Forensic taxonomy of android productivity apps

Android productivity apps have provided the facility of having a constantly accessible and productive workforce to the information and work capabilities needed by the users. With hundreds of productivity apps available in the Android app market, it is necessary to develop a taxonomy for the forensic investigators and the end users to allow them to know what personal data remnants are available from the productivity apps. In this paper, 30 popular Android productivity apps were examined. A logical extraction of the Android phone was collected by using a well-known mobile forensic tool- XRY to extract various information of forensic interest such as user email ID and list of tasks. Based on the findings, a two-dimensional taxonomy of the forensic artefacts of the productivity apps is proposed with the app categories in one dimension and the classes of artefacts in the other dimension. The artefacts identified in the study of the apps are summarised using the taxonomy. In addition, a comparison with the existing forensic taxonomies of different categories of Android apps is provided to facilitate timely collection and analysis of evidentiary materials from mobile devices.     

Tamper detection and image recovery for BTC-compressed images

To ensure the integrity of images compressed using block truncation coding (BTC), a tamper detection and image recovery scheme is proposed in this paper. In this scheme, the size of the authentication data can be adaptively selected according to the user’s requirement. The authentication data is embedded in the value differences of the quantization levels in each BTC-compressed image block. Multiple copies of the recovery data are embedded into the bit maps of the smooth blocks. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme performs well in terms of detection precision and the embedded image quality. Meanwhile, the tampered areas can be roughly recovered by using the proposed scheme.     

Artificial intelligence in cyber security: research advances,challenges, and opportunities

Artificial Intelligence Review - In recent times, there have been attempts to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) techniques in a broad range of cyber security applications. Therefore, this paper...     

Visualizing for the Non‐Visual: Enabling the Visually Impaired to Use Visualization

The majority of visualizations on the web are still stored as raster images, making them inaccessible to visually impaired users. We propose a deep‐neural‐network‐based approach that automatically recognizes key elements in a visualization, including a visualization type, graphical elements, labels, legends, and most importantly, the original data conveyed in the visualization. We leverage such extracted information to provide visually impaired people with the reading of the extracted information. Based on interviews with visually impaired users, we built a Google Chrome extension designed to work with screen reader software to automatically decode charts on a webpage using our pipeline. We compared the performance of the back‐end algorithm with existing methods and evaluated the utility using qualitative feedback from visually impaired users.     

Entropies for detection of epilepsy in EEG

The electroencephalogram (EEG) is a representative signal containing information about the condition of the brain. The shape of the wave may contain useful information about the state of the brain. However, the human observer cannot directly monitor these subtle details. Besides, since bio-signals are highly subjective, the symptoms may appear at random in the time scale. Therefore, the EEG signal parameters, extracted and analyzed using computers, are highly useful in diagnostics. The aim of this work is to compare the different entropy estimators when applied to EEG data from normal and epileptic subjects. The results obtained indicate that entropy estimators can distinguish normal and epileptic EEG data with more than 95% confidence (using t-test). The classification ability of the entropy measures is tested using ANFIS classifier. The results are promising and a classification accuracy of about 90% is achieved.     

Performance enhancement of TCP in high-speed networks

GridFTP is a secure and reliable high-performance parallel data transfer protocol used for transferring massive amounts of widely distributed data. Currently it allows users to configure the number of parallel streams and socket buffer size. However, its tuning procedure for optimal combination is a time consuming task. The socket handlers and buffers are important system resources and must therefore be carefully managed. In this paper, we propose a scheme to achieve high throughput even with a smaller buffer size, and also derive a regression equation to predict the optimal combination of resources for a connection. To improve the performance, the TCP based on our scheme obtains higher throughput and spends less memory for the same throughput than the original TCP scheme. In addition, the regression equation is verified by comparing measured and predicted values, and we apply the equation to an actual experiment on the KOrea advanced REsearch Network (KOREN). The result demonstrates that the equation provides excellent predictions with only an 8% error boundary.     

A password based authentication scheme for wireless multimedia systems

In this digital era, where Internet of Things (IoT) is increasing day by day, use of resource constrained devices is also increasing. Indeed, the features such as low cost, less maintenance, more adaptive to hostile environment, etc. make the wireless multimedia devices to be the best choice as the resource constrained devices. For the security, the end user device requires to establish the session key with the server before transferring the data. Mobile is one of the device having more and more usage as wireless multimedia device in recent years. In 2013, Li et al. proposed an efficient scheme for the wireless mobile communications and claimed it to be secure against various attacks. Recently, Shen et al. claimed that the scheme of Li et al. is still vulnerable to the privileged insider attack, the stolen verifier attack and finally proposed a scheme to withstand the mentioned and other attacks. However, in this paper we claim that the scheme of Shen et al. is still susceptible to the user anonymity, the session specific temporary information attack and the replay attack. In addition, Shen et al.’s scheme requires more time due to many operations. Further, we propose an efficient scheme that is secure against various known attacks and due to reduced time complexity our scheme is a preferred choice for the wireless mobile networks and hence for wireless multimedia systems.     

Correlation of microstructure with the wear resistance and fracture toughness of hardfacing alloys reinforced with complex carbides

A correlation was made of the microstructure, wear resistance, and fracture toughness of hardfacing alloys reinforced with complex carbides. The hardfacing alloys were deposited twice on a low-carbon steel substrate by a submerged arc welding (SAW) method. In order to investigate the effect of complex carbides, different fractions of complex carbide powders included inside hardfacing electrodes were employed. Microstructural analysis of the hardfaced layer showed that cuboidal carbides, in which a TiC carbide core was encircled by a WC carbide, and rod-type carbides, in which W and Ti were mixed, were homogeneously distributed in the bainitic matrix. In the surface layer hardfaced with FeWTiC powders, more complex carbides were formed, because of the efficient melting and solidification during hardfacing, than in the case of hardfacing with WTiC powders. As the volume fraction of complex carbides, particularly that of cuboidal carbides, increased, the hardness and wear resistance increased. In-situ observation of the fracture process showed that microcracks were initiated at complex carbides and that shear bands were formed between them, leading to ductile fracture. The hardness, wear resistance, and fracture toughness of the hardfacing alloys reinforced with complex carbides were improved in comparison with high-chromium white-iron hardfacing alloys, because of the homogeneous distribution of hard and fine complex carbides in the bainitic matrix.     

On bandwidth adjusted multicast communications in pipeline router architecture

We have developed a novel algorithm to adjust link-bandwidths of a given multicast tree, which sends a message with sizer from a source to a multiple destinations taking into consideration pipelined router. The algorithm that we have developed tries to minimize the end-to-end delay time and resources such as bandwidths of a multicast tree, and performs admirably well in any given multicast tree. Our evaluation shows that the proposed algorithm dramatically reduces the end-to-end delay time and resources reserved to satisfy the time-constraints. This work was supported in parts by BK21 and the Ministry of Information and Communication, Korea. Corresponding author: H. Choo.