Information Security Commons^™

Enhancing Health Analytics: Secure And Private Federated Learning Solutions, Nisha Thorakkattu Madathil

Dissertations

Federated Learning (FL) is a collaborative method allowing individuals to train a model jointly without sharing their local datasets. It utilizes decentralized data sources to protect privacy, making it particularly promising in medical contexts where data confidentiality is paramount. FL facilitates the use of diverse datasets from various healthcare organizations while upholding patient confidentiality. It also plays a crucial role in advancing medical research and healthcare services while adhering to data distribution and compliance requirements. The primary challenges within federated healthcare encompass privacy preservation among sensitive distributed data, ensuring efficient communication, addressing data heterogeneity, and ultimately guaranteeing model accuracy. To …

Cybersecurity Education And Continuous Learning Towards Uae Ncsp Fulfilment, Saleh Hamad Aldaajeh

Dissertations

This dissertation delves into enhancing cybersecurity education by aligning academic curricula with national cybersecurity strategic plan (NCSP) objectives, emphasizing the crucial role of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in developing a skilled cybersecurity workforce. Analyzing ten NCSPs, it identifies strategic themes and gaps between national goals and HEI offerings. The study reviews NCSP guidelines, international cybersecurity indices, and literature, including the NICE-NIST framework, to develop a framework that bridges the educational gap, improving learning outcomes and arming students with vital skills, knowledge, and competencies. Furthermore, it introduces a platform for continuous cybersecurity learning, employing micro-credentials, blockchain technology, and AI-driven systems. Based …

Fast And Reliable Authentication Method For Indoor Constrained Drones, Fatima Ali Alnuaimi

Thesis/ Dissertation Defenses

Over the last twenty years, the commercial sector of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles has been growing exponentially, owing to their rapid deployment, high mobility, and the number of applications in the industry field such as military, transportation, critical infrastructures, as well as in the academic field for research purposes. One of the main communication systems adopted by the UAVs relies on transmitting wireless signals. In particular, UAVs are adopted for indoor use-case scenarios, such as warehouse inventory applications and indoor building inspections. They need to transmit control messages and sensitive data by leveraging an efficient, short-range, and secure communication channel to …

Fast And Reliable Authentication Method For Indoor Constrained Drones, Fatima Ali Al Nuaimi

Theses

Over the last twenty years, the commercial sector of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles has been growing exponentially, owing to their rapid deployment, high mobility, and the number of applications in the industry field such as military, transportation, critical infrastructures, as well as in the academic field for research purposes. One of the main communication systems adopted by the UAVs relies on transmitting wireless signals.

In particular, UAVs are adopted for indoor use-case scenarios, such as warehouse inventory applications and indoor building inspections. They need to transmit control messages and sensitive data by leveraging an efficient, short-range, and secure communication channel to …

Assessing Open Source Tools For Enhanced Forensic Analysis Of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (Uavs), Nura Shifa Hamed

Theses

The widespread applications of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), commonly referred to as drones, has given rise to significant national security threats due to their illicit activities. Consequently, the domain of UAV forensics is rapidly evolving, presenting a substantial knowledge deficit among forensic experts. Open source tools provide accessible and affordable resources, making it easier for investigators to bridge this gap by gaining expertise in the use of these tools. This helps ensure that forensic professionals can keep up with the ever-changing UAV technology landscape. This thesis undertakes the mission of navigate the complex field of drone forensics and conducting a …

An Empirical Study On The Use Of Predictive Analytics For Improving Trade Forecasting In The Uae, Asma Salem Alneyadi

Thesis/ Dissertation Defenses

Trade contributes to the United Arab Emirates' economic growth. This thesis focuses on trade dynamics in the UAE using Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural networks. The study focuses on both import and export activities, providing understandings into the complex patterns and impacts of international trade on the UAE's economic growth. The research begins by constructing an LSTM model to forecast the UAE's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) through the utilization of historical trade data. We use time series data for imports and exports as key input features. This innovative approach highlights the relevance of trade statistics as a leading indicator of …

Assessing Open Source Tools For Enhanced Forensic Analysis Of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (Uavs), Nura Shifa Hamed

Thesis/ Dissertation Defenses

The widespread applications of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), commonly referred to as drones, has given rise to significant national security threats due to their illicit activities. Consequently, the domain of UAV forensics is rapidly evolving, presenting a substantial knowledge deficit among forensic experts. Open-source tools provide accessible and affordable resources, making it easier for investigators to bridge this gap by gaining expertise in the use of these tools. This helps ensure that forensic professionals can keep up with the ever-changing UAV technology landscape. This thesis undertakes the mission of navigate the complex field of drone forensics and conducting a comprehensive …

