Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) and Wireless Power Transfer (WPT) are both recognized as promising techniques, one is for solving the resource insufficient of mobile devices and the other is for powering the mobile device. Naturally, by integrating the two techniques, task will be capable of being executed by the harvested energy which makes it possible that less intrinsic energy consumption for task execution. However, this innovative integration is facing several challenges inevitably. In this paper, we aim at prolonging the battery life of mobile device for which we need to maximize the harvested energy and minimize the consumed energy simultaneously, which is formulated as residual energy maximization (REM) problem where the offloading ratio, energy harvesting time, CPU frequency and transmission power of mobile device are all considered as key factors. To this end, we jointly optimize the offloading ratio, energy harvesting time, CPU frequency and transmission power of mobile device to solve the REM problem. Furthermore, we propose an efficient convex optimization and sequential unconstrained minimization technique based combining method to solve the formulated multi-constrained nonlinear optimization problem. The result shows that our joint optimization outperforms the single optimization on REM problem. Besides, the proposed algorithm is more efficiency.

Internet of things (IoT) is based on a global dynamic information network with cloud services where a great number of devices (things) exchange data to provide added-value services and products. There are several commercial and open source IoT platforms available in the market to connect devices to internet; however, they have cost and operational constraints that make them not suitable for academic projects. In this work, an IoT platform, known as Novus-io, is introduced in order to support academic projects for undergraduate students. With this platform and proper training, undergraduate students from different majors (not only from information technology and electronics) are capable to upgrade their school projects with IoT functionalities. The objective of this approach is to provide to any undergraduate student skills and knowledge on IoT, so they will be prepared, in their imminent step toward professionalism, to understand the relevance of digital services in today's world.

Driven by security and real-time demands of Internet of Things (IoT), the timing of fog computing and edge computing have gradually come into place. Gateways bear more nearby computing, storage, analysis and as an intelligent broker of the whole computing lifecycle in between local devices and the remote cloud. In fog computing, the edge broker requires X-aware capabilities that combines software programmability, stream processing, hardware optimization and various connectivity to deal with such as security, data abstraction, network latency, service classification and workload allocation strategy. The prosperous of Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) pushes the possibility of gateway capabilities further landed. In this paper, we propose a software-defined gateway (SDG) scheme for fog computing paradigm termed as Fog Computing Zero-Knowledge Gateway that strengthens data protection and resilience merits designed for industrial internet of things or highly privacy concerned hybrid cloud scenarios. It is a proxy for fog nodes and able to integrate with existing commodity gateways. The contribution is that it converts Privacy-Enhancing Technologies rules into provable statements without knowing original sensitive data and guarantees privacy rules applied to the sensitive data before being propagated while preventing potential leakage threats. Some logical functions can be offloaded to any programmable micro-controller embedded to achieve higher computing efficiency.

The new mobile edge network architecture has been required for an increasing amount of traffic, quality requirements, advanced driver assistance system for autonomous driving and new cloud computing demands on highway. This article proposes a hierarchical cloud computing architecture to enhance performance by using adaptive data load distribution for buses that play the role of edge computing server. A vehicular dynamic cloud is based on wireless architecture including Wireless Local Area Network and Long Term Evolution Advanced communication is used for data transmission between moving buses and cars. The main advantages of the proposed architecture include both a reduction of data loading for top layer cloud server and effective data distribution on traffic jam highway where moving vehicles require video on demand (VOD) services from server. Through the description of real environment based on NS-2 network simulation, we conducted experiments to validate the proposed new architecture. Moreover, we show the feasibility and effectiveness for the connected car media service on highway.

Cyber intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) has become more important than traditional military ISR. An agent used in cyber ISR resides in an enemy's networks and continually collects valuable information. Thus, this agent should be able to determine what is, and is not, useful in a short amount of time. Moreover, the agent should maintain a classification rate that is high enough to select useful data from the enemy's network. Traditional feature selection algorithms cannot comply with these requirements. Consequently, in this paper, we propose an effective hybrid feature selection method derived from the filter and wrapper methods. We illustrate the design of the proposed model and the experimental results of the performance comparison between the proposed model and the existing model.

