Pervasive eHealth services a security and privacy risk awareness survey

The human factor is often recognised as a major aspect of cyber-security research. Risk and situational perception are identified as key factors in the decision making process, often playing a lead role in the adoption of security mechanisms. However, risk awareness and perception have been poorly investigated in the field of eHealth wearables. Whilst end-users often have limited understanding of privacy and security of wearables, assessing the perceived risks and consequences will help shape the usability of future security mechanisms. This paper present a survey of the the risks and situational awareness in eHealth services. An analysis of the lack of security and privacy measures in connected health devices is described with recommendations to circumvent critical situations

Development of a smart tourism information chatbot for Mauritius

Due to the current COVID-19 situation worldwide, the tourism industry has been heavily impacted worldwide. Chatbots help to minimise the spread of the virus, by limiting physical interaction, whilst help to promote the industry and make available tourism information in an accessible familiar manner. This paper aims to analyse the various aspects of the tourism industry and identify the gaps that need to be addressed in order to improve the customer experiences in Mauritius. The aim was deploy a tourism information chatbot that will provide the necessary information and recommendations to tourists coming to Mauritius and attract potential tourists plan their next trip in a few steps, using off-the-shelf technologies. The main advantage of the developed Chatbot is that is built on off the shelf technologies (Rasa, Telegram, etc), but with the ability to be further extended with APIs. Thus the chatbot developed exhibits a number of innovations for a Tourism chatbot, such as Google search, weather acquisition based on location and COVID-19 statistics

Creation and detection of hardware trojans using non-invasive off-the-shelf technologies

As a result of the globalisation of the semiconductor design and fabrication processes, integrated circuits are becoming increasingly vulnerable to malicious attacks. The most concerning threats are hardware trojans. A hardware trojan is a malicious inclusion or alteration to the existing design of an integrated circuit, with the possible effects ranging from leakage of sensitive information to the complete destruction of the integrated circuit itself. While the majority of existing detection schemes focus on test-time, they all require expensive methodologies to detect hardware trojans. Off-the-shelf approaches have often been overlooked due to limited hardware resources and detection accuracy. With the advances in technologies and the democratisation of open-source hardware, however, these tools enable the detection of hardware trojans at reduced costs during or after production. In this manuscript, a hardware trojan is created and emulated on a consumer FPGA board. The experiments to detect the trojan in a dormant and active state are made using off-the-shelf technologies taking advantage of different techniques such as Power Analysis Reports, Side Channel Analysis and Thermal Measurements. Furthermore, multiple attempts to detect the trojan are demonstrated and benchmarked. Our simulations result in a state-of-the-art methodology to accurately detect the trojan in both dormant and active states using off-the-shelf hardware

Developing an effective regulatory framework for virtual currencies in Mauritius

It is widely accepted that virtual currencies have the potential of revolutionising the global finance sector. The potential of bitcoin has been recognised by corporate organisations and governments. With the continuing growth of bitcoin as a cryptocurrency, its regulatory regime has become crucial in determining the fate of this novel system of exchange. The global economic crisis and pandemic situation of 2020 is turning industries towards adoption of digital and virtual currencies. Although bitcoins have been regarded as the pioneer of decentralized peer to peer virtual currencies, there remains uncertainties in various countries as to whether they should embrace, devise new regulations or completely outlaw the digital currency. It has been recognised that Mauritius has the potential of acting as a Financial Technology (Fintech) hub for the African and surrounding regions through the rapid development and adoption of technology.For this to become possible, the current regulatory framework of Mauritius must be updated to reflect the continuing innovating changes in this area. So far, Mauritius has not yet implemented any specific regulations to address the use of Blockchain, bitcoins and cryptocurrencies in its jurisdiction. The only related legal framework currently being used in this area is the Regulatory Sandbox Licensing Scheme implemented by the Board of Investment Mauritius ("BOI"). It offers the possibility for investors to conduct their businesses in an area where there exists no legal framework or inadequate provisions under existing Mauritian legislation. In this research paper, the different regulatory frameworks of United States,Canada and China will be assessed to serve as a comparative analysis to examine the nature of their regulatory regimes.These jurisdictions have been chosen as they have been in the forefront of bringing significant regulatory changes, which has not been the case in any countries in Africa or Indian Ocean. These will be used to address the question as to whether there are any existing legal frameworks from other jurisdictions that can be customised or adapted for incorporation into the jurisdiction of Mauritius

Improving wireless charging energy efficiency of mobile phones: analysis of key practices