A Novel Chatbot System For Digitizing Service Management To Improve Business Continuity, Asraa Mohammed Albeshr

Thesis/ Dissertation Defenses

The COVID-19 pandemic underscored the importance of businesses transitioning to digital platforms to reduce human contact and maintain operations. Digital transformation is the act of leveraging digital technologies to enhance and update business operations, corporate culture, and customer interactions to address evolving market needs. IT service management (ITSM) stands to gain significantly from this shift, as many of its processes are currently manual and labor-intensive. In our research, we introduced a model designed to refine chatbot responses to user questions, making it an invaluable asset for our study. The model performed admirably, achieving an accuracy rate of 90%. Moreover, we …

An Empirical Study On The Use Of Secure Predictive Analytics For Improving Trade Forecasting In The Uae, Asma Salem Alneyadi

Theses

Trade contributes to the United Arab Emirates' economic growth. This thesis focuses on trade dynamics in the UAE using Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural networks. The study focuses on both import and export activities, providing understandings into the complex patterns and impacts of international trade on the UAE's economic growth. The research begins by constructing an LSTM model to forecast the UAE's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) through the utilization of historical trade data. We use time series data for imports and exports as key input features. This innovative approach highlights the relevance of trade statistics as a leading indicator of …

A Smart Chatbot System For Digitizing Service Management To Improve Business Continuity, Asraa Mohammed Albeshr

Theses

Chatbots, also called digital systems that require a natural language-based interface for user interaction, are increasingly being integrated into our daily lives. These chatbots respond intelligently to voice and text and function as sophisticated entities. Its functioning includes the recognition of multiple human languages through the application of Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. These chatbots find applications in various areas such as e-commerce services, medical assistance, recommendation systems, and educational purposes. This reflects the versatility and widespread adoption of this technology. AI chatbots play a crucial role in improving IT support in IT Service Management (ITSM) for better business continuity. …

Efficient And Secure Digital Signature Algorithm (Dsa), Nissa Mehibel, M'Hamed Hamadouche

Emirates Journal for Engineering Research

The digital signature is used to ensure the integrity of messages as well as the authentication and non-repudiation of users. Today it has a very important role in information security. Digital signature is used in various fields such as e-commerce and e-voting, health, internet of things (IOT). Many digital signature schemes have been proposed, depending on the computational cost and security level. In this paper, we analyzed a recently proposed digital signature scheme based on the discrete logarithm problem (DLP). Our analysis shows that the scheme is not secure against the repeated random number attack to determine the secret keys …

Digital Transformation In Local Governments: A Case Study Of Abu Dhabi Municipality Transport Department, Alia Sahmi Al Ahbabi

Theses

The new generation is rapidly adapting to the digital era, where government and private services are being transformed into electronic services, commonly known as Eservices. Cities are leveraging digitalization to streamline their business processes and business services. This digitalization has improved service delivery time and quality for individuals. With digitalization, business processes align with technology, enhancing performance and customer satisfaction. However, there are challenges associated with digitalization, particularly people working in various municipality departments who find it challenging to adapt to digitization. Employees may take time to adjust to the new techniques and technologies, which may hamper the actions of …

An Efficient Strategy For Deploying Deception Technology, Noora Abdulla Alhosani

Theses

Implementations of deception technology is crucial in discovering attacks by creating a controlled and monitored environment for detecting malicious activity. This technology involves the deployment of decoys, traps, and honeypots that mimic natural systems and network assets to attract and identify attackers. The use of deception technology provides an early warning system for detecting cyber-attacks, allowing organizations to respond quickly and mitigate damage. This article proposed a framework that focuses on maximizing the efficiency of deception technology in detecting sophisticated attacks. The framework employs multi-layered deception techniques at various levels of the network, system, and application to provide comprehensive coverage …

Cheating Detection In Online Exams Based On Captured Video Using Deep Learning, Aysha Sultan Alkalbani

Theses

Today, e-learning has become a reality and a global trend imposed and accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, there are many risks and challenges related to the credibility of online exams which are of widespread concern to educational institutions around the world. Online exam system continues to gain popularity, particularly during the pandemic, due to the rapid expansion of digitalization and globalization. To protect the integrity of the examination and provide objective and fair results, cheating detection and prevention in examination systems is a must. Therefore, the main objective of this thesis is to develop an effective way of detection …

A Comparative Study On Microchip Implants In Humans And Wearable Devices, Ltifa Mohammed Almansoori

Theses

After the tragic covid pandemic in 2020, many things changed in the world, from learning physically all the way to e-learning, as the whole world was forced to switch digitally. It is expected that a lot of people will be more willing to invest in new technologies that aid in human development and among them are human microchip implants. The emerging technology of human microchip implants is slowly catching the attention of various countries around the world after the sudden surge of adoption in Europe. With the introduction of Biohax microchip implants in the UAE by Etisalat it is most …

