Elimination of Selected Heteroaromatics from Wastewater Using Soybean Peroxidase

Various heterocyclic aromatic compounds (HACs), widely used in pharmaceuticals, personal care products, household products and different industries have been detected in concentrations from ng/L to μg/L in surface and groundwater, soil and sediments as well as influent and effluent (treated wastewater and sludge) of municipal or industrial wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) around the world. The persistence of these so-called emerging contaminants (ECs) and their metabolites can cause toxicological and ecotoxicological effects, even at very low concentrations. A feasibility study of soybean peroxidase-catalyzed oxidation process, as environmentally-friendly and cost effective alternative method for transformation of three selected HACs was the first aim of the present study. Soybean peroxidase (SBP) is extracted from the seed coats (hulls) which are a by-product of crushing operations and are used in animal feed. Secondly, the most important operational parameters, pH, H2O2 concentration and enzyme activity were optimized for the two compounds that were substrates for SBP. Thirdly, time course study was conducted under optimized conditions to determine the initial first-order rate constant and half-life of each substrate. Finally, possible oligomerization products of enzymatic treatment were characterized by mass spectrometric analysis and showed formation of dimers and trimers for the two substrates

Contributions to Securing Software Updates in IoT

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a large network of connected devices. In IoT, devices can communicate with each other or back-end systems to transfer data or perform assigned tasks. Communication protocols used in IoT depend on target applications but usually require low bandwidth. On the other hand, IoT devices are constrained, having limited resources, including memory, power, and computational resources. Considering these limitations in IoT environments, it is difficult to implement best security practices. Consequently, network attacks can threaten devices or the data they transfer. Thus it is crucial to react quickly to emerging vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities should be mitigated by firmware updates or other necessary updates securely. Since IoT devices usually connect to the network wirelessly, such updates can be performed Over-The-Air (OTA). This dissertation presents contributions to enable secure OTA software updates in IoT. In order to perform secure updates, vulnerabilities must first be identified and assessed. In this dissertation, first, we present our contribution to designing a maturity model for vulnerability handling. Next, we analyze and compare common communication protocols and security practices regarding energy consumption. Finally, we describe our designed lightweight protocol for OTA updates targeting constrained IoT devices. IoT devices and back-end systems often use incompatible protocols that are unable to interoperate securely. This dissertation also includes our contribution to designing a secure protocol translator for IoT. This translation is performed inside a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) with TLS interception. This dissertation also contains our contribution to key management and key distribution in IoT networks. In performing secure software updates, the IoT devices can be grouped since the updates target a large number of devices. Thus, prior to deploying updates, a group key needs to be established among group members. In this dissertation, we present our designed secure group key establishment scheme. Symmetric key cryptography can help to save IoT device resources at the cost of increased key management complexity. This trade-off can be improved by integrating IoT networks with cloud computing and Software Defined Networking (SDN).In this dissertation, we use SDN in cloud networks to provision symmetric keys efficiently and securely. These pieces together help software developers and maintainers identify vulnerabilities, provision secret keys, and perform lightweight secure OTA updates. Furthermore, they help devices and systems with incompatible protocols to be able to interoperate

LMGROUP: A Lightweight Multicast Group Key Management for IoT Networks

Due to limitations of IoT networks including limited bandwidth, memory, battery, etc., secure multicast group communication has gained more attention, and to enable that a group key establishment scheme is required to share the secret key among the group members. The current group key establishment protocols were mostly designed for Wireless Sensor Network, and they require device interaction, high computation costs, or high storage on the device side. To address these drawbacks, in this paper we design LMGROUP, a lightweight and multicast group key establishment protocol for IoT networks, that is based on Elliptic Curve Integrated Encryption Scheme and HMAC verification and does not require device interaction. We also suggest an algorithm for unpredictable group member selection. Our experimental result of implementing LMGROUP indicates it has low storage, low computation, and low communication costs. Furthermore, the formal security verification indicates LMGROUP is secure and robust against different attacks

RoSym: Robust Symmetric Key Based IoT Software Upgrade Over-the-Air

Internet of Things (IoT) firmware upgrade has turned out to be a challenging task with respect to security. While Over-The-Air (OTA) software upgrade possibility is an essential feature to achieve security, it is also most sensitive to attacks and lots of different firmware upgrade attacks have been presented in the literature. Several security solutions exist to tackle these problems. We observe though that most prior art solutions are public key-based, they are not flexible with respect to firmware image distribution principles and it is challenging to make a design with good Denial-Of-Service (DoS) attacks resistance. Apart from often being rather resource demanding, a limitation with current public key-based solutions is that they are not quantum computer resistant. Hence, in this paper, we take a new look into the firmware upgrade problem and propose RoSym, a secure, firmware distribution principle agnostic, and DoS protected upgrade mechanism purely based on symmetric cryptography. We present an experimental evaluation on a real testbed environment for the scheme. The results show that the scheme is efficient in comparison to other state of the art solutions. We also make a formal security verification of RoSym showing that it is robust against different attacks

