A Survey on Security for Mobile Devices

Nowadays, mobile devices are an important part of our everyday lives since they enable us to access a large variety of ubiquitous services. In recent years, the availability of these ubiquitous and mobile services has signicantly increased due to the dierent form of connectivity provided by mobile devices, such as GSM, GPRS, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. In the same trend, the number and typologies of vulnerabilities exploiting these services and communication channels have increased as well. Therefore, smartphones may now represent an ideal target for malware writers. As the number of vulnerabilities and, hence, of attacks increase, there has been a corresponding rise of security solutions proposed by researchers. Due to the fact that this research eld is immature and still unexplored in depth, with this paper we aim to provide a structured and comprehensive overview of the research on security solutions for mobile devices. This paper surveys the state of the art on threats, vulnerabilities and security solutions over the period 2004-2011. We focus on high-level attacks, such those to user applications, through SMS/MMS, denial-of-service, overcharging and privacy. We group existing approaches aimed at protecting mobile devices against these classes of attacks into dierent categories, based upon the detection principles, architectures, collected data and operating systems, especially focusing on IDS-based models and tools. With this categorization we aim to provide an easy and concise view of the underlying model adopted by each approach

Towards a Timely Prediction of Earthquake Intensity with Social Media

A growing number of people is turning to Social Media in the aftermath of emergencies to search and publish critical and up to date information. Retrieval and exploitation of such information may prove crucial to decision makers in order to minimize the impact of disasters on the population and the infrastructures. Yet, to date, the task of the automatic assessment of the consequences of disasters has received little to no attention. Our work aims to bridge this gap, merging the theory behind statistical learning and predictive models with the data behind social media. Here we investigate the exploitation of Twitter data for the improvement of earthquake emergency management. We adopt a set of predictive linear models and evaluate their ability to map the intensity of worldwide earthquakes. The models build on a dataset of almost 5 million tweets and more than 7,000 globally distributed earthquakes. We run and discuss diagnostic tests and simulations on generated models to assess their significance and avoid overfitting. Finally we deal with the interpretation of the relations uncovered by the linear models and we conclude by illustrating how findings reported in this work can be leveraged by existing emergency management systems. Overall results show the effectiveness of the proposed techniques and allow to obtain an estimation of the earthquake intensity far earlier than conventional methods do. The employment of the proposed solutions can help understand scenarios where damage actually occurred in order to define where to concentrate the rescue teams and organize a prompt emergency response

Nowcasting of Earthquake Consequences Using Big Social Data

Messages posted to social media in the aftermath of a natural disaster have value beyond detecting the event itself. Mining such deliberately dropped digital traces allows a precise situational awareness, to help provide a timely estimate of the disaster’s consequences on the population and infrastructures. Yet, to date, the automatic assessment of damage has received little attention. Here, the authors explore feeding predictive models by tweets conveying on-the-ground social sensors’ observations, to nowcast the perceived intensity of earthquakes

WorkMail: collaborative document workflow by email

Processing documents is a critical and crucial aspect in an enterprise environment. The management of documents involves several people and many times becomes a long and wasting-time process. Many systems of document workflow have been proposed but usually they are too rigid and complex. Therefore we have developed a document workflow engine based on the email paradigm. When a user wants to make an order, a request of authorization and, in general, any kind of procedure that involve a document, starts her/his request by filling in a form and sending it by attaching it to an email. To this purpose the user has to use our web application that appears as a normal webmail client. Our solution overcomes the actual limitation in the use of document workflow software, especially for what concern the user experience; with our system there is no need, for users, to learn the functioning of a new framework. In addition, users with different roles have different customized view of the document. According with the roles of the users, we trained the system to suggest to the user, at each step, a possible receiver of the email. Currently this feature is based on the fact that the system knows in advance the flow associated with different type of documents. As improvement, we will perform a statistical analysis of interactions between senders and receivers. This analysis will be used to improve the suggestion mechanism: the system will learn the most frequent interactions for each user, depending on the history of previous flow and the document involved. Exploiting these information, the suggestion mechanism will advise to the user the possible receiver of the document

