Security techniques for intelligent spam sensing and anomaly detection in online social platforms

Copyright © 2020 Institute of Advanced Engineering and Science. All rights reserved. The recent advances in communication and mobile technologies made it easier to access and share information for most people worldwide. Among the most powerful information spreading platforms are the Online Social Networks (OSN)s that allow Internet-connected users to share different information such as instant messages, tweets, photos, and videos. Adding to that many governmental and private institutions use the OSNs such as Twitter for official announcements. Consequently, there is a tremendous need to provide the required level of security for OSN users. However, there are many challenges due to the different protocols and variety of mobile apps used to access OSNs. Therefore, traditional security techniques fail to provide the needed security and privacy, and more intelligence is required. Computational intelligence adds high-speed computation, fault tolerance, adaptability, and error resilience when used to ensure security in OSN apps. This research provides a comprehensive related work survey and investigates the application of artificial neural networks for intrusion detection systems and spam filtering for OSNs. In addition, we use the concept of social graphs and weighted cliques in the detection of suspicious behavior of certain online groups and to prevent further planned actions such as cyber/terrorist attacks before they happen

Improving the impact of power efficiency in mobile cloud applications using cloudlet model

© 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. The applications and services of Information and Communication Technologies are becoming a very essential part of our daily life. In addition, the spread of advanced technologies including the cloud and mobile cloud computing (MCC), wireless communication, and smart devices made it easy to access the internet and utilize unlimited number of services. For example, we use mobile applications to carry out critical tasks in hospitals, education, finance, and many others. This wide useful usage makes the smart devices an essential component of our daily life. The limited processing capacity and battery lifetime of mobile devices are considered main challenges. This challenge is increased when executing intensive applications. The MCC is believed to overcome these limitations. There are many models in MCC and one efficient model is the cloudlet-based computing. In this model, the mobile devices users communicate with the cloudlets using cheaper efficient technologies, and offload the job requests to be executed on the cloudlet rather than on the enterprise cloud or on the device itself. In this article, we investigated the cloudlet-based MCC architecture, and more specifically, the cooperative cloudlets model. In this model, the applications that require intensive computations such as image processing are offloaded from the mobile device to the nearest cloudlet. If the task cannot be accomplished at this cloudlet, the cloudlets cooperate with each other to accomplish the user request and send the results back to the user. To demonstrate the efficiency of this cooperative cloudlet-based MCC model, we conducted real experiments that execute selected applications such as: object code recognition, and array sorting to measure the delay and power consumption of the cloudlet-based system. Moreover, suitable cloud/mobile cloud simulators such as CloudSim and MCCSim will be used to perform simulation experiments and obtain time and power results

Security techniques for intelligent spam sensing and anomaly detection in online social platforms

Copyright © 2020 Institute of Advanced Engineering and Science. All rights reserved. The recent advances in communication and mobile technologies made it easier to access and share information for most people worldwide. Among the most powerful information spreading platforms are the Online Social Networks (OSN)s that allow Internet-connected users to share different information such as instant messages, tweets, photos, and videos. Adding to that many governmental and private institutions use the OSNs such as Twitter for official announcements. Consequently, there is a tremendous need to provide the required level of security for OSN users. However, there are many challenges due to the different protocols and variety of mobile apps used to access OSNs. Therefore, traditional security techniques fail to provide the needed security and privacy, and more intelligence is required. Computational intelligence adds high-speed computation, fault tolerance, adaptability, and error resilience when used to ensure security in OSN apps. This research provides a comprehensive related work survey and investigates the application of artificial neural networks for intrusion detection systems and spam filtering for OSNs. In addition, we use the concept of social graphs and weighted cliques in the detection of suspicious behavior of certain online groups and to prevent further planned actions such as cyber/terrorist attacks before they happen

Reconsidering big data security and privacy in cloud and mobile cloud systems

Large scale distributed systems in particular cloud and mobile cloud deployments provide great services improving people\u27s quality of life and organizational efficiency. In order to match the performance needs, cloud computing engages with the perils of peer-to-peer (P2P) computing and brings up the P2P cloud systems as an extension for federated cloud. Having a decentralized architecture built on independent nodes and resources without any specific central control and monitoring, these cloud deployments are able to handle resource provisioning at a very low cost. Hence, we see a vast amount of mobile applications and services that are ready to scale to billions of mobile devices painlessly. Among these, data driven applications are the most successful ones in terms of popularity or monetization. However, data rich applications expose other problems to consider including storage, big data processing and also the crucial task of protecting private or sensitive information. In this work, first, we go through the existing layered cloud architectures and present a solution addressing the big data storage. Secondly, we explore the use of P2P Cloud System (P2PCS) for big data processing and analytics. Thirdly, we propose an efficient hybrid mobile cloud computing model based on cloudlets concept and we apply this model to health care systems as a case study. Then, the model is simulated using Mobile Cloud Computing Simulator (MCCSIM). According to the experimental power and delay results, the hybrid cloud model performs up to 75% better when compared to the traditional cloud models. Lastly, we enhance our proposals by presenting and analyzing security and privacy countermeasures against possible attacks

Greener and Smarter Phones for Future Cities: Characterizing the Impact of GPS Signal Strength on Power Consumption

