Cybersecurity threats and attacks are a critical concern for computing systems as general and specifically in web applications. There are many types and categories of cyberattacks on web applications. Many of these attacks are made possible due to existing vulnerabilities in the networking environments and platforms that host these web applications. So, the vulnerability assessment and attacks simulations on these networking platforms are of extreme importance to protect and secure the top web applications that play a prime role in our daily life. One of the widely used mechanisms to identify vulnerabilities and defend against different attacks on systems and networks is Penetration Testing. It allows us to simulate real-world attacks on a network or a single device to determine the susceptibility and impact of cybersecurity attacks. Pen testing aims to secure a system or network by performing a full-blown attack against it. Several techniques have been used for that, from port scanning, service, and operating system detection to network enumeration, creating specially crafted packets, and modifying software to exploit vulnerabilities. However, while it is used widely as a defensive technique, some attackers also employ it for malicious intentions utilizing available open-source penetration testing tools. Penetration testing on internal networks such as networks that connect IoT/sensors/web cameras, can be utilized to find vulnerabilities and fix them to secure the networks. In this research, we present a detailed discussion on penetration testing and its seven phases of action and provide a step-by-step procedure with instructions using various open-source tools to conduct penetration testing and vulnerability assessments of a network. We finally demonstrate the process and results of simulated attacks on our network within the testing environment. This research provides a comprehensive introduction to penetration testing and testbed through real-world attack simulation. The IT administrator or security enthusiast can utilize them to secure networks, devices, clients, servers, and applications while enhancing the overall organization’s security.

Smart cities provide citizens with smart and advanced services to improve their quality of life. However, it has been observed that the collection, storage, processing, and analysis of heterogeneous data that are usually borne by citizens will bear certain difficulties. The development of the Internet of Things, cloud computing, social media, and other Industry 4.0 influencers pushed technology into a smart society’s framework, bringing potential vulnerabilities to sensor data, services, and smart city applications. These vulnerabilities lead to data security problems. We propose a decentralized data management system for smart and secure transportation that uses blockchain and the Internet of Things in a sustainable smart city environment to solve the data vulnerability problem. A smart transportation mobility system demands creating an interconnected transit system to ensure flexibility and efficiency. This article introduces prior knowledge and then provides a Hyperledger Fabric-based data architecture that supports a secure, trusted, smart transportation system. The simulation results show the balance between the blockchain mining time and the number of blocks created. We also use the average transaction delay evaluation model to evaluate the model and to test the proposed system’s performance. The system will address residents’ and authorities’ security challenges of the transportation system in smart, sustainable cities and lead to better governance.

Summary With mobile computing being the number one user paradigm of choice, and cloud computing becoming the chosen supporting infrastructure, the aggregation of these two areas is inevitable. Yet due to their novelty, they suffer from both inherited and new issues. Social computing theory can apply well to this fusion, such as pooling together in a social model to create ad hoc mobile clouds or by providing a greater functionality for mobile devices through resource augmentation from an external cloud. However, due to the highly contested resources within this setting, these resources must be negotiated within a social context. This paper argues that the application of social models to mobile cloud computing can allow mobile devices to employ cooperative strategies for resource sharing to allow aspects such as energy and costs to be minimised. Social computing is the means of using computing resources to augment human intelligence, mobiles can provide these enhancements to social intelligences but in a peer‐to‐peer manner. This paper proposes the design of a novel system which employs aggregated user and application resource profiling, in order to determine the most optimal place to process data, locally or on a remote cloud. Negotiation with the local cloud will then find a balance between optimum energy and resource utilisation.

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

All over the world, the crowd management is a big challenge facing the organizations of any event with large number of people. It is clear that this task is becoming more difficult and complicated when the event is larger. In the recent few years, the there are many new technologies developed that can be utilized in crowed management. Among these new technologies is wireless communications, cloud computing, GPS services and many others. Moreover, the wide spread of smart phones and there useful applications made it easier to benefit directly from these technologies. One of the largest worldwide people gathering event is the Pilgrim. Every year, millions of people visit the holy city of Makkah from different countries of the world with different languages and cultural backgrounds. Pilgrim includes certain doings at certain times at certain locations which emphasizes the complexity of crowd management task of the biggest event worldwide. Besides the transportation, housing, and feeding management, there is the dos and donts management of this huge event since it is being a timed and location-based worship. In this research, we utilize the advanced technologies to develop a mobile application to guide the visitors of Makkah (including the elders and those of hearing disability) to perform the correct worship doings and to avoid the worship donts at the holy place of Makkah. The application detects the GPS location of the visitor and sends notifications if he/she commits any donts at that location using a cloud-based decision system. The notifications can be sent as text, image, and video (with deaf sign language integrated). More features of our application, and given that the diversity of Pilgrim, it supports three main languages; Arabic, English, and Urdu, and it is compatible with iOS and Android. The application development process followed the best practices in software engineering that is shown in this paper. To test the application efficiency and functionality, real testing experiments and demos were conducted and presented.

