AL-Rafidain Journal of Computer Sciences and Mathematics, 2021
Mobile malware has become a very hot research topic in the last few years, and this was due to th... more Mobile malware has become a very hot research topic in the last few years, and this was due to the widespread usage of mobile devices all over the world. Like other systems, mobile devices are prune to different attacks that might invade user’s privacy and lead to private data leakage. Millions of Mobile application have been developed and used Worldwide, most of them are requiring permissions to work properly. The permission management problem is more apparent on Android systems rather than other mobile systems such as iOS. Some of these permissions might lead to successful security attacks on Android systems and hence lead to privacy leakage. To reduce the possibility of such attacks, many researchers have proposed mobile applications that help users to manage access permissions for their mobile applications. Most of the proposed systems lack the ability to profile users according to their preferences and do not provide automatic follow up with temporary granted permissions. In th...
Objectives Due to the diversity, volume, and distribution of ingested data, the majority of curre... more Objectives Due to the diversity, volume, and distribution of ingested data, the majority of current healthcare entities operate independently, increasing the problem of data processing and interchange. The goal of this research is to design, implement, and evaluate an electronic health record (EHR) interoperability solution – prototype – among healthcare organizations, whether these organizations do not have systems that are prepared for data sharing, or organizations that have such systems. Methods We established an EHR interoperability prototype model named interoperability smart lane for electronic health record (islEHR), which comprises of three modules: 1) a data fetching APIs for external sharing of patients’ information from participant hospitals; 2) a data integration service, which is the heart of the islEHR that is responsible for extracting, standardizing, and normalizing EHRs data leveraging the fast healthcare interoperability resources (FHIR) and artificial intelligenc...
Flexible fair and collusion resistant pseudonym providing system
Int. Arab J. Inf. Technol., 2019
In service providing systems, user authentication is required for different purposes such as bill... more In service providing systems, user authentication is required for different purposes such as billing, restricting unauthorized access, etc., to protect the privacy of users, their real identities should not be linked to the services that they use during authentication. A good solution is to use pseudonyms as temporary identities. On the other hand, it may also be required to have a backdoor in pseudonym systems for identity revealing that can be used by law enforcement agencies for legal reasons. Existing systems that retain a backdoor are either punitive (full user anonymity is revealed), or they are restrictive by revealing only current pseudonym identity of. In addition to that, existing systems are designed for a particular service and may not fit into others. In this paper, we address this gap and we propose a novel pseudonym providing and management system. Our system is flexible and can be tuned to fit into services for different service providers. The system is privacy-prese...
Privacy aware collaborative traffic monitoring via anonymous access and autonomous location update mechanism
Collaborative Traffic Monitoring, CTM, systems collect information from users in the aim of gener... more Collaborative Traffic Monitoring, CTM, systems collect information from users in the aim of generating a global picture of traffic status. Users send their location information including speed and directions, and in return they get reports about traffic in certain regions. There are two major approaches for the deployment of CTM systems. The first approach relies on dedicated communication infrastructure (DI). This approach is still being investigated by researchers and there is no important deployments done yet. The other approach utilizes existing communication infrastructures (EI) such as Wi-Fi, GSM, and GPRS for communication between users and traffic server. Due to the sensitivity of location information, different privacy preserving techniques have been proposed for both DI and EI approaches. In DI approach the concentration was on anonymous access using pseudonyms. In EI approach privacy techniques concentrate on hiding the identity of a particular user within other k-1 users...
Development of a Case Study-Based Approach for Effective Understanding and use of EHRs in Undergraduate Multidisciplinary Education
2018 IEEE/ACS 15th International Conference on Computer Systems and Applications (AICCSA), 2018
The notion of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) and healthcare Information Technologies (HITs) hav... more The notion of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) and healthcare Information Technologies (HITs) have recently been adopted by many countries. EHRs facilitate sharing of patients' data among healthcare providers, improve patient safety, and reduce healthcare delivery costs. However, many healthcare providers are unable to use EHRs and related HITs, as they lake the competencies and skills necessary to use them. To overcome this gap, many initiatives have proposed, in different countries, on one hand to train healthcare providers to effectively use EHRs and on another to integrate the required EHR competencies and skills with undergraduate curricula. HiCure is a European Erasmus+ project that aims to develop competency-based health informatics pathways that can be integrated within undergraduate curricula of IT and healthcare programs. This paper presents a case study-based approach, developed in HiCure, to instill the required skills for more applied effective understanding and use...
