Cyber Security - Scenarios for Context-Aware Applications.



This paper depicts many situations in which the PBM paradigm aids IMSs in the processing and protection of information, as well as the configuration and behavior management of systems. 


Location Privacy Management


Protecting the privacy of users' data in location-based services that are part of users' daily lives is a unique problem [63]. 

Location-based services are now available on computers, smartphones, tablets, and smart watches, and provide consumers with additional value. 

Social networks, automobile navigation systems, and recommender systems are examples of these services. 

The preservation of enormous amounts of diverse information connected to a user's location is a difficult undertaking that necessitates the deployment of an automated process. 

Location regulations seem to be a potential technique to provide real-time and dynamic protection. 

In this regard, location regulations should enable users to: Mask their location by creating one or more fictional locations for a specific user. 

Other users will be unable to tell where the target is really located. 

When they don't want to share their location with others, they might hide it. 

This prevents the requester(s) from knowing the target's location. 

Specify the level of precision at which users wish to be located. 

Several degrees of granularity may be established depending on the environment in which users are situated, including nation, city, building, and floor, among others. 

Define the minimal amount of proximity that users wish to be situated at. 

The values specified for the granularity policies correspond to the nearness levels. 



Hybrid Recommender Systems 


People's everyday lives are being bombarded with a growing amount of information, making it difficult to determine which information is relevant and which is not. 

Recommender systems are tools that may be used to propose goods to users that they may not have discovered [64]. 

Traditional recommenders, such as those based on content-based (CB) [65] and collaborative filtering (CF) [66], prefer to generate recommendations using basic models. 

The CB technique is based on item similarity, thus things that are similar to those that the target user like are suggested. 

Classifying goods, on the other hand, is a difficult operation that normally requires human expertise. 

In this context, CF approaches arose to address this flaw, relying on stereotype-based models to determine user similarity. 

As a result, the CF models aimed to propose goods that individuals with similar tastes had enjoyed. 

With the introduction of mobile devices, it became possible to incorporate location data to enhance the recommendations of conventional systems. 

Recommendations are made using location-based recommender systems, which take into account the distance between users and goods, as well as their subsequent moves. 

The ability to integrate users' location and movements with additional factors such as preferences, item features, or user ratings gives more important information that may be used to provide more accurate suggestions for things of potential interest to users. 

When the context-aware paradigm first appeared, it prompted the use of contextual information to recommend goods that were near to the users. 

The time, companion, or weather conditions in the environment where users are situated are examples of contextual information. 

These context-aware recommenders usually take into account not just contextual information, but also information from other sources such as locations, preferences, or attributes. 

During the suggestion process, the prior information is combined to allow for a better adaption of the recommendations to the current situation. 

For example, when it begins raining near a shopping area, context-aware recommender systems may recommend umbrellas or raincoats. 

The use of contextual data in conjunction with data from other sources has several privacy concerns that must be addressed. 

Users should be allowed to choose which aspects of their data they wish to divulge to recommender systems on a per-request basis. 

Users should establish their privacy choices in this way by employing rules relating to their location, identity, and personal data. 


Information Security in eHealth Scenarios.


The advancement of technology, communications, and medical services has altered the development of conventional health systems. 

There has been a lot of study in the healthcare field in recent years with the objective of moving away from paper-based systems and toward electronic-based systems that handle digital information. 

The electronic versions of patient health information are known as personal health records (PHRs) and electronic health records (EHRs). 

Patients are in charge of the former, while healthcare systems are in charge of the latter. 

eHealth [67] is a term used in the literature to describe the delivery of health care utilizing digital technologies. 

Despite the benefits of this growth, several significant difficulties have emerged, such as the need for a shared infrastructure and standard information models to ensure system compatibility. 

Furthermore, the vast amount of data associated with EHR and PHR, along with the contextual information offered by the growth of ubiquitously available context-aware services, makes monitoring and safeguarding the privacy of patients' information much more difficult. 

Context-aware apps may be beneficial and helpful in managing patients' information, with care for patients' privacy and how personal information, location, and context information are exposed, in order to partly solve this difficulty. 

Users of context-aware eHealth systems should be able to regulate the privacy of their medical records, personal information, whereabouts, and information about the environment or context in which they are situated dynamically in this way. 

The PBM paradigm may assist in the design of rules that enable both users and administrators to manage and regulate sensitive information in order to meet these objectives. 

 

Networking Paradigm 


Because computer networks are dynamic and complicated systems, their setup and administration remain difficult. 

Switches, routers, firewalls, and middleboxes are among the many resources that make up a network. 

They are responsible for passing packets across them. 

Because of the amount of various events happening at the same time and the variety of the network resources, network administrators are responsible for configuring and maintaining these resources, which is a very challenging job. 

The PBNM paradigm [68] enables network managers to set rules to regulate the behavior of network resources as well as packages flowing across the network to automate this management. 

Network administrators may designate, for example, which services have higher priority to ensure QoS, or which network resources should be turned off because they are inefficiently using energy, using rules. 

Despite the PBNM paradigm's success, recent technological breakthroughs in mobile devices and networks have promoted users' mobility, making location one of the most critical components for understanding where devices, resources, or people are. 

Network management has become a complex undertaking due to the combination of location and mobility information with other essential contextual information such as the health of network resources or the statistics of items passing over the network. 

Nowadays, network managers must create more complicated rules and duties, which necessitates taking into account past context-aware data. 

Furthermore, since network equipment have traditionally been closed, proprietary, and vertically integrated, the infrastructure's rigidity limits on-demand innovation and development. 

Context-aware systems management seeks to account for the availability of dynamically changing resources and services during the course of a system's operation. 

Management rules and automated procedures must be able to react to dynamic changes in order to provide the best possible service to the user in any circumstance. 