Mobile devices are used to perform many useful tasks in our daily life. All around the world, many people are using their smart phones to communicate with others, identify their location, and do online shopping. These useful applications involve sharing personal and sensitive information. Also, the smart devices have many weaknesses, such as: limited battery life time, limited processing capacity and security issues. The mobile cloud computing (MCC) can be used to overcome these limitations. Using MCC improved the performance of many applications by conducting the processing at the cloud and sending back the results to the mobile device. But there are still many issues need to be addressed and considered when using MCC specially when dealing with applications that need live interaction and protecting the privacy. In this paper, we will study the main issues associated with mobile cloud computing models that include: security, performance, and quality of service. Then, we will present secure implementation of the cloudlet-based mobile cloud computing framework with its prototype that uses trust delegation technique to provide better security/performance tradeoffs.

The advances in IT sector, cloud computing, the wide usage of sensors and mobile devices, and the Internet-of-Things (IoT) made our world looks like a small town. These rapid developments keep us connected all the day and seven days a week. Also, the IoT enables the connection of the devices around us (including different sensors) to the internet via different wireless and wired communication technologies. These networked sensors can be used to collect different types of data from different applications (healthcare, agriculture, civil and social life) and send it for processing and extraction of appropriate decisions. The mobile cloud computing technology is an efficient solution to process different types of collected data and respond with the required answer in real time situations where the quick response is very important. In this paper, we build a multipurpose integrated sensors system. This integrated system consists of networked sensors for different purposes and applications. For example, the sensors can be health sensors to measure the pulse and blood pressure of patients, or it can be sensors to measure the temperature to indicate a fire accident. The networked sensors will transfer the sensed data through wireless technologies to a Cloud for processing and notifying the listed users to take the proper action.

There are many recent revolutionary advances in information technology that include: wireless communication, the spread of mobile devices, and the Internet-of-Things (IoT). IoT will have an important role in connecting almost everything (mobile devices, cameras, home appliances, healthcare devices, military equipments, ..., etc) to the Internet via different communication technologies such as Wi-Fi. This connection will have impact on many sectors of our life such as industry, economy, social life, and ICT sector. Moreover, there will be huge amounts of data (including financial and medical records for example) transmitted between those devices and the non-secure Internet. Some of these data might be very sensitive and their privacy and security must not be compromised. Here comes the need for Cryptographic systems to protect the vital data. There are many hardware and software implementations for the symmetric and asymmetric cryptographic algorithms such as AES, Elliptic Curve Cryptography, and RSA. And since we are talking about protecting physical devices connected to the Internet, we think that the hardware cryptosystems are more useful to be used in this case. In this paper, we introduce the IoT concept, applications, and challenges facing IoT. Then, we present the recent timing and fault Side Channel Attacks on cryptosystem implementations for the most secure encryption algorithms (AES, ECC, and RSA). Also, the countermeasures to protect these cryptosystems from such attacks are also presented.

The smart phones are used in many aspects of our life, shopping on the Internet, and creating and distributing many types of files. But these devices have many limitations including: short battery life time and limited storage and processing. Mobile Cloud Computing technology can help to overcome these limitations. Offloading technique reduces the power consumption and saves the mobile storage by executing the huge tasks at the cloud. The mobile devices are connecting to cloud service providers using 3G or LTE technologies, which introduces some challenges including, limited bandwidth, cost, and latency. In this paper, we propose efficient and secure mobile cloud computing model based on the Cloudlet concept were the mobile devices users can connect directly to cloud resources using cheaper technologies such as Wi-Fi. Once needed, and only if the service is not available in the cloudlet, the user will be connected to the enterprise cloud. The proposed cloudlet-based model can be used in many applications where security and efficiency is required. It can be used for health applications to save and analyze patients medical records. The simulation results of our model show that it is more efficient and reliable than the other mobile could computing models that don't use the cloudlet

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

Mobile devices including smart phones are becoming an essential component of our daily life. These devices have powerful capabilities and useful applications to help us performing several tasks in less time and effort especially within cloud services. On the other hand, mobile devices have serious limitations such as battery life time, computation power, and storage capacity. Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) is an emerging technology that helps in avoiding such limitations in mobile devices, mainly saving energy. In this paper, we will address the energy efficiency in Mobile Cloud Computing since it is the most important design requirement for mobile devices. We will present techniques and prototypes in MCC to reduce power consumption and increase resources efficiency and utilization.