Design and Development of Case Studies in Security and Privacy for Health Informatics Education
2018 IEEE/ACS 15th International Conference on Computer Systems and Applications (AICCSA), 2018
Health informatics has been reported to be a vital sector for the last decade. Many efforts have ... more Health informatics has been reported to be a vital sector for the last decade. Many efforts have been implemented to better utilize advancements in health informatics in real life. Educational institutions have worked hard to enhance their programs to develop or incorporate health informatics. However, in Palestine, this field is not widely deployed in health care delivery institution or in educational institutions. One key element of Health Informatics is electronic health records, for which privacy and security are very important factors. The paper proposes a case based learning method in teaching privacy and security issues for Information Technology students. The paper proposes the use of mini case studies instead of a single cases study, each of the mini cases studies concentrates on a set of learning outcomes. Hence, these mini case studies will enable us to better fulfill learning outcomes. The paper firstly describes the selected mini case studies for Privacy and Security is...
striving to liberate the chinese people from colonial domination and the domestic ruling class, t... more striving to liberate the chinese people from colonial domination and the domestic ruling class, the Chinese Revolution was primarily a national in de pen dence movement. But with the founding of the prc in 1949, China was poised to wade into the world, and its international agenda confirmed Mao's remark that "only China's in de pen dence and liberation will make it pos si ble to participate in the world communist movement." 1 To promote alliance and mutual support among colonized nations, socialist China engaged with nations in Asia, Africa, and Latin Amer i ca in a new united front, breaking through the vicious circle of interstate geopolitics and colonialism. The Cold War era saw a new round of imperialist rivalry over former colonies and spheres of influence by two hegemonic powers. Socialist internationalism sought to battle this power structure. The battle lines were drawn between the geopo liti cal confrontation between the United States and
Mobile malware has increased rapidly last 10 years. This rapid increase is due to the rapid enhan... more Mobile malware has increased rapidly last 10 years. This rapid increase is due to the rapid enhancement of mobile technology and their power to do most work for their users. Since mobile devices are personal devices, then a special action must be taken towards preserving privacy and security of the mobile data. Malware refers to all types of software applications with malicious behavior. In this paper, we propose a malware detection technique called Personal Mobile Malware Guard ? PMMG- that classifies malwares based on the mobile user feedback. PMMG controls permissions of different applications and their behavior according to the user needs. These preferences are built incrementally on a personal basis according to the feedback of the user. Performance analysis showed that it is theoretically feasible to build PMMG tool and use it on mobile devices.
International Journal of Computing and Network Technology
Security and privacy have been considered a corner stone in all electronic transactions nowadays.... more Security and privacy have been considered a corner stone in all electronic transactions nowadays. People are becoming very cautious when conducting electronic transactions over internet. One of the major issues that frightens them is identity theft. Identity theft might be conducted using phishing techniques that aims to trick the user to provide his credentials in a well-organized tactic. Efforts have been done towards fighting against phishing attacks and hence identify theft. However, most of these efforts are either computationally exhaustive to the electronic device or depend on a third party to perform the task. In this paper, we propose a plugin called Personalized Anti-Phishing Guard-PAPG that is managed personally on the device and is used to guard the user against phishing attacks. The plug-in maintains data locally and may not need to synchronize with a third party. Besides, PAPG depends on the user's feedback to build the local knowledge base that is used to support the decision. The user might also store his profile and reuse it with other devices and from different locations without having to configure it again.
International Journal of Wireless and Microwave Technologies
According to Palestinian police records, cybercrimes have become common last few years in Palesti... more According to Palestinian police records, cybercrimes have become common last few years in Palestine. The most commonly reported cybercrimes are mainly based on social networks to hack victims asking for some service. Many efforts are carried out by police and related agencies to handle these crimes and save the victims. In this paper, we will study cybercrimes in Palestine as a matter of the art and we will focus on parties involved in thwarting cybercrimes. These parties include: 1) ministry of higher education where they have a great role to afford knowledge about cybercrimes and ethical issues related to IT in school curricula. 2) Palestinian legislative council for adopting concrete cybercrime laws and regulations. and 3) Police department by broadening the role of cybercrime unit and gaining the trust of people about that unit. A survey designed and distributes and aimed to test the effect of cybercrime on individuals in Palestine, the survey results are reported. According to the findings and survey results, recommendations are provided with the aim of leveraging the ability to fight cybercrimes in Palestine in the near future.
