Thanks to internet, as one of indispensable parts of our lives, many devices that we use in our daily lives like TV, air conditioner, refrigerator, washing machine, can be monitored and controlled remotely by becoming more intelligent via Internet of Things (IoT) technology. Smart Home applications as one of the elements of smart cities, are individually the most demanded application without question. In this study, Smart Energy Management (SEM) system, based on NodeMCU and Android, has been designed for SEM, which is a part of the smart home application. With this system, household energy consumption can be monitored in real time, as well as having the ability to record the data comprising of operation times and energy consumption information for each device. Additionally, it is ensured to meet the energy needs on a maximized level possible, during the hours when the energy costs are lower owing to the SEM system. The Android interface provides the users with the opportunity to monitor and change their electricity consumption habits in order to optimize the energy efficiency, along with the opportunity to draw up of a daily and weekly schedule.

With the help of learning analytics, MOOCs have wider potential to succeed in learning through promoting self-regulated learning (SRL). The current study aims to apply and validate visualization design guidelines for a MOOC dashboard to enhance such SRL capabilities based on learning analytics. To achieve the research objective, a MOOC dashboard prototype, LM-Dashboard, was designed and developed, reflecting the visualization design guidelines to promote SRL. Then, both expert and learner participants evaluated LM-Dashboard through iterations to validate the visualization design guidelines and perceived SRL effectiveness. The results of expert and learner evaluations indicated that most of the visualization design guidelines on LM-Dashboard were valid and some perceived SRL aspects such as monitoring a student's learning progress and assessing their achievements with time management were beneficial. However, some features on LM-Dashboard should be improved to enhance SRL aspects related to achieving their learning goals with persistence. The findings suggest that it is necessary to offer appropriate feedback or tips as well as to visualize learner behaviors and activities in an intuitive and efficient way for the successful cycle of SRL. Consequently, this study contributes to establishing a basis for the visual design of a MOOC dashboard for optimizing each learner's SRL.

Container technologies are widely used in infrastructures to deploy and manage applications in cloud computing environment. As containers are light-weight software, the cluster of cloud applications can easily scale up or down to provide Internet-based services. Container-based applications can well deal with fluctuate workloads by dynamically adjusting physical resources. Current works of scheduling applications often construct applications' performance models with collected historical training data, but these works with static models cannot self-adjust physical resources to meet the dynamic requirements of cloud computing. Thus, we propose a self-adaptive automatic container scheduling framework AutoScale for cloud applications, which uses a feedback-based approach to adjust physical resources by extending, contracting and migrating containers. First, a queue-based performance model for cloud applications is proposed to correlate performance and workloads. Second, a fuzzy Kalman filter is used to adjust the performance model's parameters to accurately predict applications' response time. Third, extension, contraction and migration strategies based on predicted response time are designed to schedule containers at runtime. Furthermore, we have implemented a framework AutoScale with container scheduling strategies. By comparing with current approaches in an experiment environment deployed with typical applications, we observe that AutoScale has advantages in predicting response time, and scheduling containers to guarantee that response time keeps stable in fluctuant workloads.

Traditional channel models for vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication usually assume fixed velocity in static scattering environment. In the realistic scenarios, however, time-variant velocity for V2V results in non-stationary statistical properties of wireless channels. Dynamic scatterers with random velocities and directions have been always utilized to depict the non-stationary statistical properties of the channel. In this paper, a non-stationary geometry-based cooperative scattering channel model is proposed for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) V2V communication systems, where a birth-death process is used to capture the appearance and disappearance dynamic properties of moving scatterers that reflect the time-variant time correlation and Doppler spectrum characteristics. Moreover, our model has more straight and concise to study the impact of the vehicular traffic density on channel characteristics and thus avoid complicated procedure in deriving the analytical expressions of the channel parameters and functions. The numerical results validate our analysis and demonstrate that setting important parameters of our model can appropriately build up more purposeful measurement campaigns in the future.