The de novo centriole assembly pathway in HeLa cells: cell cycle progression and centriole assembly/maturation

It has been reported that nontransformed mammalian cells become arrested during G1 in the absence of centrioles (Hinchcliffe, E., F. Miller, M. Cham, A. Khodjakov, and G. Sluder. 2001. Science. 291:1547–1550). Here, we show that removal of resident centrioles (by laser ablation or needle microsurgery) does not impede cell cycle progression in HeLa cells. HeLa cells born without centrosomes, later, assemble a variable number of centrioles de novo. Centriole assembly begins with the formation of small centrin aggregates that appear during the S phase. These, initially amorphous “precentrioles” become morphologically recognizable centrioles before mitosis. De novo–assembled centrioles mature (i.e., gain abilities to organize microtubules and replicate) in the next cell cycle. This maturation is not simply a time-dependent phenomenon, because de novo–formed centrioles do not mature if they are assembled in S phase–arrested cells. By selectively ablating only one centriole at a time, we find that the presence of a single centriole inhibits the assembly of additional centrioles, indicating that centrioles have an activity that suppresses the de novo pathway

CNR@wOrK - a Social Network for CNR community

Social network sites (SNSs) are increasingly attracting the attention of academic and industry re-searchers intrigued by their affordance and reach. Most website, like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and so on, connect people that don\u27t know each other based on shared interests, political views, photos, videos and in general important part of life. Some sites cater to diverse audiences, while others attract people based on common language or shared racial, sexual, religious, or nationali-ty-based identities. Social networking websites could be harnessed for immense benefit to the scientific sector. A scientific social network allows scientists to share ideas, details of their cur-rent research and freely distribute their results. It would reduce wasteful scientific redundancy, for instance, by preventing scientists from doing experiments others have done before them, and it would also enable cooperation between groups across the world. In this Technical Report we present our SNS platform called CNR@wOrK and discuss about its developments and future improvements

Conceivable security risks and authentication techniques for smart devices

With the rapidly escalating use of smart devices and fraudulent transaction of users’ data from their devices, efficient and reliable techniques for authentication of the smart devices have become an obligatory issue. This paper reviews the security risks for mobile devices and studies several authentication techniques available for smart devices. The results from field studies enable a comparative evaluation of user-preferred authentication mechanisms and their opinions about reliability, biometric authentication and visual authentication techniques

Control of daughter centriole formation by the pericentriolar material

Author Posting. © The Author(s), 2008. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Nature Publishing Group for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Nature Cell Biology 10 (2008): 322-328, doi:10.1038/ncb1694.Controlling the number of its centrioles is vital for the cell as supernumerary centrioles result in multipolar mitosis and genomic instability. Normally, just one daughter centriole forms on each mature (mother) centriole; however, a mother centriole can produce multiple daughters within a single cell cycle. The mechanisms that prevent centriole ‘overduplication’ are poorly understood. Here we use laser microsurgery to test the hypothesis that attachment of the daughter centriole to the wall of the mother inhibits formation of additional daughters. We show that physical removal of the daughter induces reduplication of the mother in Sarrested cells. Under conditions when multiple daughters simultaneously form on a single mother, all of these daughters must be removed to induce reduplication. Intriguingly, the number of daughter centrioles that form during reduplication does not always match the number of ablated daughter centrioles. We also find that exaggeration of the pericentriolar material (PCM) via overexpression of the PCM protein pericentrin in S-arrested CHO cells induces formation of numerous daughter centrioles. We propose that that the size of the PCM cloud associated with the mother centriole restricts the number of daughters that can form simultaneously.This work was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health (GM GM59363) and the Human Frontiers Science Program (RGP0064). Construction of our laser microsurgery workstation was supported in part by a fellowship from Nikon/Marine Biological Laboratory (A.K.)