Automatic setup of components, automated identification of chances for performance enhancement (self-optimization), automatic detection, diagnosis, and repair of local hardware and software issues, and automatic defense against assaults are all examples of self-management capabilities. 

The goal is to reduce the amount of external intervention, such as by human system administrators, while maintaining the architectural qualities mandated by the specification. 

The term "self-configuration" refers to the process through which an application's internal structure adapts to its surroundings. 

Networks are large-scale distributed systems that need management solutions that dynamically alter the behavior of the resources under administration. 

This network administration is a difficult undertaking with a high level of complexity. 

In the application of the PBM dedicated to network management, enforcing network QoS and choosing multiple routes to access specific network resources became a need in certain cases. 

The PBNM paradigm was created to undertake policy-based network management. 

This paradigm allows an administrator to declare what he or she wants to do, as well as the final outcomes, without needing to know how to do it for particular devices.





~ Jai Krishna Ponnappan

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References & Further Reading:



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Cyber Security - Location-Based Services.

 




Location-Based Services (LBSs) are systems that deliver information based on the location of people or devices [54]. 

Some LBSs go a step further in delivering valuable services by using the users' location to infer additional information about the area. 

To get there, existing IMSs track users' whereabouts so that they may be taken into account during management operations. 

An LBS may be either person-oriented or device-oriented, depending on the emphasis of services. 

The emphasis on applications in the person-oriented approach exploits a person's position to improve service. 

A friend-finder application is an example of an LBS that fits this concept. 

Device-oriented LBSs, on the other hand, may concentrate on a person's location but do not need it. 

Objects such as vehicles in navigation systems might also be found using this method. 

There are two types of application designs: push and pull services, in addition to this categorization. 

Users obtain information through push services without having to explicitly request it. 

Pull services, on the other hand, imply that users actively seek for information. 

The majority of early location services were pull services, however push services have gained prominence in particular areas in recent years. 

The ubiquitous computer paradigm evolved in the early 1990s, aided by the location information supplied by the mobile paradigm. 

Weiser [55] used the term "pervasive" to describe the seamless integration of electronics into consumers' daily lives. 

The invisibility or full disappearance of computer technology from the user's viewpoint, the number of users and computing resources that form the environment and the system's scalability, and context-awareness were the key aims of ubiquitous computing. 

People were prioritized above computer devices and technological difficulties in the ubiquitous paradigm. 

LBSs offered the users' movement records, which were critical pieces of information for this paradigm. 

IMSs took into account not just the users' location, but also information about their lives. 

Because ubiquitous computing is still a highly active and dynamic topic, the pace of penetration into daily life varies greatly depending on technological and nontechnical aspects including infrastructure, compute resources, security, and economics. 

The ubiquitous computing paradigm [55] is built on the context-awareness idea [56]. 

Context-awareness is a mobile paradigm in which services learn about the context or environment in which users are placed and adjust their behavior based on that knowledge without requiring users to engage. 

It's vital to note that consumers don't engage with context-aware systems, but they do agree to their data being collected and managed. 

Context-aware solutions rely on location-based systems to determine the users' position and acquire data about the people, objects, and factors that make up the context or environment in which they are situated. 

There are various definitions of context in the literature. 

Schilit et al. [57] were the first to publish one in 1994. They defined context as location, adjacent people's identities, things, and changes in those items. 

Following that, other writers added additional elements such as identity and time (Ryan et al. [58]), emotional states and focus of attention (Dey [59]), context dimensions (Prekop and Burnett [60]), and any environmental data (Gustavsen [61]). 

(Tajd and Ngantchaha [62]). Previous solutions' advancements have added to the complexity of the information management process. 

This fact suggests an increase in the amount of data evaluated during management processes, and hence an increase in the complexity of such procedures. 

Furthermore, the security of location information is a vital factor to consider. 

In another scenario, users' whereabouts may be recorded without their knowledge or agreement, and this information could be used maliciously. 

One example of this circumstance may be the ability to determine a user's present position in order to determine whether or not he or she is at home. 

It is now necessary to regulate not just the privacy of location information, as in location-based services, but also other sensitive pieces of information about the users' lives. 

In the other situation, and continuing with the previous example, it would be feasible to determine not only if a certain user is at home, but also his or her identity, whether he or she is married, his or her emails, and other details about his or her personal life. 

The quantity of heterogeneous bits of information maintained by the context-aware paradigm is quite large, as mentioned by the preceding definitions of context. 

This fact has been affected by the transition from established paradigms to new ones. 

For starters, the mobile paradigm included user and element location into IMS management procedures. 

Pervasive systems later integrated additional key aspects of the users' lives, such as their identities, emails, alerts, and information about smart places. 

Finally, the combination of information regarding the context in which users are positioned with information considered by earlier paradigms has enhanced the complexity of management operations. 



Figure depicts the development of IMSs through time, taking into account the effect of new emerging paradigms and the most representative bits of data that they typically handle. 





Due to the fact that a significant portion of this data is sensitive or private, contemporary IMSs must take into account the privacy of this data. 

In this regard, further research on automated techniques for safeguarding the privacy of sensitive data handled during IMS management activities is required. 

Otherwise, malevolent people might have access to additional information about a certain user's life. 

Context-awareness is a paradigm that may be useful in a variety of situations, including network administration. 

Contextual information may be used by network managers to manage network resources dynamically by adjusting their behavior to the network state. 

The location of connected devices and network resources, the types of devices connected to the network infrastructure, and the network's status and statistics have all been identified as valuable pieces of context information that network administrators should consider before making management decisions. 

These options might range from reconfiguring a network component that isn't being utilized in an energy-efficient manner to deploying additional resources in a specific location to assure the QoS of certain users. 




~ Jai Krishna Ponnappan

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References & Further Reading:



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