The continuous increase in the cost of energy production and concerns for environmental sustainability are leading research communities, governments and industries to amass efforts to reduce energy consumption and global $CO_2$ footprint. Players in the information and communication industry are keen on reducing the operational expenditures (OpEx) and maintaining the profitability of cellular networks. Meanwhile, network virtualization has been proposed in this regard as the main enabler for 5G mobile cellular networks. In this paper, we propose a generic framework of slice resource provisioning and customized physical resource allocation for energy-efficiency and quality of service optimization. In resource slicing, we consider user demand and population resources provisioning scheme aiming to satisfy quality of service (QoS). In customized physical resource allocation, we formulate this problem with an integer non-linear programming model, which is solved by a heuristic algorithm based on minimum vertex coverage. The proposed algorithm is compared with the existing approaches, without consideration of slice resource constraints via system-level simulations. From the perspective of infrastructure providers, traffic is scheduled over a limited number of active small-cell base stations (sc-BSs) that significantly reduce the system energy consumption and improve the system's spectral efficiency. From the perspective of virtual network operators and mobile users, the proposed approach can guarantee QoS for mobile users and improve user satisfaction.

The evolving internet-based services demand high-speed data transmission in conjunction with scalability. The next generation optical network has to exploit artificial intelligence and cognitive techniques to cope with the emerging requirements. This work proposes a novel way to solve the dynamic provisioning problem in optical network. The provisioning in optical network involves the computation of routes and the reservation of wavelenghs (Routing and Wavelength assignment-RWA). This is an extensively studied multi-objective optimization problem and its complexity is known to be NP-Complete. As the exact algorithms incurs more running time, the heuristic based approaches have been widely preferred to solve this problem. Recently the software-defined networking has impacted the way the optical pipes are configured and monitored. This work proposes the dynamic selection of path computation algorithms in response to the changing service requirements and network scenarios. A software-defined controller mechanism with a novel packet matching feature was proposed to dynamically match the traffic demands with the appropriate algorithm. A software-defined controller with Path Computation Element-PCE was created in the ONOS tool. A simulation study was performed with the case study of dynamic path establishment in ONOS-Open Network Operating System based software defined controller environment. A java based NOX controller was configured with a parent path computation element. The child path computation elements were configured with different path computation algorithms under the control of the parent path computation element. The use case of dynamic bulk path creation was considered. The algorithm selection method is compared with the existing single algorithm based method and the results are analyzed.

In Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) for Internet of Things (IoT) environment, fault tolerance is a most fundamental issue due to strict energy constraint of sensor node. In this paper, a robust energy saving data dissemination protocol for IoT-WSNs is proposed. Minimized energy consumption and dissemination delay time based on signal strength play an important role in our scheme. The representative dissemination protocol SPIN (Sensor Protocols for Information via Negotiation) overcomes overlapped data problem of the classical Flooding scheme. However, SPIN never considers distance between nodes, thus the issue of dissemination energy consumption is becoming more important problem. In order to minimize the energy consumption, the shortest path between sensors should be considered to disseminate the data through the entire IoT-WSNs. SPMS (Shortest Path Mined SPIN) scheme creates routing tables using Bellman Ford method and forwards data through a multi-hop manner to optimize power consumption and delay time. Due to these properties, it is very hard to avoid heavy traffic when routing information is updated. Additionally, a node failure of SPMS would be caused by frequently using some sensors on the shortest path, thus network lifetime might be shortened quickly. In contrast, our scheme is resilient to these failures because it employs energy aware concept. The dissemination delay time of the proposed protocol without a routing table is similar to that of shortest path-based SPMS. In addition, our protocol does not require routing table, which needs a lot of control packets, thus it prevents excessive control message generation. Finally, the proposed scheme outperforms previous schemes in terms of data transmission success ratio, therefore our protocol could be appropriate for IoT-WSNs environment.

