Applications for RFID in pharmaceutical industry

Security and safety are two important features desired in pharmaceutical supply chain and achieving the same is a challenging task. The need to secure and authenticate pharmaceutical products has increased tremendously with the emerging counterfeit product market. The motivation to introduce counterfeit pharmaceutical products in the supply chain could be to gain rapid economic benefits or affecting the reputation of strong brand in the pharmaceutical industry. RFID technology can be used to deter counterfeiting attempts. It can also be used in various other domains in the pharmaceutical industry. The main aim of this paper is to outline all the applications of RFID in the pharmaceutical industry. After explaining the main applications, we discuss how information hiding techniques could be used with RFID to offer efficient expiry date management, pharmaceutical tamper detection, and fraud detection and prevention

Blocking online advertising - a state of the art

Online advertising has emerged as one of the major business models on the Internet. Publishers rely on the online revenue generated from advertising to offer many free services. However it has become evident that online advertisements are now becoming quite intrusive and also consume a lot of valuable bandwidth to download zero-caching ads and flash or video ads. The main contribution of this paper is as follows; it attempts to identify the main reasons why internet users want to block online ads, it also critically evaluates several existing ad-blocking techniques and conducts an experiment to measure the amount of bandwidth used by online advertisements relative to the actual content. Near the end of the paper a brief discussion on probable future researches open a vast new region to be explored

A review of opinion mining and sentiment classification framework in social networks

The Web has dramatically changed the way we express opinions on certain products that we have purchased and used, or for services that we have received in the various industries. Opinions and reviews can be easily posted on the Web. such as in merchant sites, review portals, blogs, Internet forums, and much more. These data are commonly referred to as usergenerated content or user-generated media. Both the product manufacturers, as well as potential customers are very interested in this online 'word-of-mouth', as it provides product manufacturers information on their customers likes and dislikes, as well as the positive and negative comments on their products whenever available, giving them better knowledge of their products limitations and advantages over competitors; and also providing potential customers with useful and 'first-hand' information on the products and/or services to aid in their purchase decision making process. This paper discusses the existing works on opinion mining and sentiment classification of customer feedback and reviews online, and evaluates the different techniques used for the process. It focuses on thc areas covered by the evaluated papers, points out the areas that are well covered by many researchers and areas that are neglected in opinion mining and sentiment classification which are open for future research opportunity

Secure Transmission in Wireless Sensor Networks Data Using Linear Kolmogorov Watermarking Technique

In Wireless sensor networks (WSNs), All communications between different nodes are sent out in a broadcast fashion. These networks are used in a variety of applications including military, environmental, and smart spaces. Sensors are susceptible to various types of attack, such as data modification, data insertion and deletion, or even physical capture and sensor replacement. Hence security becomes important issue in WSNs. However given the fact that sensors are resources constrained, hence the traditional intensive security algorithms are not well suited for WSNs. This makes traditional security techniques, based on data encryption, not very suitable for WSNs. This paper proposes Linear Kolmogorov watermarking technique for secure data communication in WSNs. We provide a security analysis to show the robustness of the proposed techniques against various types of attacks. This technique is robust against data deletion, packet replication and Sybil attack

Tamper detection in RFID tags, using, fragile watermarking

Security and privacy are one of the two primary concerns with RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) adoption. While the mainstream RFID research is focused on solving the privacy issues, this paper focuses on security issues in general and data tampering in particular. We specifically consider the issue of detecting data tampering on the RFID tags for applications such as data integrity management. To address this issue, we present a novel fragile watermarking scheme, which embeds a fragile watermark (or pattern) in the serial number partition of the RFID tag. This pattern is verified to identify whether or not the data on the RFID tags has been tampered with. The novelty of this watermarking scheme lies in the fact that we have applied watermarking technology to RFID tags; in comparison, most of the existing watermarking schemes are limited to images, or audio or video applications. We term this scheme TamDetect because it is a tamper detection solution. TamDetect is designed such that it can be easily plugged into existing RFID middleware applications. This proposal is one of the first works that integrates watermarking and RFID technologies together. This paper provides a detailed theoretical foundation for the TamDetect solution