The rapid evolution in mobile devices and communication technology has increased the number of mo... more The rapid evolution in mobile devices and communication technology has increased the number of mobile device users dramatically. The mobile device has replaced many other devices and is used to perform many tasks ranging from establishing a phone call to performing critical and sensitive tasks like money payments. Since the mobile device is accompanying a person most of his time, it is highly probably that it includes personal and sensitive data for that person. The increased use of mobile devices in daily life made mobile systems an excellent target for attacks. One of the most important attacks is phishing attack in which an attacker tries to get the credential of the victim and impersonate him. In this paper, analysis of different types of phishing attacks on mobile devices is provided. Mitigation techniques-anti-phishing techniques-are also analyzed. Assessment of each technique and a summary of its advantages and disadvantages is provided. At the end, important steps to guard against phishing attacks are provided. The aim of the work is to put phishing attacks on mobile systems in light, and to make people aware of these attacks and how to avoid them.
International Journal of Network Security & Its Applications
Vehicular ad hoc networks VANETs use pseudonyms to communicate among them and with roadside units... more Vehicular ad hoc networks VANETs use pseudonyms to communicate among them and with roadside units, these pseudonyms are used to authenticate these vehicles and to hide real identities behind these pseudonyms, to better enhance privacy, these pseudonyms are changed frequently so that it will not be that easy to link these pseudonyms together and hence reveal real identities. However, changing pseudonyms will not be that useful if previous and current pseudonyms are easily linked together. Therefore different techniques have been proposed to hide the pseudonym changes and make it difficult to link pseudonyms together. Most of these techniques do not fully quarantine privacy when changing a pseudonym under some situations such as low traffic. In this paper, we provide a technique for changing pseudonyms that have the same privacy level under all traffic conditions. The technique relies on fixed mixing zones that are planted and distributed over the roads. By this technique, a vehicle guarantees a high level of security when changing its pseudonym at that mix zone which will make it very difficult for an adversary to link particular pseudonyms together and hence reveal real identity. Performance analysis showed that our model works efficiently with very few computational costs.
International Journal of Mobile Network Communications & Telematics
Mobile devices have become very popular nowadays, due to is portability and high performance, a m... more Mobile devices have become very popular nowadays, due to is portability and high performance, a mobile device became a must device for persons using information and communication technologies. In addition to hardware rapid evolution, mobile applications are also increasing in their complexity and performance to cover most the needs of their users. Both software and hardware design focused on increasing performance and the working hours of a mobile device. Different mobile operating systems are being used today with different platforms and different market shares. Like all information systems, mobile systems are prone to malware attacks. Due to the personality feature of mobile devices, malware detection is very important and is a must tool in each device to protect private data and mitigate attacks. In this paper, we will study and analyze different malware detection techniques used for mobile operating systems. We will focus on the to two competing mobile operating systems-Android and iOS. We will asset each technique summarizing its advantages and disadvantages. The aim of the work is to establish a basis for developing a mobile malware detection tool based on user profiling.
Mobile agent technology offers a dramatically evolving computing paradigm in which a program, in ... more Mobile agent technology offers a dramatically evolving computing paradigm in which a program, in the form of a software agent, can suspend its execution on a host computer, transfers itself to another agent-enabled host on the network, and resumes execution on the new host. It is 1960's since mobile code has been used in the form of remote job entry systems. Today's mobile agents can be characterized in a number of ways ranging from simple distributed objects to highly organized intelligent softwares. As a result of this rapid evolvement of mobile agents, plenty of critical security issues has risen and plenty of work is being done to address these problems. The aim is to provide trusted mobile agent systems that can be easily deployed and widely adopted. In this paper, we provide an overview of the most recent threats facing the designers of agent platforms and the developers of agent-based applications. The paper also identifies security objectives, and measures for countering the identified threats and fulfilling those security objectives.