Extreme learning machine (ELM) is emerging as a powerful machine learning method in a variety of application scenarios due to its promising advantages of high accuracy, fast learning speed and easy of implementation. However, how to select the optimal hidden layer of ELM is still an open question in the ELM community. Basically, the number of hidden layer nodes is a sensitive hyperparameter that significantly affects the performance of ELM. To address this challenging problem, we propose to adopt multiple kernel learning (MKL) to design a multi-hidden-layer-kernel ELM (MHLK-ELM). Specifically, we first integrate kernel functions with random feature mapping of ELM to design a hidden-layer-kernel ELM (HLK-ELM), which serves as the base of MHLK-ELM. Then, we utilize the MKL method to propose two versions of MHLK-ELMs, called sparse and non-sparse MHLK-ELMs. Both two types of MHLK-ELMs can effectively find out the optimal linear combination of multiple HLK-ELMs for different classification and regression problems. Experimental results on seven data sets, among which three data sets are relevant to classification and four ones are relevant to regression, demonstrate that the proposed MHLK-ELM achieves superior performance compared with conventional ELM and basic HLK-ELM.

With the development of GPS and the popularity of mobile devices with positioning capability, collecting massive amounts of trajectory data is feasible and easy. The daily trajectories of moving objects convey a concise overview of their behaviors. Different social roles have different trajectory patterns. Therefore, we can identify users or groups based on similar trajectory patterns by mining implicit life patterns. However, most existing daily trajectories mining studies mainly focus on the spatial and temporal analysis of raw trajectory data but missing the essential semantic information or behaviors. In this paper, we propose a novel trajectory semantics calculation method to identify groups that have similar behaviors. In our model, we first propose a fast and efficient approach for stay regions extraction from daily trajectories, then generate semantic trajectories by enriching the stay regions with semantic labels. To measure the similarity between semantic trajectories, we design a semantic similarity measure model based on spatial and temporal similarity factor. Furthermore, a pruning strategy is proposed to lighten tedious calculations and comparisons. We have conducted extensive experiments on real trajectory dataset of Geolife project, and the experimental results show our proposed method is both effective and efficient.

Interference may occur when several co-located wireless body area networks (WBANs) share the same channel simultaneously, which is compressed by resource scheduling generally. In this paper, a QoS-aware Adaptive Coloring (QAC) scheduling algorithm is proposed, which contains two components: interference sets determination and time slots assignment. The highlight of QAC is to determine the interference graph based on the relay scheme and adapted to the network QoS by multi-coloring approach. However, the frequent resource assignment brings in extra energy consumption and packet loss. Thus we come up with a launch condition for the QAC scheduling algorithm, that is if the interference duration is longer than a threshold predetermined, time slots rescheduling is activated. Furthermore, based on the relative distance and moving speed between WBANs, a prediction model for interference duration is proposed. The simulation results show that compared with the state-of-the-art approaches, the QAC scheduling algorithm has better performance in terms of network capacity, average delay and resource utility.

Considering the topology of hierarchical tree structure, each cluster in WSNs is faced with various attacks launched by malicious nodes, which include network eavesdropping, channel interference and data tampering. The existing intrusion detection algorithm does not take into consideration the resource constraints of cluster heads and sensor nodes. Due to application requirements, sensor nodes in WSNs are deployed with approximately uncorrelated security weights. In our study, a novel and versatile intrusion detection system (IDS) for the optimal defense strategy is primarily introduced. Given the flexibility that wireless communication provides, it is unreasonable to expect malicious nodes will demonstrate a fixed behavior over time. Instead, malicious nodes can dynamically update the attack strategy in response to the IDS in each game stage. Thus, a multi-stage intrusion detection game (MIDG) based on Bayesian rules is proposed. In order to formulate the solution of MIDG, an in-depth analysis on the Bayesian equilibrium is performed iteratively. Depending on the MIDG theoretical analysis, the optimal behaviors of rational attackers and defenders are derived and calculated accurately. The numerical experimental results validate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed scheme.

