The 11th International Conference on Computing and Information Technology (IC2IT2015) is organised by Faculty of Information Technology, King Mongkut's University of Technology North Bangkok and its partners, including:
This year's event, the IC2IT2014, was successfully held in Phuket. There were around one hundred submissions from all over the world, and thirty were accepted for oral presentation.
Next year, the IC2IT2015 will be held at King Mongkut's University of Technology North Bangkok with the emphasis on two fields:
Data Mining and Machine Learning and
Data Network and Communication
Again, the IC2IT2015 conference proceedings will be published by Springer. This will be the third time that the proceedings will be published by such accredited publisher as Springer. Moreover, the proceedings will be indexed by Scopus.
This is what the IC2IT2014 proceedings looks like. ^_^
Papers can be submitted here. We accept papers until the 21st December 2014.
On the 9th September 2014, Apple finally announced two new iPhone models: iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus. I won't go into any detail of the features they offer, because it looks like a lot of people have already talked about them.
However, there is one feature that I am particularly interested in. The Apple Pay. From what I have seen of it, it looks very convenient.
For now, let's look briefly at how it works. (Thanks TechCrunch for the video.)
Wow! Quick and convenient! What more can you ask for?
One question that instantly came to mind when looking at the demo of this sort. Is Apple Pay secure?
In order to answer this question, let us think about the technology involved in this. The first thing that makes this work is the NFC technology. Secondly, the credit card detail is required to be stored on the phone. Thirdly, the fingerprint of the user.
Let's analyse. Well, I will just do whatever I can here. haha!
First of all, the NFC technology is an integral part of this Apple Pay. Without it, no communication between the phone and the point-of-sale is possible. What information is to be transferred between them? Of course, the user's credential information. You should be asking questions right about now. ...
Apple said nothing at the event about how the communication takes place, and more importantly, how the communication is to be made secure. Why not? I don't really know.
NFC's range is said to be no further than 20 cm, which may be enough to prevent any information interception (during the payment by a person in line next to the payer). However, remember that 20 cm is just an estimate. Therefore, it is still possible that the information can travel a little further than expected. If this happens then we may be in trouble.
NFC's standard is the ISO14443, which does not appear to have a part on security! It is, therefore, up to Apple to answer how they have made the communication between the phone and the point-of-sale secure.
The next thing is that after using the Apple Pay to pay for anything, does the NFC get automatically turned off? If not, it means that a communication channel is left open to anyone to try to get into the phone (albeit to be within the communication range is not that easy, but still not impossible).
So ... the first component of Apple Pay, the NFC, still leaves a question.
The second aspect of Apple Pay is the storing of credit card information. Yes, it is neccessary to do so otherwise this would not work. Anyway, it was good to hear Apple say that the information is to be encrypted by Apple's "secure element" (no real algorithm has been mentioned). Another thing that was pleasing to hear is that no information will be sent to the Apple server. Good good. Personally, I do trust that Apple can do a good job in securing the information on the iPhone for us, provided that we do not lose the phone! haha!
Still, how the credit card information is securely sent to the point-of-sale for verification remains to be answered. This is actually back to the NFC question.
The third component to be discussed is the fingerprint. Apple has taken the advantage of having the fingerprint scanner on the iPhone here. Clever. I quite like the idea of using biometric as a factor of authentication. At least, it is better than using a pin code, which can easily be stolen.
Speaking of stealing, I think one of the reasons Apple decided to use fingerprint as a factor of authentication is to at least make it more difficult to use the Apple Pay when a phone is lost or stolen. But ... let's not forget that fingerprint can also be faked! This is how. (A few years ago, I had students in my information security class research on this exact topic, too. Interesting it was.)
One final point ... Apple Pay uses credit card information and user's fingerprint for verification and authentication purposes. Is this a two-factor authentication? Not sure, but it looks like a single-factor authentication to me (credit card information not being a factor since another person can easily transfer the information using the same phone), at a glance here. Hmmm ... one-factor authentication. I'm sure I have heard that there are problems with this. hehe! At least another factor should really used, I think.
Why don't they use their Apple Watch as a second factor of authentication? Just a funny idea ... haha!
On the whole, the idea of Apple Pay is to provide convenience to users. Some security questions remain to be explained, especially the security of data transfer via NFC. The final question is "would people use it because it is convenient despite some security doubts?".
"Celebrities' private photos have been hacked and shared on the Internet" is really today's big news. How did it happened? Did they all happen to lose their phones at the same time? Did all the phones happen to fall into the same person's hand at once? I don't think that's what has happened anyway.
Many have suggested that the photos have been shot and automatically saved on the Apple's iCloud. Somehow this person was able to access it and took those photos. The question is "has the iCloud been hacked?"
A lot of articles have agreed on the theory. But ... hacking the iCloud directly could not have been easy. Personally, I question whether the following had been done prior to getting into iCloud.
Is it possible that the hacker had got the usernames and passwords from somewhere else and used them on the iCloud?
Why is it that I seem to think that the above scenario could have been very possible? I even think that it might even have been easier to do the above than going directly to iCloud.
If this is actually what had happened, another security awareness must be raised. That is, people should know that password reuse is really not acceptable. Maybe the TOTP or Time-Based One-Time Password is an option. ^_^
I am not praising Apple by any means. I am not even using any of their products at the moment. But I have seen and read every page of their security document, and I think they have their job in trying to protect the privacy of the users.
Just wanting to provide another perspective to this current and trendy news. ^_^
When writing a research paper using LaTex, it is usually a good idea to use BibTex for references, too. Of course, this is what I normally do, because it is easy to cite any papers that I have read and kept in my collection.