A Framework For Evaluating Information Quality Of Persian Weblogs

The World Wide Web is a great tool for exploring all kinds of information. Unlike books and journals, most of this information is unfiltered, i.e. not subject to editing or peer review by experts. This lack of quality control and the large increase in number of web sites make the task of finding quality information on the web especially critical. Meanwhile, new facilities for producing web pages such as weblogs make this issue more significant because Blogs are simple content management tools that enable non-experts to build easily updatable web diaries or online journals. Despite a decade of active research, a comprehensive methodology for the assessment of Information Quality (IQ) is lacking. Specifically, no framework for measuring information quality on the weblogs is currently available.After identifying and prioritizing IQ criteria on Weblogs, a Weblog management system that automatically calculates and collects IQ scores for created Weblogs is developed. The system is implemented on Persian Weblogs. Results of analysis of data collected by the Weblog management system show that there are significant correlations between many of the information quality variables. In addition, an analysis of the data revealed seven IQ dimensions on the Weblogs. Each of the dimensions was comprised of related IQ variables. Coefficients are identified for each variable in order to facilitate IQ measurement on the Weblogs. Moreover, statistical analysis shows that three specific sub-criteria for Weblogs; namely the number of written comments, number of received comments and comment per entry influence information quality on the Weblogs and interestingly fall into same dimension

Chuchotage: In-line Software Network Protocol Translation for (D)TLS

The growing diversity of connected devices leads to complex network deployments, often made up of endpoints that implement in- compatible network application protocols. Communication between heterogeneous network protocols was traditionally enabled by hardware translators or gateways. However, such solutions are increasingly unfit to address the security, scalability, and latency requirements of modern software-driven deployments. To address these shortcomings we propose Chuchotage, a protocol translation architecture for secure and scalable machine-to-machine communication. Chuchotage enables in-line TLS interception and confidential protocol translation for software-defined networks. Translation is done in ephemeral, flow-specific Trusted Execution Environments and scales with the number of network flows. Our evaluation of Chuchotage implementing an HTTP to CoAP translation indicates a minimal transmission and translation overhead, allowing its integration with legacy or outdated deployments

Profiling Green Consumers with Data Mining

Concern about the environment has led to a new segment of consumers called green consumers. Because not all the consumers are equally green, using target marketing for persuading them to buy green product is essential. The first step in target marketing strategy is to segment the market and then develop profiles of the resulting market segments. This study aims to identify distinct green market segments based on demographic, psychographic, and behavioral variables and also investigate the relationship between each variable and green consumer behavior. This study uses self-organizing maps (SOM) to segment and then develop profiles of Iranian green consumers. Based on the results, four market segments have been identified and were named intense greens, potential greens, egoist browns, and intense browns based on profiles of consumers in each segment. The results of this study also indicate that the level of education and income together with egoistic value and environmental unfriendly habits correlate negatively with the greenness (intent and intense of green behaviors) of Iranian consumers and the age of consumers together with environmental attitude and knowledge, biospheric and altruistic values, and religiosity correlate positively

Effect Of Management Commitment To Internal Marketing On Employees' Satisfaction. A Case Study: Imam Jafar Sadegh Hospital Nurses

Nowadays, healthcare is an extraordinarily people-centric industry and employees play important roles in the product/service exchange. Internal marketing (IM) forces the employee to treat more hospitably facing customers. The present study examines the effect of management commitment to internal marketing (MCIM) on employees' satisfaction through IM practices. Data were collected from 110 nurses of Imam Jafar Sadegh hospital. The results of structural equation modeling showed the signifcant effect of MCIM on IM practices (formal internal marketing, informal internal marketing and responsiveness). But verse to what was assumed, there was no signifcant relation between IM and employees' satisfaction

Exploring Behavioral Patterns of Patients with Mental Disorders Using the MoMo-Mood Dataset

Mental disorders are major problems for people’s wellbeing in societies due to the increasing the amount of stress and challenges of living in modern cities. Understanding these disorders and diagnosing them in a timely manner is crucial for people to enjoy satisfactory life quality and to function well in society. Previous studies on diagnosing mental disorders and their development over time rely on questionnaires filled by patients and visiting clinicians on a regular basis. For instance, clinicians employ The Standard for Clinicians’ Interview in Psychiatry (SCIP) to interview adult patients and diagnose a psychiatric disorder based on their answers. In recent years, technological advancements and the fact that people are using technologies like mobile phones in their daily lives provide us new opportunities for having a more realistic image of mental disorders. However, since smartphones and digital tools have emerged only recently, their application in the mental health context calls for extensive research. The overall objective of this study is to find interpretable behavioral markers of psychiatric disorders and depressed moods in patients, using digital wearables. More specifically, this work attempts to find differences in disorder and mood levels between healthy controls and patients using features extracted from the data, their correlations, social signature, and daily rhythm analysis. To this end, this study employs the MoMo- Mood dataset, a dataset containing the digital data and mood scores (PHQ9) of 164 individuals categorized into healthy control; major depressive disorder; borderline personality disorder; and bipolar disorder. The results suggest that depressed moods are associated with a smaller but closer social network as well as higher time spent at home and reduced physical activity and variance in the movement