PA-CTM (privacy aware collaborative traffic monitoring system using autonomous location update mechanism)
Proceedings of the 4th Acm Sigspatial International Workshop, 2011
ABSTRACT Collaborative Traffic Monitoring (CTM) systems exploit the location information continuo... more ABSTRACT Collaborative Traffic Monitoring (CTM) systems exploit the location information continuously collected from vehicles. Users collaborate by providing their location information to have a global picture of the current traffic in real-time. However, location information is very sensitive information that made privacy a major obstacle for the widespread usage of CTM systems. Some of these systems depend on periodic location updates, where a vehicle updates location periodically [1]; other systems trigger update at particular regions [2], or with random time periods [3]. For privacy issues, these systems rely on a trusted third party for enforcing a predetermined privacy level. They may also generate low quality data because of the low precision in both time and space [4]. In this paper, we present a privacy aware collaborative traffic monitoring system, PA-CTM, where moving objects send their location updates to a traffic server, the latter then processes current data and provides its users with current traffic status. Users authenticate themselves to traffic server using pseudonyms that are changed according to user's privacy preferences. PA-CTM deploys two mechanisms for enhancing privacy, the first mechanism is the use of pseudonyms (to authenticate to the traffic server) to hide real identities, and changing these pseudonyms to hide trajectory information from the traffic server. Users can control their privacy by frequently changing their pseudonyms and hence become anonymous to traffic server. The second privacy enhancement technique in PA-CTM is the use of a novel autonomous location update mechanism, ALUM. In ALUM, location update is performed according to moving objects' behavior (change in speed or direction) without the need to a trusted third party. Unlike state-of-the art techniques, ALUM does not require a trusted third-party for triggering vehicles to update their locations. We utilized the existence of location prediction errors to calculate the region where a particular vehicle is expected to be in and hence to calculate anonymity level at that region. We compared ALUM against periodic and random silent period update mechanisms and it showed better privacy results in terms of k-anonymity metric.
ABSTRACT Collaborative Traffic Monitoring (CTM) systems exploit the location information continuo... more ABSTRACT Collaborative Traffic Monitoring (CTM) systems exploit the location information continuously collected from vehicles. Users collaborate by providing their location information to have a global picture of the current traffic in real-time. However, location information is very sensitive information that made privacy a major obstacle for the widespread usage of CTM systems. Some of these systems depend on periodic location updates, where a vehicle updates location periodically [1]; other systems trigger update at particular regions [2], or with random time periods [3]. For privacy issues, these systems rely on a trusted third party for enforcing a predetermined privacy level. They may also generate low quality data because of the low precision in both time and space [4]. In this paper, we present a privacy aware collaborative traffic monitoring system, PA-CTM, where moving objects send their location updates to a traffic server, the latter then processes current data and provides its users with current traffic status. Users authenticate themselves to traffic server using pseudonyms that are changed according to user's privacy preferences. PA-CTM deploys two mechanisms for enhancing privacy, the first mechanism is the use of pseudonyms (to authenticate to the traffic server) to hide real identities, and changing these pseudonyms to hide trajectory information from the traffic server. Users can control their privacy by frequently changing their pseudonyms and hence become anonymous to traffic server. The second privacy enhancement technique in PA-CTM is the use of a novel autonomous location update mechanism, ALUM. In ALUM, location update is performed according to moving objects' behavior (change in speed or direction) without the need to a trusted third party. Unlike state-of-the art techniques, ALUM does not require a trusted third-party for triggering vehicles to update their locations. We utilized the existence of location prediction errors to calculate the region where a particular vehicle is expected to be in and hence to calculate anonymity level at that region. We compared ALUM against periodic and random silent period update mechanisms and it showed better privacy results in terms of k-anonymity metric.
In general service providing systems, user authentication is required for different purposes such... more In general service providing systems, user authentication is required for different purposes such as billing, restricting unauthorized access, etc. A good solution is to use pseudonyms as temporary identities. On the other hand, it may also be required to have a backdoor in pseudonym systems for identity revealing that can be used by law enforcement agencies for legal reasons. Such pseudonym providing systems rely on one or more trusted third parties. The threat models of the existing schemes do not assume existence of collusion among these trusted parties; however, collusion among them can severely breach privacy such that pseudonyms can be linked to real identities in an unauthorized way. In this paper, we propose a novel pseudonym providing and management system. Our system is privacy-preserving and guarantees a level of anonymity for a particular number of system users. Besides, trust is distributed among all system entities instead of centralizing it into a single trusted third party. More importantly, our system is highly resistant to collusions among the trusted entities. Our system also has the ability to reveal user identity in case of a request by law enforcement. To maximize the privacy of the users, our design requires the collaboration among all trusted entities for identity revealing. We perform analytical and simulation based performance evaluation in order to analyze the anonymity level and resistance against collusion attacks. Our results show that CoRPPS provides high level of anonymity with strong resistance against collusion attacks.
