Wear it and share it: Wearables and security

As the amount of data generated by personal devices increases, supported by the trend of making these devices more personal (i.e., wearable, sewable), so too will the risks of personal privacy violation rise. From the technological perspective, it is important to follow privacy-by-design approaches, incorporating both data encryption and data anonymization techniques. From the perspective of enterprises and users, understanding that “wearing means sharing” is a valuable first step

Digital deception: Cyber fraud and online misinformation

PHISHING, USER ACCOUNT takeovers, and other computing-related threats have made it easy for criminals to deceive people for financial and other gain. It is now considered standard practice for an advanced cyberattack, even a highly technical one, to start in a nontechnical manner: a spearphishing email deceiving an organization’s employees into providing their credentials, a watering hole website infecting their computer, and so on. It is the human that is the initial target, as well as the first line of defense. At the same time, social media has become a dominant, direct, and highly effective form of news generation and sharing at a global scale, in a manner that influences and enhances, but also challenges and often antagonizes, traditional media corporations

On the Personalization of Personal Networks - Service Provision Based on User Profiles

In this paper, we present a user profile definition scheme featuring context awareness. Though the scheme has been designed to meet the needs of web applications deployed over heterogeneous devices, emphasis is given in the deployment of the profile scheme over Personal Networks (PNs), as the personalization of the deployed applications and services in PN environments is of great importance. The proposed scheme is presented as part of an integrated framework for user profile management that takes into account (and is therefore compliant to) the existing standardization attempts. The overall architecture and description of the profile management framework, taking into account security issues inside Personal Networks, is presented. The paper concludes by showcasing how user profiles have been incorporated in a selected pilot service of the EU IST research project MAGNET Beyond

Traffic engineering towards the assurance of quality in IP networks: trends and perspectives

The need for establishing bandwidth guaranteed paths in IP networks and the requirement for making optimal use of the available resources becomes more and more crucial due to the significant development of data-intensive multimedia applications. In this paper, we discuss the techniques and the mechanisms for exercising traffic engineering in contemporary IP networks under the prism of exploiting historical monitoring information collected from the operational environment.Keywords: Traffic engineering, history monitoring information, traffic matrix, QoS

An evaluation study of clustering algorithms in the scope of user communities assessment

AbstractIn this paper, we provide the results of ongoing work in Magnet Beyond project, regarding social networking services. We introduce an integrated social networking framework through the definition or the appropriate notions and metrics. This allows one to run an evaluation study of three widely used clustering methods (k-means, hierarchical and spectral clustering) in the scope of social groups assessment and in regard to the cardinality of the profile used to assess users’ preferences. Such an evaluation study is performed in the context of our service requirements (i.e. on the basis of equal-sized group formation and of maximization of interests’ commonalities between users within each social group). The experimental results indicate that spectral clustering, due to the optimization it offers in terms of normalized cut minimization, is applicable within the context of Magnet Beyond socialization services. Regarding profile’s cardinality impact on the system performance, this is shown to be highly dependent on the underlying distribution that characterizes the frequency of user preferences appearance. Our work also incorporates the introduction of a heuristic algorithm that assigns new users that join the service into appropriate social groups, once the service has been initialized and the groups have been assessed using spectral clustering. The results clearly show that our approach is able to adhere to the service requirements as new users join the system, without the need of an iterative spectral clustering application that is computationally demanding

A prototype deep learning paraphrase identification service for discovering information cascades in social networks

Identifying the provenance of information posted on social media and how this information may have changed over time can be very helpful in assessing its trustworthiness. Here, we introduce a novel mechanism for discovering “post-based” information cascades, including the earliest relevant post and how its information has evolved over subsequent posts. Our prototype leverages multiple innovations in the combination of dynamic data sub-sampling and multiple natural language processing and analysis techniques, benefiting from deep learning architectures. We evaluate its performance on EMTD, a dataset that we have generated from our private experimental instance of the decentralised social network Mastodon, as well as the benchmark Microsoft Research Paraphrase Corpus, reporting no errors in sub-sampling based on clustering, and an average accuracy of 92% and F1 score of 93% for paraphrase identification

Serious games: an attractive approach to improve awareness of community policing technologies

In security/safety-critical applications, such as community policing, citizens and Law Enforcement Officers (LEOs) need a safe and realistic environment to support their learning in handling challenging situations. In this context, the use of games can prove crucial in helping citizens improve awareness and better understand the potential value that can be developed in building relationships with Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) providing support within a specific area