Interference alignment (IA) has been a powerful approach to achieve the maximum degree of freedom (DoF) for K users multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) interference channels. However, due to the feasibility constraint, aligning all the interference signals at each receiver is impractical for large K without symbol extension. In this paper, we propose two best-effort interference alignment (BEIA) schemes that the network selects the maximum number of interfering transmitters to align their signals given the feasibility conditions when each transmitter-receiver pair has a constant number of data streams. Besides, in case of not all interfering signals aligned at each receiver, an upper bound of the average throughput is derived. Simulation results show that the proposed schemes have superiority over the traditional methods, such as time division multiple access (TDMA) and cluster IA(CIA), in low and moderate signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) region in terms of average user throughput. In addition, the proposed max-min relative interference distance alignment scheme outperforms the proposed scheme of equal interfering transmitters number alignment in terms of both average user throughput and minimum user throughput.

Reducing the interference to the licensed mobile users and obtaining the energy efficiency are key issues in cognitive heterogeneous networks. A corresponding rate loss constraint is proposed to be used for the sensing-based spectrum sharing (SBSS) model in cognitive heterogeneous networks in this paper. Resource allocation optimization strategy is designed for the maximum energy efficiency under the proposed interference constraint together with average transmission power constraint. An efficiency algorithm is studied to maximize energy efficiency due to the nonconvex optimal problem. Furthermore, the relationship between the proposed protection criterion and the conventional interference constraint strategy under imperfect sensing condition for the SBSS model is also investigated, and we found that the conventional interference threshold can be regarded as the upper bound of the maximum rate loss that the primary user could tolerate. Simulation results have shown the effectiveness of the proposed protection criterion overcome the conventional interference power constraint.

Wireless mobile communication systems in subway tunnels have been widely researched these years, due to increased demand for the communication applications. As a result, an accurate model is essential to effectively evaluate the communication system performance. Thus, a neoteric three-dimensional (3D) geometry-based stochastic model (GBSM) is proposed for the massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) fading channels in tunnel environment. Furthermore, the statistical properties of the channel such as space-time correlation, amplitude and phase probability density are analyzed and compared with those of the traditional two-dimensional (2D) model by numerical simulations. Finally, the ergodic capacity is investigated based on the proposed model. Numerical results show that the proposed model can describe the channel in tunnels more practically.

Multiple input multiple output orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) is widely applied in wireless communication by virtue of its excellent properties in data transmission rate and transmission accuracy. However, as a major drawback of MIMO-OFDM systems, the high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) complicates the design of the power amplifier at the receiver end. Some available PAPR reduction methods such as selective mapping (SLM) suffer from high computational complexity. In this paper, a low-complexity SLM method based on active constellation extension (ACE) and joint space-time selective mapping (AST-SLM) for reducing PAPR in Alamouti STBC MIMO-OFDM systems is proposed. In SLM scheme, two IFFT operations are required for obtaining each transmission sequence pair, and the selected phase vector is transmitted as side information(SI). However, in the proposed AST-SLM method, only a few IFFT operations are required for generating all the transmission sequence pairs. The complexity of AST-SLM is at least 86% less than SLM. In addition, the SI needed in AST-SLM is at least 92.1% less than SLM by using the presented blind detection scheme to estimate SI. We show, analytically and with simulations, that AST-SLM can achieve significant performance of PAPR reduction and close performance of bit error rate (BER) compared to SLM scheme.

In order to improve the utilization of irrigation water resources of greenhouse tomatoes, a water-saving irrigation decision-making model based on genetic optimization T-S fuzzy neural network is proposed in this paper. The main work are as follows: Firstly, the traditional genetic algorithm is optimized by introducing the constraint operator and update operator of the Krill herd (KH) algorithm. Secondly, the weights and thresholds of T-S fuzzy neural network are optimized by using the improved genetic algorithm. Finally, on the basis of the real data set, the genetic optimization T-S fuzzy neural network is used to simulate and predict the irrigation volume for greenhouse tomatoes. The performance of the genetic algorithm improved T-S fuzzy neural network (GA-TSFNN), the traditional T-S fuzzy neural network algorithm (TSFNN), BP neural network algorithm(BPNN) and the genetic algorithm improved BP neural network algorithm (GA-BPNN) is compared by simulation. The simulation experiment results show that compared with the TSFNN, BPNN and the GA-BPNN, the error of the GA-TSFNN between the predicted value and the actual value of the irrigation volume is smaller, and the proposed method has a better prediction effect. This paper provides new ideas for the water-saving irrigation decision in greenhouse tomatoes.

