A comprehensive survey on network anomaly detection

Nowadays, there is a huge and growing concern about security in information and communication technology among the scientific community because any attack or anomaly in the network can greatly affect many domains such as national security, private data storage, social welfare, economic issues, and so on. Therefore, the anomaly detection domain is a broad research area, and many different techniques and approaches for this purpose have emerged through the years. In this study, the main objective is to review the most important aspects pertaining to anomaly detection, covering an overview of a background analysis as well as a core study on the most relevant techniques, methods, and systems within the area. Therefore, in order to ease the understanding of this survey’s structure, the anomaly detection domain was reviewed under five dimensions: (1) network traffic anomalies, (2) network data types, (3) intrusion detection systems categories, (4) detection methods and systems, and (5) open issues. The paper concludes with an open issues summary discussing presently unsolved problems, and final remarks703447489CNPQ - Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e TecnológicoFINEP - Financiadora de Estudos E Projetos249794/2013-6; 309335/2017-5; 308348/2016-801.14.0231.00500008/2013FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologi

Enabling Technologies on Cloud of Things for Smart Healthcare

Nowadays research is heading towards the integration of cloud computing and Internet of Things thus creating a Cloud of Things (CoT). This combination generates a new paradigm for pervasive and ubiquitous computing. However, reliable CoT-based services, particularly, highly delay-sensitive services, such as, healthcare, require energy-efficient CoT architectures. Considerable efforts have been proposed to improve the efficiency of CoT architectures. This paper analyses CoT architectures and platforms, as well as the implementation of CoT in the context of smart healthcare. Subsequently, the paper explains some related issues of CoT, including the lack of standardization. Moreover, it focuses on energy efficiency with an in depth analysis of the most relevant proposals available in the literature. An evaluation of all the energy efficiency solutions investigated in this paper shows there is still a need to improve energy efficiency, especially regarding QoS and performance

Re-identifying anonymous nodes

In mobile scenarios, privacy is an aspect of growing importance. In order to avoid the creation of movement profiles, participating nodes change their identifying properties on a regular basis in order to hide their identities and stay anonymous. The drawback of this action is that nodes which previously had a connection have no means to recognise this fact. A complete re-authentication would be necessary – if possible at all. This paper discusses this new problem and proposes two possible solutions for re-identification of anonymous nodes, one based on symmetric encryption and one based on secure hashes

Structure and function of plant toxins (with emphasis on cystine knot toxins)

Plant toxins are substances produced and secreted by plants to defend themselves against predators. In a broad sense, this includes all substances that have a toxic effect on targeted organisms, whether they are microbes, other plants, insects, or higher animals. Plant toxins have a diverse range of structures, from small organic molecules through to proteins. This review gives an overview of the various classes of plant toxins but focuses on an interesting class of protein-based plant toxins containing a cystine knot motif. This structural motif confers exceptional stability on proteins containing it and is associated with a wide range of biological activities. The biological activities and structural stability offer many potential applications in the pharmaceutical and agricultural fields. One particularly exciting prospect is in the use of protein-based plant toxins as molecular scaffolds for displaying pharmaceutically important bioactivities. Future applications of plant toxins are likely to involve genetic engineering techniques and molecular pharming approaches