The network intrusion threats are increasingly severe with the application of computer supported coorperative work. Machine learning algorithms have been widely used in intrusion detection systems, including Multi-layer Perceptron (MLP). In this study, we proposed a two-stage model that combines the Birch clustering algorithm and MLP classifier to improve the performance of network anomaly multi-classification. In our proposed method, we first apply Birch or K-means as an unsupervised clustering algorithm to the CICIDS-2017 dataset to pre-group the data. The generated pseudo-label is then added as an additional feature to the training of the MLP-based classifier. The experimental results show that using Birch and K-Means clustering for data pre-grouping can improve intrusion detection system performance. Our method can achieve 99.73% accuracy in multi-classification using Birch clustering, which is better than similar researches using a stand-alone MLP model.

Malice scoring is a technique that is present throughout the literature to quantify a software malignance through the assignment of a malice score. However, the majority of existing malice scoring models are synthesised using manually selected features and weights, where a domain specialist is needed. Hence, this paper aim at utilising Genetic Programming and cooperative coevolution to automatically evolve an ensemble of symbolic regression functions to assign a malice score to an instance of software data. Using a publicly available dataset, the effectiveness of the proposed method is assessed and compared to that of the state-of-the-art malice scoring method. The experimental results show that the proposed method has significantly outperformed the benchmark method and exhibits the best-performing model that produces an overall balanced accuracy of 95.80%, correctly classifying 94.21% and 97.39% of unseen malicious and benign instances, respectively. Furthermore, various aspects of the proposed method and experimental results have been analysed in-depth to provide insight into the evolutionary process and some of the automatically evolved models.

Text password is an important authentication method for computer supported cooperative systems and is usually required to be memorable, strong, and non-reusable. Some password managers can help users manage site-specific passwords locally or on the cloud. However, existing solutions still have a single point of failure risk if the password management scheme is breached. To address the risks identified in current password managers, we proposed a password generation and management scheme called PassImg that can generate consistent passwords through hashing a master password with a user-specified salt image. In this scheme, a weak master password is also allowed while not affecting the security of the scheme. We’ve also proposed a solution for offline parameters synchronization, which would decrease online attack vectors. The user-recognizable image as a parameter can be configured on different devices and synchronized through a QR code. PassImg can ensure password usability and security through an offline managing process without storing any data on the server.

Multi-dimensional data anonymization approaches (e.g., Mondrian) ensure more fine-grained data privacy by providing a different anonymization strategy applied for each attribute. Many variations of multi-dimensional anonymization have been implemented on different distributed processing platforms (e.g., MapReduce, Spark) to take advantage of their scalability and parallelism supports. According to our critical analysis on overheads, either existing iteration-based or recursion-based approaches do not provide effective mechanisms for creating the optimal number of and relative size of resilient distributed datasets (RDDs), thus heavily suffer from performance overheads. To solve this issue, we propose a novel hybrid approach for effectively implementing a multi-dimensional data anonymization strategy (e.g., Mondrian) that is scalable and provides high-performance. Our hybrid approach provides a mechanism to create far fewer RDDs and smaller size partitions attached to each RDD than existing approaches. This optimal RDD creation and operations approach is critical for many multi-dimensional data anonymization applications that create tremendous execution complexity. The new mechanism in our proposed hybrid approach can dramatically reduce the critical overheads involved in re-computation cost, shuffle operations, message exchange, and cache management.

The cloud model allows many enterprises able to outsource computing resources at an affordable price without having to commit the expense upfront. Although the cloud providers are responsible for the security of the cloud, there are still many security concerns due to inherently complex model the cloud providers operate on (e.g.,multi-tenancy). In addition, the enterprises whose services have migrated into the cloud have a preference for their own cybersecurity situation awareness capability on top of the security mechanisms provided by the cloud providers. In this way, the enterprises can monitor the performance of the security offerings of the cloud and have a choice to decide and select potential response strategies more appropriate to the enterprise in the presence of the attack where the defense provided by the cloud doesn't work for them. However, some response strategies, such as Moving Target Defense (MTD) techniques shown to be effective to secure cloud, cannot be deployed by the enterprise themselves. In this paper, we propose a framework that enables better collaboration between enterprises and cloud providers. Our proposed framework, which offers more in-depth security analysis based on the set of most advanced security metrics, allows the security experts of the enterprise to obtain better situational awareness in the cloud. With better and more effective situation awareness of cloud security, our framework can support better decision-making and further allows to deploy more appropriate threat responses to protect the outsourced resources. We also propose a secure protocol which can facilitate more secure communication between the enterprises and cloud provider. Using our proposed secure protocol, which is based on authentication and key exchange mechanism, the enterprises can send a secure request to the cloud provider to perform a selected defensive strategy.

The requirement for data privacy is limiting to exploit the full potential of what modern data analytic capability could offer. To address such privacy concern, a number of techniques based on homomorphic encryption (HE) have been proposed to allow analytic computation, such as classification based on machine learning techniques, to run on encrypted data. However, these HE-based techniques suffer from a heavy computation overhead due to cryptographic computations having to be done on the encrypted data. We propose a non-colluding dual cloud system that utilizes Paillier cryptosystem. We illustrate how our proposal could reduce inherent computation overhead many similar techniques suffer. Such reduction could make our proposed system to be an ideal solution to use in the real world application.

