Design a Cloud Security Model in VANET Communication: Design and Architecture

During the last few years, Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) has been progressed at a rapid rate, which aimed to improve the transportation activities in the terms of the safety and efficiency. According to many issues with the traditional Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANET), some efforts are made to merge the VANET with the cloud technology. This work proposes the VANET based on the cloud (V2Cloud), and designs a security model framework that is hosted on the cloud to manage the security services, and provide a secure VANET communication between the different entities eg vehicles, authorities and etc. This security model framework is called VANET Security as a Service (VSaaS). Our works will presented in a set of two papers. In this first one, it presents VSaaS design and architecture in order to show that the VSaaS fulfills the VANET's security requirements, and protects the VANET against the different types of attacks. The second paper will present the progress towards the implementation and the security analysis of the proposed architecture, along with the results of the performance of the security overhead for the secure Vehicle Information Messages (VIMs), which are sent by vehicles to the cloud as a coarse-grained information

Design a Cloud Security Model in VANET Communication: Implementation, Performance and Security Analysis

In the first paper of this work, the design and the architecture of our proposed model framework, VANET Security as a Service (VSaaS), was discussed. In this second paper, the performance metrics measurements will be investigated through the NS2, SUMO and Trans simulations, to evaluate the security overhead of the secure Vehicle Information Messages (VIMs), which are sent by the vehicles to the cloud as a coarse-grained information. Moreover, our proposed model framework (VSaaS) will be discussed against the security requirements in the VANET

Secure Live Virtual Machine Migration by Proposed Security Center

In this paper, we propose a Security Center (SC) to provide a secure environment for Live Virtual Machine (VM) migration which is defined as the movement of a virtual machine from one physical host to another. In the cloud systems, the migration has appeared based on the need of transferring VMs among resources. At most, researchers have focused on the performance of migration process; whereas the security aspects in migration have not been fully explored. So, we show how our proposed mechanism analyzes and fulfills the major security requirements for secure live VM migration in cloud environments to become protected against different types of passive and active attacks

Performance of combined tillage equipment and it’s effect on soil properties

An experiment was conducted to evaluate the performance of a locally manufactured combined tillage implement (moldboard plow + ripper) in one of the fields of the kufa university faculty of agriculture. The experiment was included two factors , the first factor is combing the ripper to mold board plow in five level these are fixing the combined ripper shanks while the shanks points oriented in two different levels with and opposite to the plowing direction , two levels of different ripper depths the same depth and 5 cm above the depth of mold board plow share and the fifth level is control treatment ( mold board plow alone ) .The second factor was the plowing operation speed at five levels (1.4, 2.0 , 3.6 and 4.7) Km.hr ̵ ¹ . the experiment was conducted as a factorial experiment with RCBD , the LSD test at 5 % was used to compare between means .The results of the research were showed that combining the locally manufactured ripper implement to mold board plow resulted in significant increase in the number of soil clods with the desired diameter (5-10 cm ) very low number of soil block with diameter larger than 10 cm , more even soil roughness and the actual productivity has not decreased to the extent that it affects the efficient performance of the tillage process compared to the use at the mold board plow alone

Combined features in region of interest for brain tumor segmentation

Diagnosis of brain tumor gliomas is a challenging task in medical image analysis due to its complexity, the less regularity of tumor structures, and the diversity of tissue textures and shapes. Semantic segmentation approaches using deep learning have consistently outperformed the previous methods in this challenging task. However, deep learning is insufficient to provide the required local features related to tissue texture changes due to tumor growth. This paper designs a hybrid method arising from this need, which incorporates machine-learned and hand-crafted features. A semantic segmentation network (SegNet) is used to generate the machine-learned features, while the grey-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM)-based texture features construct the hand-crafted features. In addition, the proposed approach only takes the region of interest (ROI), which represents the extension of the complete tumor structure, as input, and suppresses the intensity of other irrelevant area. A decision tree (DT) is used to classify the pixels of ROI MRI images into different parts of tumors, i.e. edema, necrosis and enhanced tumor. The method was evaluated on BRATS 2017 dataset. The results demonstrate that the proposed model provides promising segmentation in brain tumor structure. The F-measures for automatic brain tumor segmentation against ground truth are 0.98, 0.75 and 0.69 for whole tumor, core and enhanced tumor, respectively

