Alex Talevski

Applications of Wireless Sensor Networks in the Oil, Gas and Resources Industries

The paper provides a study on the use of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) in refineries, petrochemicals, underwater development facilities, and oil and gas platforms. The work focuses on networks that monitor the production process, to either prevent or detect health and safety issues or to enhance production. WSN applications offer great opportunities for production optimization where the use of wired counterparts may prove to be prohibitive. They can be used to remotely monitor pipelines, natural gas leaks, corrosion, H2S, equipment condition, and real-time reservoir status. Data gathered by such devices enables new insights into plant operation and innovative solutions that aids the oil, gas and resources industries in improving platform safety, optimizing operations, preventing problems, tolerating errors, and reducing operating costs. In this paper, we survey a number of WSN applications in oil, gas and resources industry operations.

Web Spambot Detection Based on Web Navigation Behaviour

Web robots have been widely used for various beneficial and malicious activities. Web spambots are a type of web robot that spreads spam content throughout the web by typically targeting Web 2.0 applications. They are intelligently designed to replicate human behaviour in order to bypass system checks. Spam content not only wastes valuable resources but can also mislead users to unsolicited websites and award undeserved search engine rankings to spammers’ campaign websites. While most of the research in anti-spam filtering focuses on the identification of spam content on the web, only a few have investigated the origin of spam content, hence identification and detection of web spambots still remains an open area of research. In this paper, we describe an automated supervised machine learning solution which utilises web navigation behaviour to detect web spambots. We propose a new feature set (referred to as an action set) as a representation of user behaviour to differentiate web spambots from human users. Our experimental results show that our solution achieves a 96.24% accuracy in classifying web spambots.

HoneySpam 2.0: Profiling Web Spambot Behaviour

Internet bots have been widely used for various beneficial and malicious activities on the web. In this paper we provide new insights into a new kind of bot termed as web spambot which is primarily used for spreading spam content on the web. To gain insights into web spambots, we developed a tool (HoneySpam 2.0) to track their behaviour. This paper presents two main contributions, firstly it describes the design of HoneySpam 2.0 and secondly we outline the experimental results that characterise web spambot behaviour. By profiling web spambots, we provide the foundation for identifying such bots and preventing and filtering web spam content.

Definition of spam 2.0: New spamming boom

The most widely recognized form of spam is e-mail spam, however the term “spam” is used to describe similar abuses in other media and mediums. Spam 2.0 (or Web 2.0 Spam) is refereed to as spam content that is hosted on online Web 2.0 applications. In this paper: we provide a definition of Spam 2.0, identify and explain different entities within Spam 2.0, discuss new difficulties associated with Spam 2.0, outline its significance, and list possible countermeasure. The aim of this paper is to provide the reader with a complete understanding of this new form of spamming.

Cyber-physical systems: Providing Quality of Service (QoS) in a heterogeneous systems-of-systems environment

The very recent development of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) provides a smart infrastructure for connecting abstract computational artifacts with the physical world. As new CPS applications start to interact with the physical world using sensors and actuators, there is a great need for ensuring that the actions initiated by the CPS is timely. This will require new Quality of Service (QoS) functionality and mechanisms for CPS. This paper will investigate QoS requirements for CPS and discuss the state of the art in CPS QoS techniques and models. Research challenges to providing QoS for CPS will be discussed and a new CPS framework that provides end-to-end QoS in a complex system-of-systems CPS will be presented. Two case studies, in smart energy grids and intelligent vehicle systems, will be provided to clearly illustrate the QoS requirements in CPS and how it can be achieved.

Comparison of industrial WSN standards

This paper presents a comparison of the current Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) standards that are available for industrial applications. Zigbee, WirelessHART and the recently released ISA.100 are carefully considered. The comparison outlines how WirelessHART and ISA.100 address some of the ZigBee weaknesses in the oil and gas domain.

Taxonomy of Wireless Sensor Network Cyber Security Attacks in the Oil and Gas Industries

The monitoring of oil and gas plants using sensors allows for greater insight into safety and operational performance. However, as a result of strict installation regulations of powered sensors near oil and gas fittings, the introduction of new wired sensors to optimize end-of-lifecycle plants has been expensive, complex and time consuming. Recent advances in wireless technology have enabled low-cost Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) capable of robust and reliable communication. However, the critical WSN security issues have not been sparsely investigated. The goal of this paper is to define the security issues surrounding WSNs with specific focus on the oil and gas industry.

ZigBee/ZigBee PRO Security Assessment Based on Compromised Cryptographic Keys

Sensor networks have many applications in monitoring and controlling of environmental properties such as sound, acceleration, vibration and temperature. Due to limited resources in computation capability, memory and energy, they are vulnerable to many kinds of attacks. The ZigBee specification [1], based on the 802.15.4 standard [2], defines a set of layers specifically suited to sensor networks. These layers support secure messaging using symmetric cryptographic. This paper presents two different ways for grabbing the cryptographic key in ZigBee: remote attack and physical attack. It also surveys and categorizes some additional attacks which can be performed on ZigBee networks: eavesdropping, spoofing, replay and DoS attacks at different layers. From this analysis, it is shown that some vulnerabilities still in the existing security schema in ZigBee technology.

Behaviour-Based web spambot detection by utilising action time and action frequency

Web spam is an escalating problem that wastes valuable resources, misleads people and can manipulate search engines in achieving undeserved search rankings to promote spam content. Spammers have extensively used Web robots to distribute spam content within Web 2.0 platforms. We referred to these web robots as spambots that are capable of performing human tasks such as registering user accounts as well as browsing and posting content. Conventional content-based and link-based techniques are not effective in detecting and preventing web spambots as their focus is on spam content identification rather than spambot detection. We extend our previous research by proposing two action-based features sets known as action time and action frequency for spambot detection. We evaluate our new framework against a real dataset containing spambots and human users and achieve an average classification accuracy of 94.70%.

Voice over Internet Protocol on Mobile Devices

Voice over internet protocol (VoIP) is a way to carry out a telephone conversation over a data network. VoIP products promise converged telecommunications and data services that are cheaper, more versatile and provide good voice quality as compared to traditional offerings. Although VoIP is widely used, VoIP on mobile devices is still in its infancy. Currently, there are a number of VoIP solutions for mobile phones. However, VoIP solutions developed using Java 2 platform micro edition(J2ME) are not available. Java based solutions are widely compatible with many devices. In this paper, strong focus has been granted to cross-device compatibility through the use of the widely supported J2ME framework. The implementation details of VoIP client using J2ME are illustrated.