Mobile-based collaboration tools are increasingly used for communication and information sharing in delivering healthcare services that need collaboration across different geographical locations. Some of the typical features found in the collaboration tools include video conferencing facility, image

Telehealth services research projects often require to access a variety of data sources under different data access policies and privacy constrains. There is a need to link these clinical and administrative records from different data custodians and produce a research data for analytics. One of the

Cloud storage services provide highly scalable, available and pay-as-you-go storage space for individual and enterprise users. Cloud storage services are inherently insecure as the management of the data in the cloud storage is controlled by third parties beyond the reach of the data owner. To addre

Existing proposals to address trusted end-to-end communication tend to focus on attestation between client applications and their enterprise servers. These proposals have given little or no consideration to the vulnerabilities between client applications and their users, resulting in identity thefts or impersonator. To address this problem, we propose a biometric enabled portable Trusted Computing Platform (portable TCP). The proposed platform coordinates two stage authentication and subsequent integrity check to provide trusted pathways amongst users, applications, and enterprise servers. We describe the proposed solution and its implementation.

We report on our experiences in developing a hardware based security solution for a demonstration prototype of a novel, smart-grid enabled energy services delivery model. This model is based on establishing and maintaining trusted, secure dynamic collaborations with agreed, policy driven usage and b

We propose and implement a cloud architecture of virtual TPMs. In this architecture, TPM instances can be obtained from the TPM cloud on demand. Hence, the TPM functionality is available for applications that do not have TPM chips in their local platforms. Moreover, users can access their keys and data in the same TPM instance even if they move to other platforms. The TPM functionality in cloud is easy to access for applications developed in different languages since cloud computing delivers services in standard protocols. The functionality of the TPM cloud is demonstrated by using it to implement the Needham-Schroeder public-key protocol for web authentication.

The mechanism of establishing trust in a computing platform is tightly coupled with the characteristics of a specific machine. This limits the portability and mobility of trust as demanded by many emerging applications that go beyond the organizational boundaries. In order to address this problem, we propose a trusted computing platform in a form of a USB device. First, we describe the design and implementation of the hardware and software architectures of the device. We then demonstrate the capabilities of the proposed device by developing a trusted application.

Among the problems facing designers of complex multi-participant Web services-based applications is dealing with the consequences of the lack of suitable isolation mechanisms. This deficiency means that concurrent applications can interfere with each other, resulting in race conditions and lost updates. This paper considers a proposed solution to this problem based on 'promises' and shows that this model can be implemented in practice. We consider implementation issues that need to be handled in promise-based systems and discuss a proof of concept prototype that supports promise-based isolation without requiring changes to existing applications and resources.

Dynamic collaborations are the means by which a group of autonomous entities (possibly competing) collaborate to achieve a common objective by sharing resources that may be owned and managed both privately or jointly. Our focus in this paper is on controlling jointly owned shared data that is inherently ephemeral, as it does not exist outside the period of the collaboration. This paper explores the application of the ephemerizer concept as a means to control the access to shared collaboration data. Towards this, we first define a service-oriented architecture Anitya that enables the development of a third party service for managing ephemeral data in dynamic collaborations. We then extend the pair wise secure communication protocol used in the ephemerizer and propose three different multiparty secure group communication protocols for sharing collaboration data under the defined architecture. We also discuss the design, implementation, and evaluation of the architecture and protocols.

This paper discusses a novel implementation of a workflow engine that supports service-based applications. The applications are defined according to the GAT model, which is an event-based programming model using conditional guards to determine when both normal and exception-handling activities are to be executed. We propose implementation techniques for key features of GAT. These include implementing control flow based on the evaluation of guards, the management and distribution of events, and enforcing atomicity across the evaluation of guards and the execution of the corresponding activities. We have built an engine following this approach which uses available technologies to support translating GAT models into executable applications

One important trend in enterprise-scale IT has been the increasing use of business-business integration (B2Bi) technologies to automate business processes that cross organizational boundaries, such as the interactions between partner companies along a supply chain. It is relatively easy to describe a pattern of interaction, or choreography, in the case where everything proceeds smoothly. However, the abnormal cases, such as where a process fails or a message is lost, are much more complicated, and risk introducing data and process inconsistencies into computer-based systems. Current B2Bi technologies do not supply an infrastructure that can provide reliability without considerable sophistication from the architects and developers. As a first step towards guiding architects to the design of B2Bi systems that maintain consistency despite failures, this paper describes a variety of types of failure that can arise in practice, based on a realistic e-procurement scenario. We describe these failures in terms of the different types of state that naturally occur within the distributed system. Understanding the types of failure that need to be handled, or prevented, is essential to an architect or developer who must design and write handlers for all the exceptions that can occur in their workflows.

An important problem in designing infrastructure to support business-to-business integration (B2Bi) is how to cancel a long-running interaction (either because the user has changed their mind, or in response to an unrecoverable failure). We review the fault-handling and compensation mechanism that is now used in most workflow products and business process modeling standards. We then use an e-procurement case-study to extract a set of requirements for an effective cancellation mechanism, and we show that the standard approach using fault-handling, and compensation transactions is not adequate to meet these requirements.