The widespread adoption of the social computing paradigm has ushered in the development of online social innovation community (OSIC) as a promising method for solving social problems. Previous studies have not explicitly considered the conceptual factors that facilitate these communities' users' innovative activities, so it is vital to conduct empirical studies to verify the effectiveness of these factors. In this paper, the primary goals are to construct a theoretical model of the social innovation and empirically verify the casual relationship between theoretical factors and societal innovativeness. A survey of 398 OSIC users was conducted to empirically validate the theoretical model. The causal relationships between network characteristics and social innovativeness were experimentally tested. The results of this study indicated that ambiguity, switching, and multiplexity are important factors that facilitate social innovativeness, which contradicts the prior assumptions about innovation performance.

A single snapshot data can only provide limited amount of information so that the rank of covariance matrix is not full, which is not adopted to complete the parameter estimation directly using the traditional super-resolution method. Aiming at solving the problem, a joint time delay and angle estimation using matrix pencil method based on information reconstruction vector for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signal is proposed. Firstly, according to the channel frequency response vector of each array element, the algorithm reconstructs the vector data with delay and angle parameter information from both frequency and space dimensions. Then the enhanced data matrix for the extended array element is constructed, and the parameter vector of time delay and angle is estimated by the two-dimensional matrix pencil (2D MP) algorithm. Finally, the joint estimation of two-dimensional parameters is accomplished by the parameter pairing. The algorithm does not need a pseudo-spectral peak search, and the location of the target can be determined only by a single receiver, which can reduce the overhead of the positioning system. The theoretical analysis and simulation results show that the estimation accuracy of the proposed method in a single snapshot and low signal-to-noise ratio environment is much higher than that of Root Multiple Signal Classification algorithm (Root-MUSIC), and this method also achieves the higher estimation performance and efficiency with lower complexity cost compared to the one-dimensional matrix pencil algorithm.

With the popularity of mobile networks and smartphones, geo-textual publish/subscribe messaging has attracted wide attention. Different from the traditional publish/subscribe format, geo-textual data is published and subscribed in the form of dynamic data flow in the mobile network. The difference creates more requirements for efficiency and flexibility. However, most of the existing Top-k geo-textual publish/subscribe schemes have the following deficiencies: (1) All publications have to be scored for each subscription, which is not efficient enough. (2) A user should take time to set a threshold for each subscription, which is not flexible enough. Therefore, we propose an efficient and flexible Top-k geo-textual publish/subscribe scheme. First, our scheme groups publish and subscribe based on text classification. Thus, only a few parts of related publications should be scored for each subscription, which significantly enhances efficiency. Second, our scheme proposes an adaptive publish/subscribe matching algorithm. The algorithm does not require the user to set a threshold. It can adaptively return Top-k results to the user for each subscription, which significantly enhances flexibility. Finally, theoretical analysis and experimental evaluation verify the efficiency and effectiveness of our scheme.

In this paper, the downlink performance of multi-cell distributed antenna systems (DAS) with a single user in each cell is investigated. Assuming the channel state information is available at the transmitter, four transmission modes are formulated as combinations of remote antenna units (RAUs) selection and cooperative transmission, namely, non-cooperative transmission without RAU selection (NCT), cooperative transmission without RAU selection (CT), non-cooperative transmission with RAU selection (NCT_RAUS), and cooperative transmission with RAU selection (CT_RAUS). By using probability theory, the cumulative distribution function (CDF) of a user's signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) and the system ergodic capacity under the above four modes are determined, and their closed-form expressions are obtained. Furthermore, the system energy efficiency (EE) is studied by introducing a realistic power consumption model of DAS. An expression for determining EE is formulated, and the closed-form tradeoff relationship between spectral efficiency (SE) and EE is derived as well. Simulation results demonstrate their consistency with the theoretical analysis and reveal the factors constraining system EE, which provide a scientific basis for future design and optimization of DAS.