Torpid Mode: Hybrid of Sleep and Idle Mode as Power Saving Mechanism for IEEE 802.16j

Sleep and Idle modes are proposed as power saving mechanisms in IEEE 802.16j Mobile Multi-hop Relay (MMR) networks. In this paper, these mechanisms are analyzed in terms of number of messages exchanged, latency and cost. Besides, hybridization of Sleep and Idle modes, named as Torpid mode is proposed as a power saving mechanism for IEEE 802.16j. Our proposed mechanism takes advantage of the relay stations. Analytical results verified by simulations evince that our proposed mechanism surpasses both Idle and Sleep modes significantly in terms of bandwidth consumption. Torpid mode also outperforms over the Idle mode in terms of latency and is superior to Sleep mode on the grounds of cost

State of the Art: Carbon Emission Accountability Modeling

Global warming is becoming a big problem and carbon emissions from a variety of sources are the cause of it. To control emission, a number of carbon emission reduction policies and schemes such as the Kyoto Protocol & COP15 treaty have been reached and put in place. However, not all countries participate in these global carbon mitigation treaties. One of the many reasons for the absence of participation in developing countries is due to their incapable financial status. As in the case of developed countries such as the USA, it is usually due to monetary profiting before and after the participation and the ambiguous carbon emission responsibility that each country has to bear. Many accounting models have already been proposed in the current literature to solve the problem of responsibility ambiguity. However, the current accountability models are proposed for the general industries and not for the ICT industry.We feel that these models cannot be applied directly to the ICT industry since factors of influence are significantly different. In ICT industry, it involves a mix of international and national factors such as accountability issues (eg. the party responsible for the carbon emission) and the implications of participants and non-participants of those climate change mitigation treaties in different countries. Hence, taking into account all the determinant factors and different stakeholders involved in the process of the carbon accounting, we are proposing an efficacious and fair accountability model for the ICT industry in our research. This accountability model can be used to assist Government worldwide in coming up with a fair tax `relief/subsidy' scheme for ICT companies for more sustainable business models. This research will take a science and engineering approach and the outcome of this research would be significant to the global combat against climate change

Wireless Sensor Network transport protocol: A critical review

The transport protocols for Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) play vital role in achieving the high performance together with longevity of the network. The researchers are continuously contributing in developing new transport layer protocols based on different principles and architectures enabling different combinations of technical features. The uniqueness of each new protocol more or less lies in these functional features, which can be commonly classified based on their proficiencies in fulfilling congestion control, reliability support, and prioritization. The performance of these protocols has been evaluated using dissimilar set of experimental/simulation parameters, thus there is no well defined benchmark for experimental/simulation settings. The researchers working in this area have to compare the performance of the new protocol with the existing protocols to prove that new protocol is better. However, one of the major challenges faced by the researchers is investigating the performance of all the existing protocols, which have been tested in different simulation environments. This leads the significance of having a well-defined benchmark for the experimental/simulation settings. If the future researchers simulate their protocols according to a standard set of simulation/experimental settings, the performance of those protocols can be directly compared with each other just using the published simulation results.This article offers a twofold contribution to support researchers working in the area of WSN transport protocol design. First, we extensively review the technical features of existing transport protocols and suggest a generic framework for a WSN transport protocol, which offers a strong groundwork for the new researchers to identify the open research issues. Second we analyse the experimental settings, focused application areas and the addressed performance criteria of existing protocols; thus suggest a benchmark of experimental/simulation settings for evaluating prospective transport protocols

Spammer and hacker, two old friends

Spammers are always looking for new ways to bypass filters and spread spam content. Currently, spammers have not only improved their spam methods but have also moved towards exploiting software security vulnerabilities in order to spread their spam content. Spammers use weaknesses inside web applications to inject their spam content into legitimate websites, redirect users to their own campaign, misuse web users resources, and hide their footprints. In this paper, we investigate security vulnerabilities that are exploited by spammers. We explain these security vulnerabilities, list their importance and provide a scenario of how spammers can exploit them. Additionally, we discuss two possible solutions to counter problems by patching and secure software development. The result of our work highlights importance of concerning security best-practices in developing secure software which lack of that would result to demotion of website popularity, blacklisting of website and lose of users' trust