AL-Rafidain Journal of Computer Sciences and Mathematics, 2021
Mobile malware has become a very hot research topic in the last few years, and this was due to th... more Mobile malware has become a very hot research topic in the last few years, and this was due to the widespread usage of mobile devices all over the world. Like other systems, mobile devices are prune to different attacks that might invade user’s privacy and lead to private data leakage. Millions of Mobile application have been developed and used Worldwide, most of them are requiring permissions to work properly. The permission management problem is more apparent on Android systems rather than other mobile systems such as iOS. Some of these permissions might lead to successful security attacks on Android systems and hence lead to privacy leakage. To reduce the possibility of such attacks, many researchers have proposed mobile applications that help users to manage access permissions for their mobile applications. Most of the proposed systems lack the ability to profile users according to their preferences and do not provide automatic follow up with temporary granted permissions. In th...
Objectives Due to the diversity, volume, and distribution of ingested data, the majority of curre... more Objectives Due to the diversity, volume, and distribution of ingested data, the majority of current healthcare entities operate independently, increasing the problem of data processing and interchange. The goal of this research is to design, implement, and evaluate an electronic health record (EHR) interoperability solution – prototype – among healthcare organizations, whether these organizations do not have systems that are prepared for data sharing, or organizations that have such systems. Methods We established an EHR interoperability prototype model named interoperability smart lane for electronic health record (islEHR), which comprises of three modules: 1) a data fetching APIs for external sharing of patients’ information from participant hospitals; 2) a data integration service, which is the heart of the islEHR that is responsible for extracting, standardizing, and normalizing EHRs data leveraging the fast healthcare interoperability resources (FHIR) and artificial intelligenc...
Flexible fair and collusion resistant pseudonym providing system
Int. Arab J. Inf. Technol., 2019
In service providing systems, user authentication is required for different purposes such as bill... more In service providing systems, user authentication is required for different purposes such as billing, restricting unauthorized access, etc., to protect the privacy of users, their real identities should not be linked to the services that they use during authentication. A good solution is to use pseudonyms as temporary identities. On the other hand, it may also be required to have a backdoor in pseudonym systems for identity revealing that can be used by law enforcement agencies for legal reasons. Existing systems that retain a backdoor are either punitive (full user anonymity is revealed), or they are restrictive by revealing only current pseudonym identity of. In addition to that, existing systems are designed for a particular service and may not fit into others. In this paper, we address this gap and we propose a novel pseudonym providing and management system. Our system is flexible and can be tuned to fit into services for different service providers. The system is privacy-prese...
Privacy aware collaborative traffic monitoring via anonymous access and autonomous location update mechanism
Collaborative Traffic Monitoring, CTM, systems collect information from users in the aim of gener... more Collaborative Traffic Monitoring, CTM, systems collect information from users in the aim of generating a global picture of traffic status. Users send their location information including speed and directions, and in return they get reports about traffic in certain regions. There are two major approaches for the deployment of CTM systems. The first approach relies on dedicated communication infrastructure (DI). This approach is still being investigated by researchers and there is no important deployments done yet. The other approach utilizes existing communication infrastructures (EI) such as Wi-Fi, GSM, and GPRS for communication between users and traffic server. Due to the sensitivity of location information, different privacy preserving techniques have been proposed for both DI and EI approaches. In DI approach the concentration was on anonymous access using pseudonyms. In EI approach privacy techniques concentrate on hiding the identity of a particular user within other k-1 users...
Development of a Case Study-Based Approach for Effective Understanding and use of EHRs in Undergraduate Multidisciplinary Education
2018 IEEE/ACS 15th International Conference on Computer Systems and Applications (AICCSA), 2018
The notion of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) and healthcare Information Technologies (HITs) hav... more The notion of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) and healthcare Information Technologies (HITs) have recently been adopted by many countries. EHRs facilitate sharing of patients' data among healthcare providers, improve patient safety, and reduce healthcare delivery costs. However, many healthcare providers are unable to use EHRs and related HITs, as they lake the competencies and skills necessary to use them. To overcome this gap, many initiatives have proposed, in different countries, on one hand to train healthcare providers to effectively use EHRs and on another to integrate the required EHR competencies and skills with undergraduate curricula. HiCure is a European Erasmus+ project that aims to develop competency-based health informatics pathways that can be integrated within undergraduate curricula of IT and healthcare programs. This paper presents a case study-based approach, developed in HiCure, to instill the required skills for more applied effective understanding and use...