Adaptive Multi-Rate Codec is one of the codecs which is used for making voice calls. It helps to connect people who are scattered in various geographical areas. It adjusts its bit-rate according to the user's channel conditions. It plays a vital role in providing an improved speech quality of voice connection in Long Term Evolution (LTE). There are some constraints which need to be addressed in providing this service profitably. Quality of Service (QoS) is the dominant mechanism which determines the quality of the speech in communication. On several occasions, number of users are trying to access the same channel simultaneously by standing in a particular region for a longer period of time. It refers to Multi-user channel sharing problem which leads to resource loss very often. The main aim of this paper is to develop a novel RSA - QoS scheduling algorithm for reducing the Resource Loss Ratio. Eventually, it increases the throughput.The simulation result shows that the RSA - QoS increases the number of users for accessing the resources better than the existing algorithms in terms of resource loss and throughput. Ultimately, it enhances the QoS in Mobile Networks.

Eight out of the top ten the largest technology companies in the world are involved in some way with the coming mobile VR revolution since Facebook acquired Oculus. This trend has allowed the technology related with mobile VR to achieve remarkable growth in both academic and industry. Therefore, the importance of reproducing the acoustic expression for users to experience more realistic is increasing because auditory cues can enhance the perception of the complicated surrounding environment without the visual system in VR. This paper presents a audio downmixing system for auralization based on hardware, a stage of sound rendering pipelines that can reproduce realiy-like sound but requires high computation costs. The proposed system is verified through an FPGA platform with the special focus on hardware architectural designs for low power and real-time. The results show that the proposed system on an FPGA can downmix maximum 5 sources in real-time rate (52 FPS), with 382 mW low power consumptions. Furthermore, the generated 3D sound with the proposed system was verified with satisfactory results of sound quality via the user evaluation.

Performance of the interpolation algorithm used in the technique of bi-dimensional empirical mode decomposition directly affects its popularization and application, so that the researchers pay more attention to the algorithm reasonable, accurate and fast. However, it has been a lack of an adaptive interpolation algorithm that is relatively satisfactory for the bi-dimensional empirical mode decomposition (BEMD) and is derived from the image characteristics. In view of this, this paper proposes an image interpolation algorithm based on the particle swarm and fractal. Its procedure includes: to analyze the given image by using the fractal brown function, to pick up the feature quantity from the image, and then to operate the adaptive image interpolation in terms of the obtained feature quantity. All parameters involved in the interpolation process are determined by using the particle swarm optimization algorithm. The presented interpolation algorithm can solve those problems of low efficiency and poor precision in the interpolation operation of bi-dimensional empirical mode decomposition and can also result in accurate and reliable bi-dimensional intrinsic modal functions with higher speed in the decomposition of the image. It lays the foundation for the further popularization and application of the bi-dimensional empirical mode decomposition algorithm.

Pedestrian detection is a challenging area in the intelligent vehicles domain. During the last years, many works have been proposed to efficiently detect motion in images. However, the problem becomes more complex when it comes to detecting moving areas while the vehicle is also moving. This paper presents a variational optical flow-based method for motion estimation in vehicular traffic scenarios. We introduce a framework for detecting motion areas with small and large displacements by computing optical flow using a multilevel architecture. The flow field is estimated at the shortest level and then successively computed until the largest level. We include a filtering parameter and a warping process using bicubic interpolation to combine the intermediate flow fields computed at each level during optimization to gain better performance. Furthermore, we find that by including a penalization function, our system is able to effectively reduce the presence of outliers and deal with all expected circumstances in real scenes. Experimental results are performed on various image sequences from Daimler Pedestrian Dataset that includes urban traffic scenarios. Our evaluation demonstrates that despite the complexity of the evaluated scenes, the motion areas with both moving and static camera can be effectively identified.