A Blockchain Based Policy Framework For The Management Of Electronic Health Record (Ehrs), Aysha Ali Mohammed Murad Qambar

Theses

The rapid development of information technology during the last decade has greatly influenced all aspects of society, including individuals and enterprise organizations. Adopting new technologies by individuals and organizations depends on several factors, such as usability, available resources, support needed for adoption benefits, and return on investment, to mention a few. When it comes to the adoption of new technologies, one of the main challenges faced by organizations is the ability to effectively incorporate such technologies into their enterprise solutions to maximize the expected benefits. For the last several years, Blockchain technology has become a popular trend in a variety …

Virtual Laboratories For Stem Education: An Evaluation Model And Comparison, Jumana Mahmoud Kharsa

Theses

Laboratory work is key to science education, and virtual environments play a vital role in remote learning. This thesis is concerned with the evaluation of virtual laboratories used in educational fields, mainly in STEM courses. This research investigates the basic criteria for evaluating virtual environments used in science education in order to create an evaluation scale. We reviewed the literature to highlight the main guidelines of evaluating virtual laboratories and found that the most common evaluation features for virtual tools are Ease of Use, Usefulness, Motivation, Interface Design, and Realism. Upon generating the assessment scale, we selected two web-based interactive …

A Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (Mcdm) Approach For Data-Driven Distance Learning Recommendations, Aysha Meshaal Alshamsi

Theses

Distance learning has been adopted as an alternative learning strategy to the dominant face-to-face teaching methodology. It has been largely implemented by many governments worldwide due to the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic and the implication in enforcing lockdown and social distancing. In emergency situations distance learning is referred to as Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT). Due to this dynamic, sudden shift, and scaling demand in distance learning, many challenges have been accentuated. These include technological adoption, student commitments, parent involvement, and teacher extra burden management, changes in the organization methodology, in addition to government development of new guidelines and regulations …

Determining Knowledge From Student Performance Prediction Using Machine Learning, Wala El Rashied Mohamed

Theses

Recent years have seen a rapid development in the field of educational data mining (EDM), enhancing the ability to trace student knowledge. Data from intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) have been analyzed and interpreted by multiple researchers seeking to measure students’ knowledge as it evolves. Human nature, as well as other factors, makes it difficult to determine whether or not students are knowledgeable. This thesis sets out to examine the level of students’ knowledge by predicting their current and future academic performance based on records of their historical interactions. By restructuring data and considering a student perspective, we can gain insight …

Authenticated Key Establishment Protocol For Constrained Smart Healthcare Systems Based On Physical Unclonable Function, Abdalla Saleh Elkushli

Theses

Smart healthcare systems are one of the critical applications of the internet of things. They benefit many categories of the population and provide significant improvement to healthcare services. Smart healthcare systems are also susceptible to many threats and exploits because they run without supervision for long periods of time and communicate via open channels. Moreover, in many implementations, healthcare sensor nodes are implanted or miniaturized and are resource-constrained. The potential risks on patients/individuals’ life from the threats necessitate that securing the connections in these systems is of utmost importance. This thesis provides a solution to secure end-to-end communications in such …

Establishing Blockchain-Related Security Controls, Maitha Ali Al Ketbi

Theses

Blockchain technology is a secure and relatively new technology of distributed digital ledgers which is based on interlinked blocks of transactions. There is a rapid growth in the adoption of the blockchain technology in different solutions and applications and within different industries throughout the world, such as but not limited to, finance, supply chain, digital identity, energy, healthcare, real estate and government. Blockchain technology has great benefits such as decentralization, transparency, immutability and automation. Like any other emerging technology, the blockchain technology has also several risks and threats associated with its expected benefits which in turns could have a negative …

Disruptive Bussiness Model For Higher Education, Aya Rizik Abushawish

Theses

A business model is a plan for the successful operation of a business, identifying the source of revenue, the intended customers, value proposition, key resources, activities, and financing. It describes how organizations create, deliver and capture value. The recent developments in information and communications technology (ICT) disrupted most business models in different industries. The higher education industry is no exception, where it witnessed enormous integration of information and communications technologies. E-learning in higher education has made a tremendous shift in students’ life and raised the expectations of higher education service quality. The main objective of this thesis to develop a …