A novel distributed compress-and-forward (CF) system based on multi-relay network is presented. In this system, as the direct link between the source and destination is invalid due to some reasons, such as the limited power, special working environment, or even economic factors, relays are employed to receive analog signals and carry on distributed compressed encoding. Subsequently, the digital signals are transmitted to the destination via wireless channel. Moreover, a theoretical analysis for the system is provided by utilizing the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) theory and Shannon channel capacity theory, and the rate-distortion function as well as the connection between the transmission rate and the channel capacity are constructed. In addition, an optimal signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) -based power allocation method is proposed to maximize the quantization SNR under the limited total power. Simulation result shows that the proposed CF system outperforms the amplify-and-forward (AF) system versus the SNR performance.

Global data center IP traffic is expected to reach 20.6 zettabytes (ZB) by the end of 2021. Intra-data center networks (Intra-DCN) will account for 71.5% of the data center traffic flow and will be the largest portion of the traffic. The understanding of traffic distribution in IntraDCN is still sketchy. It causes significant amount of bandwidth to go unutilized, and creates avoidable choke points. Conventional transport protocols such as Optical Packet Switching (OPS) and Optical Burst Switching (OBS) allow a one-sided view of the traffic flow in the network. This therefore causes disjointed and uncoordinated decision-making at each node. For effective resource planning, there is the need to consider joining the distributed with centralized management which anticipates the system's needs and regulates the entire network. Methods derived from Kalman filters have proved effective in planning road networks. Considering the network available bandwidth as data transport highways, we propose an intelligent enhanced SDN concept applied to OBS architecture. A management plane (MP) is added to conventional control (CP) and data planes (DP). The MP assembles the traffic spatio-temporal parameters from ingress nodes, uses Kalman filtering prediction-based algorithm to estimate traffic demand. Prior to packets arrival at edges nodes, it regularly forwards updates of resources allocation to CPs. Simulations were done on a hybrid scheme (1+1) and on the centralized OBS. The results demonstrated that the proposition decreases the packet loss ratio. It also improves network latency and throughput-up to 84 and 51%, respectively, versus the traditional scheme.

The uncertainties of the uncertain graph make the traditional definition and algorithms on mining dense graph for certain graph not applicable. The subgraph obtained by maximizing expected density from an uncertain graph always has many low edge-probability data, which makes it low reliable and low expected edge density. Based on the concept of ${\beta}$-subgraph, to overcome the low reliability of the densest subgraph, the concept of optimal ${\beta}$-subgraph is proposed. An efficient greedy algorithm is also developed to find the optimal ${\beta}$-subgraph. Simulation experiments of multiple sets of datasets show that the average edge-possibility of optimal ${\beta}$-subgraph is improved by nearly 40%, and the expected edge density reaches 0.9 on average. The parameter ${\beta}$ is scalable and applicable to multiple scenarios.

Full-duplex (FD) technologies enable wireless nodes to simultaneously transmit and receive signal using the same frequency-band. The FD modes could improve their physical layer throughputs. However, in the wireless ad hoc networks, the FD communications also produce new interference risks. On the one hand, the interference ranges (IRs) of the nodes are enlarged when they work in the FD mode. On the other hand, for each FD pair, the FD communication may cause the potential hidden terminal problems to appear around the both sides. In this paper, to avoid the interference risks, we first model the IR of each node when it works in the FD mode, and then analyze the conditions to be satisfied among the transmission ranges (TRs), carrier-sensing ranges (CSRs), and IRs of the FD pair. Furthermore, in the media access control (MAC) layer, we propose a specific method and protocol for collision avoidance. Based on the modified Omnet++ simulator, we conduct the simulations to validate and evaluate the proposed FD MAC protocol, showing that it can reduce the collisions effectively. When the hidden terminal problem is serious, compared with the existing typical FD MAC protocol, our protocol can increase the system throughput by 80%~90%.