As human beings became dependent on mobile phones, the relationship of these devices with the natural environment became more significant to study. Mobile phones require energy to operate and this is stored within connected batteries. Recently, there has been a shift in the way batteries of mobile phones are charged, namely, from wired to wireless charging. Being regarded as a transformational technology in the mobile world, many smartphone manufacturers have been investing in this technology. However, current wireless charging mechanisms meant for mobile phones are recognized to be slow and energy inefficient as compared to wired charging. Such inefficiency can in turn worsen the adverse impacts that mobile phones already have on the environment. This paper addresses the energy inefficiency issue during wireless charging of mobile phones by comparing different charging practices in order to identify opportunities for energy savings

X-Secure:protecting users from big bad wolves

In 2014 over 70% of people in Great Britain accessed the Internet every day. This resource is an optimal vector for malicious attackers to penetrate home computers and as such compromised pages have been increasing in both number and complexity. This paper presents X-Secure, a novel browser plug-in designed to present and raise the awareness of inexperienced users by analysing web-pages before malicious scripts are executed by the host computer. X-Secure was able to detect over 90% of the tested attacks and provides a danger level based on cumulative analysis of the source code, the URL, and the remote server, by using a set of heuristics, hence increasing the situational awareness of users browsing the internet

NFC tag-based mHealth patient healthcare tracking system

Patient misdiagnosis is quite a common occurrence in hospitals around the world. It is a mistake that can happen to anyone at any time, and especially during a pandemic crisis when hospital facilities are overwhelmed with increasing number of patients. This problem could stem from improper patient identification whereby patient files are mislabelled or placed in an incorrect patient dossier. It is the responsibility of a hospital and its employees to guarantee that such mistakes do not occur. With respect to this, near-field communication (NFC) technology, which is a short ranged wireless communication technology, has been identified to have great potential to help identify patients in hospitals. This paper demonstrates a solution by designing and developing a patient healthcare management information system that sees the seamless integration of the NFC technology along with and both web and mobile technologies, to provide a holistic solution to tackle the problem of patient misidentification in a hospital environment especially during pandemics such as COVID-19.The Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) was used as evaluation method in order to quantify the proposed systems’s usability and acceptance using 5 constructs. Results showed acceptance of the system with a mean score of 4, indicating that the NFC tag-based mHealth Patient Healthcare Tracking System was found to be useful and easy to use

Creation and detection of hardware trojans using non-invasive off-the-shelf technologies

As a result of the globalisation of the semiconductor design and fabrication processes, integrated circuits are becoming increasingly vulnerable to malicious attacks. The most concerning threats are hardware trojans. A hardware trojan is a malicious inclusion or alteration to the existing design of an integrated circuit, with the possible effects ranging from leakage of sensitive information to the complete destruction of the integrated circuit itself. While the majority of existing detection schemes focus on test-time, they all require expensive methodologies to detect hardware trojans. Off-the-shelf approaches have often been overlooked due to limited hardware resources and detection accuracy. With the advances in technologies and the democratisation of open-source hardware, however, these tools enable the detection of hardware trojans at reduced costs during or after production. In this manuscript, a hardware trojan is created and emulated on a consumer FPGA board. The experiments to detect the trojan in a dormant and active state are made using off-the-shelf technologies taking advantage of different techniques such as Power Analysis Reports, Side Channel Analysis and Thermal Measurements. Furthermore, multiple attempts to detect the trojan are demonstrated and benchmarked. Our simulations result in a state-of-the-art methodology to accurately detect the trojan in both dormant and active states using off-the-shelf hardwar

Cyber deception against DDoS attack using moving target defence framework in SDN IOT-EDGE networks

Software Defined Networking (SDN) networking paradigm advancements are advantageous, but they have also brought new security concerns. The Internet of Things (IoT) Edge Computing servers provide closer access to cloud services and is also a point of target for availability attacks. The Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on SDN IoT-Edge Computing caused by botnet of IoT hosts has compromised major services and is still an impending concern due to the Work From Home virtual office shift attributed by Covid19 pandemic. The effectiveness of a Moving Target Defense (MTD) technique based on SDN for combating DDoS attacks in IoT-Edge networks was investigated in this study with a test scenario based on a smart building. An MTD Reactive and Proactive Network Address Shuffling Mechanism was developed, tested, and evaluated with results showing successful defence against UDP, TCP SYN, and LAND DDoS attacks; preventing IoT devices from being botnet compromised due to the short-lived network address; and ensuring reliable system performance