Design and Development of Case Studies in Security and Privacy for Health Informatics Education
2018 IEEE/ACS 15th International Conference on Computer Systems and Applications (AICCSA), 2018
Health informatics has been reported to be a vital sector for the last decade. Many efforts have ... more Health informatics has been reported to be a vital sector for the last decade. Many efforts have been implemented to better utilize advancements in health informatics in real life. Educational institutions have worked hard to enhance their programs to develop or incorporate health informatics. However, in Palestine, this field is not widely deployed in health care delivery institution or in educational institutions. One key element of Health Informatics is electronic health records, for which privacy and security are very important factors. The paper proposes a case based learning method in teaching privacy and security issues for Information Technology students. The paper proposes the use of mini case studies instead of a single cases study, each of the mini cases studies concentrates on a set of learning outcomes. Hence, these mini case studies will enable us to better fulfill learning outcomes. The paper firstly describes the selected mini case studies for Privacy and Security is...
striving to liberate the chinese people from colonial domination and the domestic ruling class, t... more striving to liberate the chinese people from colonial domination and the domestic ruling class, the Chinese Revolution was primarily a national in de pen dence movement. But with the founding of the prc in 1949, China was poised to wade into the world, and its international agenda confirmed Mao's remark that "only China's in de pen dence and liberation will make it pos si ble to participate in the world communist movement." 1 To promote alliance and mutual support among colonized nations, socialist China engaged with nations in Asia, Africa, and Latin Amer i ca in a new united front, breaking through the vicious circle of interstate geopolitics and colonialism. The Cold War era saw a new round of imperialist rivalry over former colonies and spheres of influence by two hegemonic powers. Socialist internationalism sought to battle this power structure. The battle lines were drawn between the geopo liti cal confrontation between the United States and
Mobile malware has increased rapidly last 10 years. This rapid increase is due to the rapid enhan... more Mobile malware has increased rapidly last 10 years. This rapid increase is due to the rapid enhancement of mobile technology and their power to do most work for their users. Since mobile devices are personal devices, then a special action must be taken towards preserving privacy and security of the mobile data. Malware refers to all types of software applications with malicious behavior. In this paper, we propose a malware detection technique called Personal Mobile Malware Guard ? PMMG- that classifies malwares based on the mobile user feedback. PMMG controls permissions of different applications and their behavior according to the user needs. These preferences are built incrementally on a personal basis according to the feedback of the user. Performance analysis showed that it is theoretically feasible to build PMMG tool and use it on mobile devices.
International Journal of Computing and Network Technology
Security and privacy have been considered a corner stone in all electronic transactions nowadays.... more Security and privacy have been considered a corner stone in all electronic transactions nowadays. People are becoming very cautious when conducting electronic transactions over internet. One of the major issues that frightens them is identity theft. Identity theft might be conducted using phishing techniques that aims to trick the user to provide his credentials in a well-organized tactic. Efforts have been done towards fighting against phishing attacks and hence identify theft. However, most of these efforts are either computationally exhaustive to the electronic device or depend on a third party to perform the task. In this paper, we propose a plugin called Personalized Anti-Phishing Guard-PAPG that is managed personally on the device and is used to guard the user against phishing attacks. The plug-in maintains data locally and may not need to synchronize with a third party. Besides, PAPG depends on the user's feedback to build the local knowledge base that is used to support the decision. The user might also store his profile and reuse it with other devices and from different locations without having to configure it again.
International Journal of Wireless and Microwave Technologies
According to Palestinian police records, cybercrimes have become common last few years in Palesti... more According to Palestinian police records, cybercrimes have become common last few years in Palestine. The most commonly reported cybercrimes are mainly based on social networks to hack victims asking for some service. Many efforts are carried out by police and related agencies to handle these crimes and save the victims. In this paper, we will study cybercrimes in Palestine as a matter of the art and we will focus on parties involved in thwarting cybercrimes. These parties include: 1) ministry of higher education where they have a great role to afford knowledge about cybercrimes and ethical issues related to IT in school curricula. 2) Palestinian legislative council for adopting concrete cybercrime laws and regulations. and 3) Police department by broadening the role of cybercrime unit and gaining the trust of people about that unit. A survey designed and distributes and aimed to test the effect of cybercrime on individuals in Palestine, the survey results are reported. According to the findings and survey results, recommendations are provided with the aim of leveraging the ability to fight cybercrimes in Palestine in the near future.
