rank of scenarios obtained from group VIKOR suggested the second scenario with, four RSUs, a maximum distance of 200 meters between RSUs and the antennas height of two-meter, is the best positioning scenarios; and (2) in the objective validation. The study also reported significant differences between the scores of the groups, indicating that the ranking results are valid. Finally, the integration of AHP, Entropy and VIKOR has effectively solved the RSUs positioning problems

New Advanced Technologies to Provide Decentralised and Secure Access to Medical Records: Case Studies in Oncology

The main problem for health professionals and patients in accessing information is that this information is very often distributed over many medical records and locations. This problem is particularly acute in cancerology because patients may be treated for many years and undergo a variety of examinations. Recent advances in technology make it feasible to gain access to medical records anywhere and anytime, allowing the physician or the patient to gather information from an “ephemeral electronic patient record”. However, this easy access to data is accompanied by the requirement for improved security (confidentiality, traceability, integrity, ...) and this issue needs to be addressed. In this paper we propose and discuss a decentralised approach based on recent advances in information sharing and protection: Grid technologies and watermarking methodologies. The potential impact of these technologies for oncology is illustrated by the examples of two experimental cases: a cancer surveillance network and a radiotherapy treatment plan. It is expected that the proposed approach will constitute the basis of a future secure “google-like” access to medical records

Protection of Relational Databases by Means of Watermarking: Recent Advances and Challenges

Databases represent today great economical and strategic concerns for both enterprises and public institutions. In that context, where data leaks, robbery as well as innocent or even hostile data degradation represent a real danger, and watermarking appears as an interesting tool. Watermarking is based on the imperceptible embedding of a message or watermark into a database in order, for instance, to determine its origin as well as to detect if it has been modified. A major advantage of watermarking in relation to other digital content protection mechanisms is that it leaves access to the data while keeping them protected by means of a watermark, independent of the data format storage. Nevertheless, it is necessary to ensure that the introduced distortion does not perturb the exploitation of the database. In this chapter, we give a general overview of the latest database watermarking methods, focusing on those dealing with distortion control. In particular, we present a recent technique based on an ontological modeling of the database semantics that represent the relationships in between attributes—relationships that should be preserved in order to avoid the appearance of incoherent and unlikely records

A dual adaptive watermarking scheme in contourlet domain for DICOM images

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Nowadays, medical imaging equipments produce digital form of medical images. In a modern health care environment, new systems such as PACS (picture archiving and communication systems), use the digital form of medical image too. The digital form of medical images has lots of advantages over its analog form such as ease in storage and transmission. Medical images in digital form must be stored in a secured environment to preserve patient privacy. It is also important to detect modifications on the image. These objectives are obtained by watermarking in medical image.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>In this paper, we present a dual and oblivious (blind) watermarking scheme in the contourlet domain. Because of importance of ROI (region of interest) in interpretation by medical doctors rather than RONI (region of non-interest), we propose an adaptive dual watermarking scheme with different embedding strength in ROI and RONI. We embed watermark bits in singular value vectors of the embedded blocks within lowpass subband in contourlet domain.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The values of PSNR (peak signal-to-noise ratio) and SSIM (structural similarity measure) index of ROI for proposed DICOM (digital imaging and communications in medicine) images in this paper are respectively larger than 64 and 0.997. These values confirm that our algorithm has good transparency. Because of different embedding strength, BER (bit error rate) values of signature watermark are less than BER values of caption watermark. Our results show that watermarked images in contourlet domain have greater robustness against attacks than wavelet domain. In addition, the qualitative analysis of our method shows it has good invisibility.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The proposed contourlet-based watermarking algorithm in this paper uses an automatically selection for ROI and embeds the watermark in the singular values of contourlet subbands that makes the algorithm more efficient, and robust against noise attacks than other transform domains. The embedded watermark bits can be extracted without the original image, the proposed method has high PSNR and SSIM, and the watermarked image has high transparency and can still conform to the DICOM format.</p