However, there are times when we will have to submit a paper to an academic journal, which does not let us use and uoload our BibTex file during the submission process. What they ask us to use for references is LaTex's \begin{thebibliography} ... \end{thebibliography} command instead.
Fortunately, there is an easy way to turn our BibTex references to thebibliography in LaTex. We just have to follow the following steps.
Cite and compile the LaTex document with BibTex as usual. By using BibTex, a .bbl file is generated.
Open the .bbl file
Copy the content in the .bbl file
Paste it inside the \begin{thebibliography} ... \end{thebibliography}
I think it might be worth writing a blog post on ns2 installation. As we know, ns2 is a network simulator used a lot by students and researchers in the field of networking. I, personally, had not touched the simulator since I graduated in 2006!! However, today I thought I would install it on my Ubuntu-run laptop and revisit my knowledge. Well, actually the real reason for installing it was because I had an idea on a research on remote procedure call (RPC) and its performance and security.
I remember that installing ns2 back in 2002 was not an easy task. Lots of compilations and finding dependencies were to be carried out. That was over ten years ago. With today's technologies and operating system, it cannot be as hard surely. Or can it?
My laptop is now running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, which is the latest version. I was thinking about what packages to install and how to install them with the least effort and, of course, the fewest number of errors possible.
Yes! Ubuntu comes with the Ubuntu Software Centre. What I did was I searched for ns2. Bam! It showed. I clicked on the install button. All done!
I could not believe how simple it was.
I then tried out a few simple scripts, running a few simple network scenarios, and sending a few packets. Everything worked. The graphical simulator worked.
Even though everything seemed fine, there was one more thing for me to test in order to believe that ns2 worked perfectly.
I wrote a simple protocol. As I remembered, that means I had to create a .h file and a .cc file. I would then have to edit the ns2's packet.h file, ns-default.tcl file and several others. It sounded easy in my head. What's so hard about writing my own files and editting the ns2's existing files?
No!! Where are all the ns2's files!!??? That's right. I could not find them anywhere in the system. I tried the locate command. I tried looking for them in all the directories. They weren't there!!
THIS is a big problem for me now. I, therefore, concluded that installing ns2 using the Ubuntu Software Centre was very easy and everything worked. However, when I wanted to do something a little bit more advanced, I could not do it.
Damn! My only option at that moment was to remove the ns2 from my system entirely. Of course, via the Ubuntu Software Centre. Again, very easy.
I now had to do what I wanted to avoid in the first place. Installing from the source. Fortunately, thanks to several Web pages that provided me with very simple guides on how to get ns2 to work without the help of the Ubuntu Software Centre.
Here are the steps to be followed when installing ns2 on Ubuntu:
1. Download the ns2 all-in-one source file from here.
2. Install all necessary dependencies using this command:
The network simulator should work as it is now. However, with more complicated scenarios where you want to create your own protocols, ns2 may ask for pcap.h and pcap.cc files. In this case, the following command must be run in order to incall the pcap library.
sudo apt-get install libpcap-dev
That's it. That was really all I did, and I was able to get ns2 working perfectly.
It was a lot simpler than what I had to go through ten years ago. ^_^
It's finally that time of the year when the UK university league table came out. The Sunday Times provides one of the most respectable guide in ranking the university with the following criteria.
Student satisfaction
Teaching excellence
Heads and peer assessment
Research quality
A-Level points
Unemployment
Firsts and 2:1s awarded
Dropout rate
The Sunday Times' league table came out as recently as early October 2012. The top ten British universities are depicted below.
Rank number 3, the University of Bath has been highlighted for personal pride only. haha! It's only because I got both my Bachelor of Science and Doctor of Philosophy from there. ^_^
This is the university's highest ever ranking in the guide, as said here.
Since this blog is about computer science, I feel the need to announce the Sunday Times computer science league table also The top ten British universities for computer science are:
(I have to thank my colleague, Dr.Tom Crick, for this computer science league table.)
There were many participants from around the globe, including (but not limited to) USA, Germany, Australia, Finland, Malaysia, India and Thailand (that's me!). The papers presented there were of good quality. The more interesting ones were on parallel processing using GPU. It was presented by Dr.Ming Ouyang, who is an assistant professor at the Department of Computer Engineering and Computer Science, University of Louisville, USA. What he said basically was that nowadays comparing a normal CPU with a GPU,the GPU is more suited to parallel processing due to its architecture. I spoke to him afterwards. He said that one of his students used a GPU to process intrusion detection mechanism and the results were pretty impressive. That is, it could run approximately four times faster than running this intrusion detection mechanism on a normal CPU. Having heard that I began to think how interesting it would be to use a GPU to run cryptography and even to carry out cryptanalysis. (Sorry, forgot to say that information and network security is really my research area.)
Anyway, enough about that. Let's talk a little bit about the paper I presented. The paper I presented was titled "The Number of Keys Needed for Secure Sharing on Social Networks." I reason I wrote this paper is because I realised that cryptography had not been widely used in social networks as much as it should be to give better privacy to information. One reason was that the number of keys that needed to be held was large. Therefore, I had to find a way to reduce that number, and this is what this paper was about.
Below is the abstract of paper. The full version can be read here.
Online social networks have become an essential
tool for communications these days. With popularity come security problems,
especially with information privacy. One way to solve this problem is to use
cryptography. However, cryptography on online social networks has not been
studied exclusively. Most works have been done on access control. The main
issue with cryptography is the number of keys needed to encrypt and decrypt the
information. The most obvious number of keys would be to use one key for every
user in our group of friends. This is not entirely true as we show here. This
paper, therefore, gives an attempt to show that the number of keys needed to
achieve secure sharing among friends can in fact be fewer than the number of
friends. We also provide proofs of correctness and security to confirm our
claim.
This paper was also given the Best Research Paper Award by the Conference.
