Jalal Atoum

Distributed Black Box and Graveyards Defense Strategies against Distributed Denial of Services

A Distributed Denial of Service attack (DDoS) is one the most dangerous attacks that can be initiated on computer systems that targets their availability. No defense technique was suggested until now to be called an absolute defense that stands against all types of DDoS attacks. In this paper, we suggest two strategies of defense mechanisms that will enhance the efficiency of compacting against DDoS; the Distributed black box/packet Reflector that uses the packet reflecting technique and the Graveyard that drops malicious packets at least after doing several levels of testing on them.

A Multi-Agent Experience Based e-Negotiation System

This paper presents an alternative approach to modeling of an e-negotiation process based on integration of case-based reasoning with multiagent technology whose complementary properties can be advantageously combined to build an efficient e-negotiation model where using any single technique fails to provide a satisfactory solution. Integration of centralized and decentralized decision making techniques allows to minimize the volume of required communications between negotiating parts, thus making the negotiating process itself less susceptible to the network problems. Reusing previous successful solutions for current problems, capability to avoid repeating the same mistakes leads to improved quality of agreement, mutual acceptance and satisfaction. Modular design allows easy integration into other e-business services, such as contracting, scheduling, supply chain management, dispute resolution, etc

Risk adaptive hybrid RFID access control system

Dynamic environments pose a challenge for traditional access control models where permissions are granted or revoked merely based on predefined and static access policies making them incapable of dynamically adapting to changing conditions. Risk adaptive access control models have been gaining more attention in the research community as an alternative approach to overcome the limitations of traditional access control models. Radio Frequency Identification RFID is an emerging technology widely utilized in both physical and logical access control systems because of its contactless nature, low cost, high read/write speed and long distance operation. Serverless RFID system architecture offers better availability assurance and lower implementation cost, while access rights management is easier in server-based architecture. In this study, we continue to build on our previous research on the privacy and security of RFID access control systems without a backend database in order to overcome its limitations. We propose a hybrid design for a risk adaptive RFID access control system; that is, dynamically alternating between two access control modes, online server-based and offline serverless, to adapt to the level of risk depending on rule-based risk scenarios and current risk value. The proposed design combines features of both serverless and risk adaptive access control systems. Copyright

A Robust Algorithm for Arabic Video Text Detection

In this paper, we propose an efficient Arabic text detection method based on the Laplacian operator in the frequency domain. The zero crossing value is computed for each pixel in the Laplacian-filtered image to found edges in four directions. K-means is then used to classify all the pixels of the filtered image into two clusters: text and non-text. For each candidate text region, the corresponding region in the canny edge map of the input image undergoes projection profile analysis to determine the boundary of the text blocks. Finally, we employ empirical rules to eliminate false positives based on geometrical properties. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is able to detect texts of different fonts, contrasts and backgrounds. Moreover, it outperforms four existing algorithms in terms of detection and false positive rates.

Cloud Computing: Privacy, Mobility and Resources Utilization

The fascinating world of Cloud computing has definitely changed the way of using computers and the Internet. The impact it has left so far on how IT and business services are delivered and managed is undeniable. However, the evolutionary change that Cloud computing has left on the IT landscape has given rise to a range of concerns by Cloud providers and customers. The current study introduces and examines two major problems in Cloud computing system. The first one is the Cloud internal and external data security and client’s privacy, and the tasks mobility and resources utilization. The study also provides practical solutions to the two aforementioned problems and a prototype, called SPI, which has been successfully tested. The present study suggests using SSL with proxy server and secured access to members control panel for Cloud external data security. As for internal security and client’s privacy, multiple approaches have been applied.

Approximate Functional Dependencies Mining Using Association Rules Specificity Interestingness Measur e

Mining Approximate Functional Dependencies (AFDs) from a database may produce valuable interesting relationships among its variables that would be beneficial in several domain applications such as marketing, financial data analysis, biological data analysi s, and intrusion detection. Mining of association rules is concerned with extracting new knowledge from dat abases in the form of patterns and associations among data items. The mining of AFDs still posing special se t of challenges such as the space and time requirements in addition to the quality of the discovered AFD s. In this paper, an approach for AFDs mining is being developed through employing the specificity interestingness measure and its monotonic property used in some association rules mining algorithms. Thi s approach has been tested on a set of test bed of datasets. The results showed an improvement in time requirements and in the number of mined AFDs.

Searching Vocalized/Unvocalized Arabic Texts Using an Improved Coding Schema

Searching for a pattern in an Arabic text raises various problems due to the association of vocalization characters with alphabetical letters of Arabic words. This feature causes a problem for existing searching algorithms. They either fail to find all partial matches of a pattern or they may suffer from performance degradation when they are simply modified to ignore these vocalization characters. This paper presents a new coding schema for Arabic vocalization characters that will facilitate and improve the performance of searching for vocalized and unvocalized patterns in any Arabic text (vocalized or unvocalized). This schema is based on repositioning the vocalization characters at the end of each word. We present in this paper the coding and decoding algorithms needed to support our new coding schema. In addition, we explain the modifications to the Boyer-Moore algorithm that take advantage of our improved coding schema together with the complexity analysis.