Exploration of media blockchain technologies for JPEG privacy and security

Privacy and security, copyright violations and fake news are emerging challenges in digital media. Social media and data leaks increase risk of user privacy. Creative media particularly images are often susceptible to copyright violations which poses a serious problem to the industry. On the other hand, doctored images using photo editing tools and computer generated images may give a false impression of reality and add to the problem of fake news. These problems demand solutions to protect images and associated metadata as well as methods that can proof the integrity of digital media. For these reasons, the JPEG standardization committee has been working on a new Privacy and Security standard that provides solutions to support privacy and security focused workflows. The standard defines tools to support protection and integrity across the wide range of JPEG image standards. Related to image integrity, blockchain technology provides a solution for creating tamper proof distributed ledgers. However, adopting blockchain technology for digital image integrity poses several challenges at the technology level as well as at the level of privacy legislation. In addition, if blockchain technology is adopted to support media applications, it needs to be closely integrated with a widely adopted standard to ensure broad interoperability. Therefore, the JPEG committee initiated an activity to explore standardization needs related to media blockchain and distributed ledger technologies (DLT). This paper explains the scope and implementation of the JPEG Privacy and Security standard and presents the current state of the exploration on standardization needs related to media blockchain applications

BC4LLM: Trusted Artificial Intelligence When Blockchain Meets Large Language Models

In recent years, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are reshaping society's production methods and productivity, and also changing the paradigm of scientific research. Among them, the AI language model represented by ChatGPT has made great progress. Such large language models (LLMs) serve people in the form of AI-generated content (AIGC) and are widely used in consulting, healthcare, and education. However, it is difficult to guarantee the authenticity and reliability of AIGC learning data. In addition, there are also hidden dangers of privacy disclosure in distributed AI training. Moreover, the content generated by LLMs is difficult to identify and trace, and it is difficult to cross-platform mutual recognition. The above information security issues in the coming era of AI powered by LLMs will be infinitely amplified and affect everyone's life. Therefore, we consider empowering LLMs using blockchain technology with superior security features to propose a vision for trusted AI. This paper mainly introduces the motivation and technical route of blockchain for LLM (BC4LLM), including reliable learning corpus, secure training process, and identifiable generated content. Meanwhile, this paper also reviews the potential applications and future challenges, especially in the frontier communication networks field, including network resource allocation, dynamic spectrum sharing, and semantic communication. Based on the above work combined and the prospect of blockchain and LLMs, it is expected to help the early realization of trusted AI and provide guidance for the academic community

Copyright protection of scalar and multimedia sensor network data using digital watermarking

This thesis records the research on watermarking techniques to address the issue of copyright protection of the scalar data in WSNs and image data in WMSNs, in order to ensure that the proprietary information remains safe between the sensor nodes in both. The first objective is to develop LKR watermarking technique for the copyright protection of scalar data in WSNs. The second objective is to develop GPKR watermarking technique for copyright protection of image data in WMSN

NEW SECURE SOLUTIONS FOR PRIVACY AND ACCESS CONTROL IN HEALTH INFORMATION EXCHANGE

In the current digital age, almost every healthcare organization (HCO) has moved from storing patient health records on paper to storing them electronically. Health Information Exchange (HIE) is the ability to share (or transfer) patients’ health information between different HCOs while maintaining national security standards like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996. Over the past few years, research has been conducted to develop privacy and access control frameworks for HIE systems. The goal of this dissertation is to address the privacy and access control concerns by building practical and efficient HIE frameworks to secure the sharing of patients’ health information. The first solution allows secure HIE among different healthcare providers while focusing primarily on the privacy of patients’ information. It allows patients to authorize a certain type of health information to be retrieved, which helps prevent any unintentional leakage of information. The privacy solution also provides healthcare providers with the capability of mutual authentication and patient authentication. It also ensures the integrity and auditability of health information being exchanged. The security and performance study for the first protocol shows that it is efficient for the purpose of HIE and offers a high level of security for such exchanges. The second framework presents a new cloud-based protocol for access control to facilitate HIE across different HCOs, employing a trapdoor hash-based proxy signature in a novel manner to enable secure (authenticated and authorized) on-demand access to patient records. The proposed proxy signature-based scheme provides an explicit mechanism for patients to authorize the sharing of specific medical information with specific HCOs, which helps prevent any undesired or unintentional leakage of health information. The scheme also ensures that such authorizations are authentic with respect to both the HCOs and the patient. Moreover, the use of proxy signatures simplifies security auditing and the ability to obtain support for investigations by providing non-repudiation. Formal definitions, security specifications, and a detailed theoretical analysis, including correctness, security, and performance of both frameworks are provided which demonstrate the improvements upon other existing HIE systems