This study investigated the television (TV) content viewers' behavior influenced by online communication at the choice of new TV series on a terrestrial streaming platform. For exploring the impact of the anchoring effect on the TV content consumption, this study analyzed the correlation between the first episode's TV ratings and the data of online comments or reactions. These data were potential audiences' communication, which were generated on the online article three weeks before the first broadcasting began. To avoid the crucial influence by external factors, such as season and social issue, the test was done with eight (8) TV series which have same genre (drama), similar core audience targeting (20-49's women), similar broadcasting period (Jun-Oct 2016), same scheduling (10.00 to 11.00 pm, weekdays) and aired on terrestrial TV platforms. This research found that not only the amount of comments and reactions, but also the attitude about the comments created before broadcasting, positively influence the audiences' decision-making behavior for new TV content choices. This investigation contributes to the literature on media economics and management by exploring the media content users' consuming behavior with behavioral economics perspectives (anchoring effect) and making a first step for finding a new effect on the media content consumption.

Public bicycle system (PBS) is a new emerging and popular mode of public transportation. PBS data can be adopted to analyze human movement patterns. Previous work usually focused on specific scales, and the relationships between different levels of hierarchies are ignored. In this paper, we introduce a multi-scale and interactive visual analytics system to investigate human cycling movement and PBS usage condition. The system supports level-of-detail explorative analysis of spatio-temporal characteristics in PBS. Visual views are designed from global, regional and microcosmic scales. For the regional scale, a bicycle network is constructed to model PBS data, and an flow-based community detection algorithm is applied on the bicycle network to determine station clusters. In contrast to the previous used Louvain algorithm, our method avoids producing super-communities and generates better results. We provide two cases to demonstrate how our system can help analysts explore the overall cycling condition in the city and spatio-temporal aggregation of stations.

In this paper, a new user identification method is presented using real environmental human-computer-interaction (HCI) behavior data to improve method usability. User behavior data in this paper are collected continuously without setting experimental scenes such as text length, action number, etc. To illustrate the characteristics of real environmental HCI data, probability density distribution and performance of keyboard and mouse data are analyzed through the random sampling method and Support Vector Machine(SVM) algorithm. Based on the analysis of HCI behavior data in a real environment, the Multiple Kernel Learning (MKL) method is first used for user HCI behavior identification due to the heterogeneity of keyboard and mouse data. All possible kernel methods are compared to determine the MKL algorithm's parameters to ensure the robustness of the algorithm. Data analysis results show that keyboard data have a narrower range of probability density distribution than mouse data. Keyboard data have better performance with a 1-min time window, while that of mouse data is achieved with a 10-min time window. Finally, experiments using the MKL algorithm with three global polynomial kernels and ten local Gaussian kernels achieve a user identification accuracy of 83.03% in a real environmental HCI dataset, which demonstrates that the proposed method achieves an encouraging performance.

With the widespread use of the Internet, services for providing large-capacity multimedia data such as video-on-demand (VOD) services and video uploading sites have greatly increased. VOD service providers want to be able to provide users with high-quality keyframes of high quality videos within a few minutes after the broadcast ends. However, existing keyframe extraction tends to select keyframes whose quality as a keyframe is insufficiently considered, and it takes a long computation time because it does not consider an HD class image. In this paper, we propose a keyframe selection method that flexibly applies multiple keyframe quality metrics and improves the computation time. The main procedure is as follows. After shot boundary detection is performed, the first frames are extracted as initial keyframes. The user sets evaluation metrics and priorities by considering the genre and attributes of the video. According to the evaluation metrics and the priority, the low-quality keyframe is selected as a replacement target. The replacement target keyframe is replaced with a high-quality frame in the shot. The proposed method was subjectively evaluated by 23 votes. Approximately 45% of the replaced keyframes were improved and about 18% of the replaced keyframes were adversely affected. Also, it took about 10 minutes to complete the summary of one hour video, which resulted in a reduction of more than 44.5% of the execution time.

