Mobile phones running open operating systems such as Google Android will soon be the norm in cellular networks. These systems expose previously unavailable phone and network resources to application developers. However, with increased exposure comes increased risk. Poorly or maliciously designed applications can compromise the phone and network. While Android defines a base set of permissions t...

Wireless communications are vulnerable to signal jamming attacks that can block mission-critical messages from being received. Spread spectrum techniques mitigate these attacks by spreading normal narrowband signals over a much wider band of frequencies and forcing jammers who do not know the spreading pattern to expend much more effort to launch the attack. In broadcast systems, however, jamme...

Automated patient monitoring systems suffer from several design problems. Among them, alarm fatigue is one of the most critical issues, as evidenced by the Sentinel Event Alert that The Joint Commission – the U.S. hospital-accrediting body – recently issued. In this study, we explore fast-andfrugal heuristics that may be used to prioritize patient alarms, while continuing to monitor patient phy...

The notion of accountable authority introduced by Goyal (Crypto 2007) in identity-based encryption (IBE) setting is a novel approach to mitigate the (inherent) key escrow problem in identity based cryptosystems. As far as we know, the (inherent) key escrow problem also exists in attribute based encryption (ABE), for example ciphertext policy ABE (CP-ABE). In this paper, the concept of accountab...

This paper presents StopWatch , a system that defends against timing-based side-channel attacks that arise from coresidency of victims and attackers in infrastructureas-a-service clouds. StopWatch triplicates each cloudresident guest virtual machine (VM) and places replicas so that the three replicas of a guest VM are coresident with nonoverlapping sets of (replicas of) other VMs. StopWatch use...

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Despite a decade since the inception of B2C e-commerce, the uncertainty of the online environment still makes many consumers reluctant to engage in online exchange relationships. Even if uncertainty has been widely touted as the primary barrier to online transactions, the literature has viewed uncertainty as a “background” mediator with insufficient conceptualization and measurement. To better ...

Informal caregiving is the most common form of long-term care provided in the United States, and with the projected rapid growth of older adults, informal caregiving will be even more critical in the foreseeable future. In the United States, slightly more than 20% of informal caregivers provide care for more than one care recipient, and 10% provide care for three or more care recipients. Caring...

GreenHouse Gasses’ (GHG) emission control is the greatest environmental challenge facing the world. The energy sector accounts for the highest percentage of environmental pollution. Emissions from internal combustion power generators are high and these emissions are responsible for the fast depletion of the ozone layer. Though there are other measures put in place to control the emission from p...

This article emphasizes so-called Rayleigh fading, primarily in the UHF band, that affects mobile systems such as cellular and personal communication systems (PCS). The major elements that contribute to fading and their degradation effects in a communication channel are briefly summarized. Emphasis is then placed on methods for mitigating the degradation. Two examples of specific mitigation tec...