Smart cities appear as the next stage of urbanization aiming to not only exploit physical and digital infrastructure for urban development but also the intellectual and social capital as its core ingredient for urbanization. Smart cities harness the power of data from sensors in order to understand and manage city systems. The most important of these sensing devices are smartphones as they provide the most important means to connect the smart city systems with its citizens, allowing personalization n and cocreation. The battery lifetime of smartphones is one of the most important parameters in achieving good user experience for the device. Therefore, the management and the optimization of handheld device applications in relation to their power consumption are an important area of research. This paper investigates the relationship between the energy consumption of a localization application and the strength of the global positioning system (GPS) signal. This is an important focus, because location-based applications are among the top power-hungry applications. We conduct experiments on two android location-based applications, one developed by us, and the other one, off the shelf. We use the results from the measurements of the two applications to derive a mathematical model that describes the power consumption in smartphones in terms of SNR and the time to first fix. The results from this study show that higher SNR values of GPS signals do consume less energy, while low GPS signals causing faster battery drain (38% as compared with 13%). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that provides a quantitative understanding of how the poor strength (SNR) of satellite signals will cause relatively higher power drain from a smartphone\u27s battery

IoT Privacy and Security: Challenges and Solutions

Privacy and security are among the significant challenges of the Internet of Things (IoT). Improper device updates, lack of efficient and robust security protocols, user unawareness, and famous active device monitoring are among the challenges that IoT is facing. In this work, we are exploring the background of IoT systems and security measures, and identifying (a) different security and privacy issues, (b) approaches used to secure the components of IoT-based environments and systems, (c) existing security solutions, and (d) the best privacy models necessary and suitable for different layers of IoT driven applications. In this work, we proposed a new IoT layered model: generic and stretched with the privacy and security components and layers identification. The proposed cloud/edge supported IoT system is implemented and evaluated. The lower layer represented by the IoT nodes generated from the Amazon Web Service (AWS) as Virtual Machines. The middle layer (edge) implemented as a Raspberry Pi 4 hardware kit with support of the Greengrass Edge Environment in AWS. We used the cloud-enabled IoT environment in AWS to implement the top layer (the cloud). The security protocols and critical management sessions were between each of these layers to ensure the privacy of the users’ information. We implemented security certificates to allow data transfer between the layers of the proposed cloud/edge enabled IoT model. Not only is the proposed system model eliminating possible security vulnerabilities, but it also can be used along with the best security techniques to countermeasure the cybersecurity threats facing each one of the layers; cloud, edge, and IoT

How Secure Having IoT Devices in Our Homes?

Nowadays, technology has evolved to be in our daily lives to assist in making our lives easier. We now have technology helping us in our lives at home. Devices used to create our “smart home” have done a great deal in making our lives at home less burdensome, but sadly, these devices have secured our personal lives to be more accessible to outsiders. In this paper, the security of home smart devices and their communication will be researched by using other academic articles to support facts found. The operation of the devices will be discussed along with security risks and future trends on security attacks. The results found will be crucial to knowing exactly how well our own home is protected. After understanding where the risks lie and a demonstration of how hackers can take control of our smart home, solutions will be given to shield ourselves from security attacks. We protect our homes from physical threats by locking doors, but it is time we guard ourselves from cyber threats as well

Experimental Comparison of Simulation Tools for Efficient Cloud and Mobile Cloud Computing Applications

Cloud computing provides a convenient and on-demand access to virtually unlimited computing resources. Mobile cloud computing (MCC) is an emerging technology that integrates cloud computing technology with mobile devices. MCC provides access to cloud services for mobile devices. With the growing popularity of cloud computing, researchers in this area need to conduct real experiments in their studies. Setting up and running these experiments in real cloud environments are costly. However, modeling and simulation tools are suitable solutions that often provide good alternatives for emulating cloud computing environments. Several simulation tools have been developed especially for cloud computing. In this paper, we present the most powerful simulation tools in this research area. These include CloudSim, CloudAnalyst, CloudReports, CloudExp, GreenCloud, and iCanCloud. Also, we perform experiments for some of these tools to show their capabilities

Models versus Datasets: Reducing Bias through Building a Comprehensive IDS Benchmark

Today, deep learning approaches are widely used to build Intrusion Detection Systems for securing IoT environments. However, the models’ hidden and complex nature raises various concerns, such as trusting the model output and understanding why the model made certain decisions. Researchers generally publish their proposed model’s settings and performance results based on a specific dataset and a classification model but do not report the proposed model’s output and findings. Similarly, many researchers suggest an IDS solution by focusing only on a single benchmark dataset and classifier. Such solutions are prone to generating inaccurate and biased results. This paper overcomes these limitations in previous work by analyzing various benchmark datasets and various individual and hybrid deep learning classifiers towards finding the best IDS solution for IoT that is efficient, lightweight, and comprehensive in detecting network anomalies. We also showed the model’s localized predictions and analyzed the top contributing features impacting the global performance of deep learning models. This paper aims to extract the aggregate knowledge from various datasets and classifiers and analyze the commonalities to avoid any possible bias in results and increase the trust and transparency of deep learning models. We believe this paper’s findings will help future researchers build a comprehensive IDS based on well-performing classifiers and utilize the aggregated knowledge and the minimum set of significantly contributing features

Mobile Cloud Computing Model and Big Data Analysis for Healthcare Applications

Mobile devices are increasingly becoming an indispensable part of people\u27s daily life, facilitating to perform a variety of useful tasks. Mobile cloud computing integrates mobile and cloud computing to expand their capabilities and benefits and overcomes their limitations, such as limited memory, CPU power, and battery life. Big data analytics technologies enable extracting value from data having four Vs: volume, variety, velocity, and veracity. This paper discusses networked healthcare and the role of mobile cloud computing and big data analytics in its enablement. The motivation and development of networked healthcare applications and systems is presented along with the adoption of cloud computing in healthcare. A cloudlet-based mobile cloud-computing infrastructure to be used for healthcare big data applications is described. The techniques, tools, and applications of big data analytics are reviewed. Conclusions are drawn concerning the design of networked healthcare systems using big data and mobile cloud-computing technologies. An outlook on networked healthcare is given