Visible-infrared image fusion is a process of synthesizing an infrared image and a visible image into a fused image. This process synthesizes the complementary advantages of both images. The infrared image is able to capture a target object in dark or foggy environments. However, the utility of the infrared image is hindered by the blurry appearance of objects. On the other hand, the visible image clearly shows an object under normal lighting conditions, but it is not ideal in dark or foggy environments. In this paper, we propose a multi-guided filter and a real-time image fusion method. The proposed multi-guided filter is a modification of the guided filter for multiple guidance images. Using this filter, we propose a real-time image fusion method. The speed of the proposed fusion method is much faster than that of conventional image fusion methods. In an experiment, we compare the proposed method and the conventional methods in terms of quantity, quality, fusing speed, and flickering artifacts. The proposed method synthesizes 57.93 frames per second for an image size of $320{\times}270$. Based on our experiments, we confirmed that the proposed method is able to perform real-time processing. In addition, the proposed method synthesizes flicker-free video.

Point cloud is widely used in 3D applications due to the recent advancement of 3D data acquisition technology. Polygonal mesh-based compression has been dominant since it can replace many points sharing a surface with a set of vertices with mesh structure. Recent point cloud-based applications demand more point-based interactivity, which makes point cloud compression (PCC) becomes more attractive than 3D mesh compression. Interestingly, an exploration activity has been started to explore the feasibility of PCC standard in MPEG. In this paper, a new color attribute compression method is presented for point cloud data. The proposed method utilizes the spatial redundancy among color attribute data to construct a color palette. The color palette is constructed by using K-means clustering method and each color data in point cloud is represented by the index of its similar color in palette. To further improve the compression efficiency, the spatial redundancy between the indices of neighboring colors is also removed by marking them using a flag bit. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves a better improvement of RD performance compared with that of the MPEG PCC reference software.

Segmentation plays an important role in the field of image processing and computer vision. Intuitionistic fuzzy C-means (IFCM) clustering algorithm emerged as an effective technique for image segmentation in recent years. However, standard fuzzy C-means (FCM) and IFCM algorithms are sensitive to noise and initial cluster centers, and they ignore the spatial relationship of pixels. In view of these shortcomings, an improved algorithm based on IFCM is proposed in this paper. Firstly, we propose a modified non-membership function to generate intuitionistic fuzzy set and a method of determining initial clustering centers based on grayscale features, they highlight the effect of uncertainty in intuitionistic fuzzy set and improve the robustness to noise. Secondly, an improved nonlinear kernel function is proposed to map data into kernel space to measure the distance between data and the cluster centers more accurately. Thirdly, the local spatial-gray information measure is introduced, which considers membership degree, gray features and spatial position information at the same time. Finally, we propose a new measure of intuitionistic fuzzy entropy, it takes into account fuzziness and intuition of intuitionistic fuzzy set. The experimental results show that compared with other IFCM based algorithms, the proposed algorithm has better segmentation and clustering performance.

Face recognition systems have several potential applications, such as security and biometric access control. Ongoing research is focused to develop a robust face recognition algorithm that can mimic the human vision system. Face pose, non-uniform illuminations, and low-resolution are main factors that influence the performance of face recognition algorithms. This paper proposes a novel method to handle the aforementioned aspects. Proposed face recognition algorithm initially uses 68 points to locate a face in the input image and later partially uses the PCA to extract mean image. Meanwhile, the AdaBoost and the LDA are used to extract face features. In final stage, classic nearest centre classifier is used for face classification. Proposed method outperforms recent state-of-the-art face recognition algorithms by producing high recognition rate and yields much lower error rate for a very challenging situation, such as when only frontal ($0^{\circ}$) face sample is available in gallery and seven poses ($0^{\circ}$, ${\pm}30^{\circ}$, ${\pm}35^{\circ}$, and ${\pm}45^{\circ}$) as a probe on the LFW and the CMU Multi-PIE databases.