General Anesthetics Predicted to Block the GLIC Pore with Micromolar Affinity

Although general anesthetics are known to modulate the activity of ligand-gated ion channels in the Cys-loop superfamily, there is at present neither consensus on the underlying mechanisms, nor predictive models of this modulation. Viable models need to offer quantitative assessment of the relative importance of several identified anesthetic binding sites. However, to date, precise affinity data for individual sites has been challenging to obtain by biophysical means. Here, the likely role of pore block inhibition by the general anesthetics isoflurane and propofol of the prokaryotic pentameric channel GLIC is investigated by molecular simulations. Microscopic affinities are calculated for both single and double occupancy binding of isoflurane and propofol to the GLIC pore. Computations are carried out for an open-pore conformation in which the pore is restrained to crystallographic radius, and a closed-pore conformation that results from unrestrained molecular dynamics equilibration of the structure. The GLIC pore is predicted to be blocked at the micromolar concentrations for which inhibition by isofluorane and propofol is observed experimentally. Calculated affinities suggest that pore block by propofol occurs at signifcantly lower concentrations than those for which inhibition is observed: we argue that this discrepancy may result from binding of propofol to an allosteric site recently identified by X-ray crystallography, which may cause a competing gain-of-function effect. Affinities of isoflurane and propofol to the allosteric site are also calculated, and shown to be 3 mM for isoflurane and for propofol; both anesthetics have a lower affinity for the allosteric site than for the unoccupied pore

The Prokaryote Ligand-Gated Ion Channel ELIC Captured in a Pore Blocker-Bound Conformation by the Alzheimer's Disease Drug Memantine

Pentameric ligand-gated ion channels (pLGIC) catalyze the selective transfer of ions across the cell membrane in response to a specific neurotransmitter. A variety of chemically diverse molecules, including the Alzheimer's drug memantine, block ion conduction at vertebrate pLGICs by plugging the channel pore. We show that memantine has similar potency in ELIC, a prokaryotic pLGIC, when it contains an F16'S pore mutation. X-ray crystal structures, using both memantine and its derivative, Br-memantine, reveal that the ligand is localized at the extracellular entryway of the channel pore, and the pore is in a more closed conformation than wild-type ELIC in both the presence and absence of memantine. However, using voltage clamp fluorometry we observe fluorescence changes in opposite directions during channel activation and pore block, revealing an additional conformational transition not apparent from the crystal structures. These results have important implications for drugs such as memantine, which block channel pores.publisher: Elsevier articletitle: The Prokaryote Ligand-Gated Ion Channel ELIC Captured in a Pore Blocker-Bound Conformation by the Alzheimer’s Disease Drug Memantine journaltitle: Structure articlelink: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.str.2014.07.013 content_type: article copyright: Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.status: publishe

Expanding the Huntington’s disease research toolbox; validated subdomain protein constructs for biochemical and structural investigation of huntingtin

Huntington's disease is characterised by the CAG expansion in the huntingtin gene above a critical threshold of ~35 repeats, which results in the polyglutamine expansion of the huntingtin protein (HTT). The biological roles of wildtype HTT and the associated mechanisms of disease pathology caused by expanded HTT remain incompletely understood, in part due to challenges in directly characterising interactions between HTT and putative binding partners. Here we describe a biochemical toolkit of two rationally designed, high-quality recombinant HTT subdomains; one consisting of the N-terminal HEAT region and bridge domain (NTD) and the second comprising the C-terminal HEAT domain (CTD). Using biophysical methods and cryo-electron microscopy, we show that these smaller subdomains are natively folded and can associate to reconstitute a functional full-length HTT structure capable of forming a near native-like complex with the 40 kDa HTT-associated protein (HAP40). We also report biotin-tagged variants of these subdomains, as well as full-length HTT, that permit immobilisation of each protein for quantitative biophysical assays without impacting protein quality. We demonstrate that the CTD alone can form a stable complex when co-expressed with HAP40, which can be structurally resolved. The CTD/HAP40 complex binds to the NTD, with a dissociation constant of approximately 10 nM as measured by bio-layer interferometry. We validated the interaction between the CTD and HAP40 in cells using a luciferase two-hybrid assay and used individual subdomain constructs to demonstrate their respective stabilization of HAP40 in cells. These open-source biochemical tools will prove useful to the wider HD community for the study of fundamental HTT biology, discover new macromolecular or small-molecule binding partners and mapping of their interaction sites across this very large protein

Delineation of functional subdomains of Huntingtin protein and their interaction with HAP40

The huntingtin (HTT) protein plays critical roles in numerous cellular pathways by functioning as a scaffold for its many interaction partners and HTT knock out is embryonic lethal. Interrogation of HTT function is complicated by the large size of this protein so we studied a suite of structure-rationalized subdomains to investigate the structure-function relationships within the HTT-HAP40 complex. Protein samples derived from the subdomain constructs were validated using biophysical methods and cryo-electron microscopy, revealing they are natively folded and can complex with validated binding partner, HAP40. Derivatized versions of these constructs enable protein-protein interaction assays in vitro, with biotin tags, and in cells, with luciferase two-hybrid assay-based tags, which we use in proof-of-principle analyses to further interrogate the HTT-HAP40 interaction. These open-source biochemical tools enable studies of fundamental HTT biochemistry and biology, will aid the discovery of macromolecular or small-molecule binding partners and help map interaction sites across this large protein