This paper presents a new descriptor, named Histograms of Prominent Edge Directions (HPED), for the recognition of facial expressions in a person-independent environment. In this paper, we raise the issue of sampling error in generating the code-histogram from spatial regions of the face image, as observed in the existing descriptors. HPED describes facial appearance changes based on the statistical distribution of the top two prominent edge directions (i.e., primary and secondary direction) captured over small spatial regions of the face. Compared to existing descriptors, HPED uses a smaller number of code-bins to describe the spatial regions, which helps avoid sampling error despite having fewer samples while preserving the valuable spatial information. In contrast to the existing Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) that uses the histogram of the primary edge direction (i.e., gradient orientation) only, we additionally consider the histogram of the secondary edge direction, which provides more meaningful shape information related to the local texture. Experiments on popular facial expression datasets demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed HPED against existing descriptors in a person-independent environment.

Fires are a common cause of catastrophic personal injuries and devastating property damage. Every year, many fires occur and threaten human lives and property around the world. Providing early important sign for early fire detection, and therefore the detection of smoke is always the first step in fire-alarm systems. In this paper we propose an automatic smoke detection system built on camera surveillance and image processing technologies. The key features used in our algorithm are to detect and track smoke as moving objects and distinguish smoke from non-smoke objects using a convolutional neural network (CNN) model for cascade classification. The results of our experiment, in comparison with those of some earlier studies, show that the proposed algorithm is very effective not only in detecting smoke, but also in reducing false positives.

This paper describes two user studies in remote collaboration between two users with a video conferencing system where a remote user can draw annotations on the live video of the local user's workspace. In these two studies, the local user had the control of the view when sharing the first-person view, but our interfaces provided instant control of the shared view to the remote users. The first study investigates methods for assisting drawing annotations. The auto-freeze method, a novel solution for drawing annotations, is compared to a prior solution (manual freeze method) and a baseline (non-freeze) condition. Results show that both local and remote users preferred the auto-freeze method, which is easy to use and allows users to quickly draw annotations. The manual-freeze method supported precise drawing, but was less preferred because of the need for manual input. The second study explores visual notification for better local user awareness. We propose two designs: the red-box and both-freeze notifications, and compare these to the baseline, no notification condition. Users preferred the less obtrusive red-box notification that improved awareness of when annotations were made by remote users, and had a significantly lower level of interruption compared to the both-freeze condition.

Smart home systems provide a safe, comfortable, and convenient living environment for users, whereby users enjoy featured home services supported by the data collected and generated by smart devices in smart home systems. However, existing smart devices lack sufficient protection in terms of data security and privacy, and challenging security and privacy issues inevitably emerge when using these data. This article aims to address these challenging issues by proposing a private blockchain-based access control (PBAC) scheme. PBAC involves employing a private blockchain to provide an unforgeable and auditable foundation for smart home systems, that can thwart illegal data access, and ensure the accuracy, integrity, and timeliness of access records. A detailed security analysis shows that PBAC could preserve data security against various attacks. In addition, we conduct a comprehensive performance evaluation to demonstrate that PBAC is feasible and efficient.

Safety-related systems (SRSs) has widely used in shipbuilding and power generation to prevent fatal accidents and to protect life and property. Thus, SRS performance is a high priority. The safety integrity level (SIL) is the relative performance level of an SRS with regard to its ability to operate reliably in a safe manner. In this article, we proposed an optimal design procedure to achieve the targeted SIL of SRSs. In addition, a more efficient failure mode and effects diagnostic analysis (FMEDA) process and optimization model were developed to improve cost efficiency. Based on previous IEC 61508 diagnostic analyses that revealed unnecessary costs associated with excessive reliability, the new approach consists of two phases: (i) SIL evaluation by FMEDA, and (ii) solution optimization for achieving the target SIL with minimal cost using integer-programming models. The proposed procedure meets the required safety level and minimizes system costs. A case study involving a gas-detection SRS was conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the new procedure.