The rapid evolution in mobile devices and communication technology has increased the number of mo... more The rapid evolution in mobile devices and communication technology has increased the number of mobile device users dramatically. The mobile device has replaced many other devices and is used to perform many tasks ranging from establishing a phone call to performing critical and sensitive tasks like money payments. Since the mobile device is accompanying a person most of his time, it is highly probably that it includes personal and sensitive data for that person. The increased use of mobile devices in daily life made mobile systems an excellent target for attacks. One of the most important attacks is phishing attack in which an attacker tries to get the credential of the victim and impersonate him. In this paper, analysis of different types of phishing attacks on mobile devices is provided. Mitigation techniques-anti-phishing techniques-are also analyzed. Assessment of each technique and a summary of its advantages and disadvantages is provided. At the end, important steps to guard against phishing attacks are provided. The aim of the work is to put phishing attacks on mobile systems in light, and to make people aware of these attacks and how to avoid them.
International Journal of Network Security & Its Applications
Vehicular ad hoc networks VANETs use pseudonyms to communicate among them and with roadside units... more Vehicular ad hoc networks VANETs use pseudonyms to communicate among them and with roadside units, these pseudonyms are used to authenticate these vehicles and to hide real identities behind these pseudonyms, to better enhance privacy, these pseudonyms are changed frequently so that it will not be that easy to link these pseudonyms together and hence reveal real identities. However, changing pseudonyms will not be that useful if previous and current pseudonyms are easily linked together. Therefore different techniques have been proposed to hide the pseudonym changes and make it difficult to link pseudonyms together. Most of these techniques do not fully quarantine privacy when changing a pseudonym under some situations such as low traffic. In this paper, we provide a technique for changing pseudonyms that have the same privacy level under all traffic conditions. The technique relies on fixed mixing zones that are planted and distributed over the roads. By this technique, a vehicle guarantees a high level of security when changing its pseudonym at that mix zone which will make it very difficult for an adversary to link particular pseudonyms together and hence reveal real identity. Performance analysis showed that our model works efficiently with very few computational costs.
International Journal of Mobile Network Communications & Telematics
Mobile devices have become very popular nowadays, due to is portability and high performance, a m... more Mobile devices have become very popular nowadays, due to is portability and high performance, a mobile device became a must device for persons using information and communication technologies. In addition to hardware rapid evolution, mobile applications are also increasing in their complexity and performance to cover most the needs of their users. Both software and hardware design focused on increasing performance and the working hours of a mobile device. Different mobile operating systems are being used today with different platforms and different market shares. Like all information systems, mobile systems are prone to malware attacks. Due to the personality feature of mobile devices, malware detection is very important and is a must tool in each device to protect private data and mitigate attacks. In this paper, we will study and analyze different malware detection techniques used for mobile operating systems. We will focus on the to two competing mobile operating systems-Android and iOS. We will asset each technique summarizing its advantages and disadvantages. The aim of the work is to establish a basis for developing a mobile malware detection tool based on user profiling.
Mobile agent technology offers a dramatically evolving computing paradigm in which a program, in ... more Mobile agent technology offers a dramatically evolving computing paradigm in which a program, in the form of a software agent, can suspend its execution on a host computer, transfers itself to another agent-enabled host on the network, and resumes execution on the new host. It is 1960's since mobile code has been used in the form of remote job entry systems. Today's mobile agents can be characterized in a number of ways ranging from simple distributed objects to highly organized intelligent softwares. As a result of this rapid evolvement of mobile agents, plenty of critical security issues has risen and plenty of work is being done to address these problems. The aim is to provide trusted mobile agent systems that can be easily deployed and widely adopted. In this paper, we provide an overview of the most recent threats facing the designers of agent platforms and the developers of agent-based applications. The paper also identifies security objectives, and measures for countering the identified threats and fulfilling those security objectives.