Sdhcare: Secured Distributed Healthcare System, Mohammed R. S. Al Baqari

Information Security Theses

In the healthcare sector, the move towards Electronic Health Records (EHR) systems has been accelerating in parallel with the increased adoption of IoT and smart devices. This is driven by the anticipated advantages for patients and healthcare providers. The integration of EHR and IoT makes it highly heterogeneous in terms of devices, network standards, platforms, types of data, connectivity, etc. Additionally, it introduces security, patient and data privacy, and trust challenges. To address such challenges, this thesis proposes an architecture that combines biometric-based blockchain technology with the EHR system. More specifically, this thesis describes a mechanism that uses a patient’s …

Innovative Business Model For Smart Healthcare Insurance, Maryam Hasan Al Thawadi

Information Security Theses

Information revolution and technology growth have made a considerable contribution to restraining the cost expansion and empowering the customer. They disrupted most business models in different industries. The customer-centric business model has pervaded the different sectors. Smart healthcare has made an enormous shift in patient life and raised their expectations of healthcare services quality. Healthcare insurance is an essential business in the healthcare sector; patients expect a new business model to meet their needs and enhance their wellness. This research develops a holistic smart healthcare architecture based on the recent development of information and communications technology. Then develops a disruptive …

A Dendritic Cell Algorithm Based Approach For Malicious Tcp Port Scanning Detection, Nuha Yousef Al Masalmeh

Information Security Theses

The proliferation of cyber-attacks is accompanied by an urgent need to develop sophisticated detection tools. Some of these tools are based on algorithms inspired by the Human Immune System (HIS). The Dendritic Cell Algorithm (DCA) is one of such HIS inspired methods, which is based on the Danger theory model. In this thesis, two types of DCA algorithms are identified, namely the deterministic a classical DCA in order to improve the algorithm's applicability and performance to detect TCP port scanning. This algorithm consists of components based on the behavior of Human dendritic cells, which involves four categories of the input …

Gender Differences In Identity-Based Social Influence: An Experimental Examination Of Software Piracy Behavior, Noura Eisa Al Khyeli

Information Security Theses

Software piracy is the unauthorized copying, sharing, or using the software. It can be a profitable endeavor for individuals and a tremendous loss for the industry. According to Gulf News, Software piracy losses in the Arabian Gulf states in 2015 was 897$ million (AED 3.29 billion). Therefore, it is critical to understand as much as possible about the phenomenon and investigate the factors that influence subjects’ piracy behavior. Driven by gaps in previously published literature, the study presented here is an experimental investigation into the gender differences in identity-based social influence. In essence, the study examined if males or females …

Healthcare Monitoring System Security Platform Using Software Defined Networking Paradigm, Mohamad Issam Khayat

Information Security Theses

This thesis studies the security and privacy concerns of Healthcare Monitoring System (HMS) and proposes a state-of-the-art Security Platform for HMS using the newly emerging Software Defined Network (SDN) paradigm. In this thesis, we investigate the existing HMS architecture and the relevant solutions proposed for both security and privacy concerns in the literature today. Moreover, we develop a new HMS Security Integration Framework, in the form of a security platform for securing HMS. Finally, we perform a comparison among existing architectures and our proposed framework to highlight the added value of our proposed architecture. Our proposed integration framework eliminates the …

Enhancing Firewall Filtering Performance Using Neural Networks, Heba Saleous

Information Security Theses

The internet has grown to a point where people all over the world have become dependent on this convenient communication medium. However, with this dependency, malicious traffic has become a major concern. Consequently, firewalls have become a mandatory part of any network, due to their ability to filter the traffic based on rules that state which packets should be accepted or denied. However, a network administrator must manually configure filter rules, and packets that do not fit any rule may be subject to wrong judgement by the firewall. Neural networks can learn the filter rules in order to decide if …

Business-It Alignment In Higher Education Institutions: United Arab Emirates University Case Study, Nayla Salem Al Khateri

Theses

This thesis addresses the importance of Business-IT alignment in higher education institutions. Business-IT alignment is defined as applying IT in a suitable and timely manner, in harmony with business strategies, goals and needs. Business- IT alignment is an ultimate goal of governmental and non-governmental organizations that requires close attention and continuous monitoring. UAE university has a well-defined business strategy augmented with a well-defined IT strategy. So, to get the most benefits of acquiring and using IT in the university, the IT need to be aligned with the core business and the supporting services. The main objective of this thesis is …

Mobile Big Data Analytics In Healthcare, Alramzana Nujum Navaz

Theses

Mobile and ubiquitous devices are everywhere around us generating considerable amount of data. The concept of mobile computing and analytics is expanding due to the fact that we are using mobile devices day in and out without even realizing it. These mobile devices use Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or mobile data to be intermittently connected to the world, generating, sending and receiving data on the move. Latest mobile applications incorporating graphics, video and audio are main causes of loading the mobile devices by consuming battery, memory and processing power. Mobile Big data analytics includes for instance, big health data, big location data, …