Spherical videos, which are also called 360-degree videos, have become increasingly popular due to the rapid development of virtual reality technology. However, the large amount of data in such videos is a huge challenge for existing transmission system. To use the existing encode framework, it should be converted into a 2D image plane by using a specific projection format, e.g. the equi-rectangular projection (ERP) format. The existing high-efficiency video coding standard (HEVC) can effectively compress video content, but its enormous computational complexity makes the time spent on compressing high-frame-rate and high-resolution 360-degree videos disproportionate to the benefits of compression. Focusing on the ERP format characteristics of 360-degree videos, this work develops a fast decision algorithm for predicting the coding unit depth interval and adaptive mode decision for intra prediction mode. The algorithm makes full use of the video characteristics of the ERP format by dealing with pole and equatorial areas separately. It sets different reference blocks and determination conditions according to the degree of stretching, which can reduce the coding time while ensuring the quality. Compared with the original reference software HM-16.16, the proposed algorithm can reduce time consumption by 39.3% in the all-intra configuration, and the BD-rate increases by only 0.84%.

Vision-based Human Pose Estimation has been considered as one of challenging research subjects due to problems including confounding background clutter, diversity of human appearances and illumination changes in scenes. To tackle these problems, we propose to use a new multi-stage convolution machine for estimating human pose. To provide better heatmap prediction of body joints, the proposed machine repeatedly produces multiple predictions according to stages with receptive field large enough for learning the long-range spatial relationship. And stages are composed of various modules according to their strategic purposes. Pyramid stacking module and dilation module are used to handle problem of human pose at multiple scales. Their multi-scale information from different receptive fields are fused with concatenation, which can catch more contextual information from different features. And spatial and channel information of a given input are converted to gating factors by squeezing the feature maps to a single numeric value based on its importance in order to give each of the network channels different weights. Compared with other ConvNet-based architectures, we demonstrated that our proposed architecture achieved higher accuracy on experiments using standard benchmarks of LSP and MPII pose datasets.

Location-based services (LBSs) have become popular in recent years due to the ever-increasing usage of smart mobile devices and mobile applications through networks. Although LBS application provides great benefits to mobile users, it also raises a sever privacy concern of users due to the untrusted service providers. In the lack of privacy enhancing mechanisms, most applications of the LBS may discourage the user's acceptance of location services in general, and endanger the user's privacy in particular. Therefore, it is a great interest to discuss on the recent privacy-preserving mechanisms in LBSs. Many existing location-privacy protection-mechanisms (LPPMs) make great efforts to increase the attacker's uncertainty on the user's actual whereabouts by generating a multiple of fake-locations together with user's actual positions. In this survey, we present a study and analysis of existing LPPMs and the state-of-art privacy measures in service quality aware LBS applications. We first study the general architecture of privacy qualification system for LBSs by surveying the existing framework and outlining its main feature components. We then give an overview of the basic privacy requirements to be considered in the design and evaluation of LPPMs. Furthermore, we discuss the classification and countermeasure solutions of existing LPPMs for mitigating the current LBS privacy protection challenges. These classifications include anonymization, obfuscation, and an encryption-based technique, as well as the combination of them is called a hybrid mechanism. Finally, we discuss several open issues and research challenges based on the latest progresses for on-going LBS and location privacy research.

The Cloud Computing is growing rapidly in the current IT industry. Cloud computing has become a buzzword in relation to Grid & Utility computing. It provides on demand services to customers and customers will pay for what they get. Various "Cloud Service Provider" such as Microsoft Azure, Google Web Services etc. enables the users to access the cloud in cost effective manner. However, security, privacy and integrity of data is a major concern. In this paper various security challenges have been identified and the survey briefs the comprehensive overview of various security issues in cloud computing. The classification of security issues in cloud computing have been studied. In this paper we have discussed security challenges in cloud computing and also list recommended methods available for addressing them in the literature.