Cache-based side-channel attacks have achieved more attention along with the development of cloud computing technologies. However, current host-based mitigation methods either provide bad compatibility with current cloud infrastructure, or turn out too application-specific. Besides, they are defending blindly without any knowledge of on-going attacks. In this work, we present CacheSCDefender, a framework that provides a (Virtual Machine Monitor) VMM-based comprehensive defense framework against all levels of cache attacks. In designing CacheSCDefender, we make three key contributions: (1) an attack-aware framework combining our novel dynamic remapping and traditional cache cleansing, which provides a comprehensive defense against all three cases of cache attacks that we identify in this paper; (2) a new defense method called dynamic remapping which is a developed version of random permutation and is able to deal with two cases of cache attacks; (3) formalization and quantification of security improvement and performance overhead of our defense, which can be applicable to other defense methods. We show that CacheSCDefender is practical for deployment in normal virtualized environment, while providing favorable security guarantee for virtual machines.

Named data networking (NDN) is a new network architecture designed for next generation Internet. Router-side content caching is one of the key features in NDN, which can reduce redundant transmission, accelerate content distribution and alleviate congestion. However, several security problems are introduced as well. One important security risk is cache privacy leakage. By measuring the content retrieve time, adversary can infer its neighbor users' hobby for privacy content. Focusing on this problem, we propose a cache privacy protection mechanism (named as CPPM-DAM) to identify legitimate user and adversary using Bloom filter. An optimization for storage cost is further provided to make this mechanism more practical. The simulation results of ndnSIM show that CPPM-DAM can effectively protect cache privacy.

For ease of use and access, web browsers are now being used to access and modify sensitive data and systems including critical control systems. Due to their computational capabilities and network connectivity, browsers are vulnerable to several types of attacks, even when fully updated. Browsers are also the main target of phishing attacks. Many browser attacks, including phishing, could be prevented or mitigated by using site-, user-, and device-specific security configurations. However, we discovered that all major browsers expose disparate security configuration procedures, option names, values, and semantics. This results in an extremely hard to secure web browsing ecosystem. We analyzed more than a 1000 browser security configuration options in three major browsers and found that only 13 configuration options had syntactic and semantic similarity, while 4 configuration options had semantic similarity, but not syntactic similarity. We: a) describe the results of our in-depth analysis of browser security configuration options; b) demonstrate the complexity of policy-based configuration of web browsers; c) describe a knowledge-based solution that would enable organizations to implement highly-granular and policy-level secure configurations for their information and operational technology browsing infrastructures at the enterprise scale; and d) argue for necessity of developing a common language and semantics for web browser configurations.

Pseudorandom numbers are useful in cryptographic operations for using as nonce, initial vector, secret key, etc. Security of the cryptosystem relies on the secret key parameters, so a good pseudorandom number is needed. In this paper, we have proposed a new approach for generation of pseudorandom number. This method uses the three dimensional combinational puzzle Rubik Cube for generation of random numbers. The number of possible combinations of the cube approximates to 43 quintillion. The large possible combination of the cube increases the complexity of brute force attack on the generator. The generator uses cryptographic hash function. Chaotic map is being employed for increasing random behavior. The pseudorandom sequence generated can be used for cryptographic applications. The generated sequences are tested for randomness using NIST Statistical Test Suite and other testing methods. The result of the tests and analysis proves that the generated sequences are random.

In order to achieve the goal of protecting medical images, some existing watermark techniques for medical image protection mainly focus on improving the invisibility and robustness properties of the method, in order to prevent unnecessary medical disputes. This paper proposes a novel copyright method for medical image protection based on visual secret sharing (VSS) and cellular automata transform (CAT). This method uses the protected medical image feature as well as VSS and a watermark to produce the ownership share image (OSI). The OSI is used for medical image verification and must be registered to a certified authority. In the watermark extraction process, the suspected medical image is used to generate a master share image (MSI). The watermark can be extracted by combining the MSI and the OSI. Different from other traditional methods, the proposed method does not need to modify the medical image in order to protect the copyright of the image. Moreover, the registered OSI used to verify the ownership and its appearance display meaningful information, facilitating image management. Finally, the results of the final experiment can prove the effectiveness of our method.