PA-CTM (privacy aware collaborative traffic monitoring system using autonomous location update mechanism)
Proceedings of the 4th Acm Sigspatial International Workshop, 2011
ABSTRACT Collaborative Traffic Monitoring (CTM) systems exploit the location information continuo... more ABSTRACT Collaborative Traffic Monitoring (CTM) systems exploit the location information continuously collected from vehicles. Users collaborate by providing their location information to have a global picture of the current traffic in real-time. However, location information is very sensitive information that made privacy a major obstacle for the widespread usage of CTM systems. Some of these systems depend on periodic location updates, where a vehicle updates location periodically [1]; other systems trigger update at particular regions [2], or with random time periods [3]. For privacy issues, these systems rely on a trusted third party for enforcing a predetermined privacy level. They may also generate low quality data because of the low precision in both time and space [4]. In this paper, we present a privacy aware collaborative traffic monitoring system, PA-CTM, where moving objects send their location updates to a traffic server, the latter then processes current data and provides its users with current traffic status. Users authenticate themselves to traffic server using pseudonyms that are changed according to user's privacy preferences. PA-CTM deploys two mechanisms for enhancing privacy, the first mechanism is the use of pseudonyms (to authenticate to the traffic server) to hide real identities, and changing these pseudonyms to hide trajectory information from the traffic server. Users can control their privacy by frequently changing their pseudonyms and hence become anonymous to traffic server. The second privacy enhancement technique in PA-CTM is the use of a novel autonomous location update mechanism, ALUM. In ALUM, location update is performed according to moving objects' behavior (change in speed or direction) without the need to a trusted third party. Unlike state-of-the art techniques, ALUM does not require a trusted third-party for triggering vehicles to update their locations. We utilized the existence of location prediction errors to calculate the region where a particular vehicle is expected to be in and hence to calculate anonymity level at that region. We compared ALUM against periodic and random silent period update mechanisms and it showed better privacy results in terms of k-anonymity metric.
ABSTRACT Collaborative Traffic Monitoring (CTM) systems exploit the location information continuo... more ABSTRACT Collaborative Traffic Monitoring (CTM) systems exploit the location information continuously collected from vehicles. Users collaborate by providing their location information to have a global picture of the current traffic in real-time. However, location information is very sensitive information that made privacy a major obstacle for the widespread usage of CTM systems. Some of these systems depend on periodic location updates, where a vehicle updates location periodically [1]; other systems trigger update at particular regions [2], or with random time periods [3]. For privacy issues, these systems rely on a trusted third party for enforcing a predetermined privacy level. They may also generate low quality data because of the low precision in both time and space [4]. In this paper, we present a privacy aware collaborative traffic monitoring system, PA-CTM, where moving objects send their location updates to a traffic server, the latter then processes current data and provides its users with current traffic status. Users authenticate themselves to traffic server using pseudonyms that are changed according to user's privacy preferences. PA-CTM deploys two mechanisms for enhancing privacy, the first mechanism is the use of pseudonyms (to authenticate to the traffic server) to hide real identities, and changing these pseudonyms to hide trajectory information from the traffic server. Users can control their privacy by frequently changing their pseudonyms and hence become anonymous to traffic server. The second privacy enhancement technique in PA-CTM is the use of a novel autonomous location update mechanism, ALUM. In ALUM, location update is performed according to moving objects' behavior (change in speed or direction) without the need to a trusted third party. Unlike state-of-the art techniques, ALUM does not require a trusted third-party for triggering vehicles to update their locations. We utilized the existence of location prediction errors to calculate the region where a particular vehicle is expected to be in and hence to calculate anonymity level at that region. We compared ALUM against periodic and random silent period update mechanisms and it showed better privacy results in terms of k-anonymity metric.
In general service providing systems, user authentication is required for different purposes such... more In general service providing systems, user authentication is required for different purposes such as billing, restricting unauthorized access, etc. A good solution is to use pseudonyms as temporary identities. On the other hand, it may also be required to have a backdoor in pseudonym systems for identity revealing that can be used by law enforcement agencies for legal reasons. Such pseudonym providing systems rely on one or more trusted third parties. The threat models of the existing schemes do not assume existence of collusion among these trusted parties; however, collusion among them can severely breach privacy such that pseudonyms can be linked to real identities in an unauthorized way. In this paper, we propose a novel pseudonym providing and management system. Our system is privacy-preserving and guarantees a level of anonymity for a particular number of system users. Besides, trust is distributed among all system entities instead of centralizing it into a single trusted third party. More importantly, our system is highly resistant to collusions among the trusted entities. Our system also has the ability to reveal user identity in case of a request by law enforcement. To maximize the privacy of the users, our design requires the collaboration among all trusted entities for identity revealing. We perform analytical and simulation based performance evaluation in order to analyze the anonymity level and resistance against collusion attacks. Our results show that CoRPPS provides high level of anonymity with strong resistance against collusion attacks.
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