Closed-circuit television (CCTV) technology continuously captures and stores video streams. Users are typically required by policy to store all the captured video for a certain period. Accordingly, increasing the number of CCTV operation cycles and photographing positions expands the amount of data to be stored. However, expanding the available storage space for video data incurs increased costs. In recent years, this problem has been addressed with cloud storage solutions, which enable multiple users and devices to access and store data simultaneously. However, because of the large amount of data to be stored, a vast storage space is required. Consequently, cloud storage administrators need a way to store data more efficiently. To save storage space, deduplication technology has been proposed to prevent duplicate storage of the same data. However, because cloud storage is hosted on remote servers, data encryption technology must be applied to address data exposure issues. Although deduplication techniques for encrypted data have been studied, there have been various security vulnerabilities. We attempted to solve this problem by addressing various issues such as poison attacks, property forgery, and ownership management while removing the redundant data and handling the data more securely.

Recently, ransomware has earned itself an infamous reputation as a force to reckon with in the cybercrime landscape. However, cybercriminals are adopting other unconventional means to seamlessly attain proceeds of cybercrime with little effort. Cybercriminals are now acquiring cryptocurrencies directly from benign Internet users without the need to extort a ransom from them, as is the case with ransomware. This paper investigates advances in the cryptovirology landscape by examining the state-of-the-art cryptoviral attacks. In our approach, we perform digital autopsy on the malware's source code and execute the different malware variants in a contained sandbox to deduce static and dynamic properties respectively. We examine three cryptoviral attack structures: browser-based crypto mining, memory resident crypto mining and cryptoviral extortion. These attack structures leave a trail of digital forensics evidence when the malware interacts with the file system and generates noise in form of network traffic when communicating with the C2 servers and crypto mining pools. The digital forensics evidence, which essentially are IOCs include network artifacts such as C2 server domains, IPs and cryptographic hash values of the downloaded files apart from the malware hash values. Such evidence can be used as seed into intrusion detection systems for mitigation purposes.

Vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) have become increasingly significant in intelligent transportation systems, they play a great role in improving traffic safety and efficiency. In the deployment of intelligent VANETs, intelligent vehicles can efficiently exchange important or urgent traffic information and make driving decisions. Meanwhile, secure data communication and vehicle's identity privacy have been highlighted. To cope with these security issues, in this paper, we construct an efficient anonymous authentication scheme with secure communication in intelligent VANETs. Combing the ElGamal encryption technique with a modified Schnorr signature technique, the proposed scheme provides secure anonymous authentication process for encrypted message in the vehicle-to-infrastructure communication model, and achieves identity privacy, forward security, and reply attack resistance simultaneously. Moreover, except the trusted authority (TA), any outside entity cannot trace the real identity of an intelligent vehicle. The proposed scheme is designed on an identity-based system, which can remove the costs of establishing public key infrastructure (PKI) and certificates management. Compared with existing authentication schemes, the proposed scheme is much more practical in intelligent VANETs.

Deniable authentication (DA) is a protocol in which a receiver can generate an authenticator that is probabilistically indistinguishable from a sender. DA can be applied in many scenarios that require user privacy protection. To enhance the security of DA, in this paper, we construct a new deniable authenticated encryption (DAE) scheme that realizes deniable authentication and confidentiality in a logical single step. Compared with existing approaches, our approach provides proof of security and is efficient in terms of performance analysis. Our scheme is in an identity-based environment; thus, it avoids the public key certificate-based public key infrastructure (PKI). Moreover, we provide an example that shows that our protocol is applicable for e-voting systems.

In a transitive signature scheme, a signer wants to authenticate edges in a dynamically growing and transitively closed graph. Using transitive signature schemes it is possible to authenticate an edge (i, k), if the signer has already authenticated two edges (i, j) and (j, k). That is, it is possible to make a signature on (i, k) using two signatures on (i, j) and (j, k). We propose the first transitive signature schemes for undirected graphs from lattices. Our first scheme is provably secure in the random oracle model and our second scheme is provably secure in the standard model.