This paper proposes an efficient software based data possession mobile cloud computing framework. The proposed design utilizes the characteristics of two frameworks. The first one is the provable data possession design built for resource-constrained mobile devices and it uses the advantage of trusted computing technology, and the second framework is a lightweight resilient storage outsourcing design for mobile cloud computing systems. Our software based framework utilizes the strength aspects in both mentioned frameworks to gain better performance and security. The evaluation and comparison results showed that our design has better flexibility and efficiency than other related frameworks.

Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) has been introduced as a viable solution to the inherited limitations of mobile computing. These limitations include battery lifetime, processing power, and storage capacity. By using MCC, the processing and the storage of intensive mobile device jobs will take place in the cloud system and the results will be returned to the mobile device. This will reduce the required power and time for completing such intensive jobs. However, connecting mobile devices with the cloud suffers from the high network latency and the huge transmission power consumption especially when using 3G/LTE connections. In this paper, we introduce a Cloudlet based MCC system aiming to reduce the power consumption and the network delay while using MCC. We merged the MCC concepts with the proposed Cloudlet framework and propose a new framework for the MCC model. Our practical experimental results showed that using the proposed model reduces the power consumption from the mobile device, besides reducing the communication latency when the mobile device requests a job to take place remotely while keeping high quality of service stander.

The unique characteristics of the elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) such as the small key size, fast computations and bandwidth saving make its use attractive for multimedia encryption. In this study, the ECC is used to perform encryption along with multimedia compression, and two ECC‐based encryption algorithms are introduced and applied before and during compression. The first algorithm performs selective encryption on the transform coefficients during compression, whereas the second algorithm achieves perceptual encryption based on selective bit‐plane encryption before compression. The results of applying ECC to multimedia encryption are presented and analysed with respect to the requirements of multimedia encryption: the encryption efficiency, compression efficiency, codec compliance and security level. It is shown that ECC is highly efficient and does not affect the compression efficiency, and accordingly can meet the multimedia encryption requirements.

This paper proposes a more secure image hiding scheme using Optimal Pixel Adjustment Process (OPAP) and Genetic Algorithm (GA). The security issues of key selection that is used in image hiding are addressed. Thus, a more secure scheme is proposed in order to improve the security as well as the quality of the stego-image. Since GA is a semi-blind algorithm, it may select a key that affects the security. Therefore, the authores improve the security by applying image transformation not only using the GA key, but also using a user key. The user key is used to disarrange the pixel locations of the secret image. Then, the GA, using OPAP, selects the key that maximizes the quality as well as the security of the stego-image. From implementation point of view, the scheme uses a simple and fast transformation method that increases the difference between the secret image and its transformed version. The results showed that the resultant disarranged image cannot be detected, and at the same time the stego-image quality is still high.

This paper presents an FPGA architecture for a new version of the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm. The efficient hardware that implements the algorithm is also proposed. The new algorithm (AES-512) uses input block size and key size of 512-bits which makes it more resistant to cryptanalysis with tolerated area increase. AES-512 will be suitable for applications with high security and throughput requirements and with less chip area constrains such as multimedia and satellite communication systems. An FPGA architectural for AES-512 was developed using VHDL, and synthesized using Virtix-6 and Virtex-7 chips. AES-512 show tremendous throughput increase of 230% when compared with the implementation of the original AES-128.

Several arithmetic circuits use carry-save (CS) representation of signed numbers in one's complement or two's complement. However, arithmetic right shifts of the CS form may generate incorrect results. This work presents the problem and proposes a simple solution to keep the correct CS representation of signed numbers when arithmetic right-shift operations or sign extensions are required. The authors discuss why the problem does not occur in most of the traditional implementations of arithmetic circuits and also emphasize that it may happen for some types of arithmetic algorithm and arithmetic hardware design.