Matrix Factorization Techniques for Recommender Systems

Teleoperated robots are playing an increasingly important role in military actions and medical services. In the future, remotely operated surgical robots will likely be used in more scenarios such as battlefields and emergency response. But rapidly growing applications of teleoperated surgery raise the question; what if the computer systems for these robots are attacked, taken over and even turned into weapons? Our work seeks to answer this question by systematically analyzing possible cyber security attacks against Raven II, an advanced teleoperated robotic surgery system. We identify a slew of possible cyber security threats, and experimentally evaluate their scopes and impacts. We demonstrate the ability to maliciously control a wide range of robots functions, and even to completely ignore or override command inputs from the surgeon. We further find that it is possible to abuse the robot's existing emergency stop (E-stop) mechanism to execute efficient (single packet) attacks. We then consider steps to mitigate these identified attacks, and experimentally evaluate the feasibility of applying the existing security solutions against these threats. The broader goal of our paper, however, is to raise awareness and increase understanding of these emerging threats. We anticipate that the majority of attacks against telerobotic surgery will also be relevant to other teleoperated robotic and co-robotic systems.

To Make a Robot Secure: An Experimental Analysis of Cyber Security Threats Against Teleoperated Surgical Robots

While the current generation of mobile and fixed communication networks has been standardized for mobile broadband services, the next generation is driven by the vision of the Internet of Things and mission-critical communication services requiring latency in the order of milliseconds or submilliseconds. However, these new stringent requirements have a large technical impact on the design of all layers of the communication protocol stack. The cross-layer interactions are complex due to the multiple design principles and technologies that contribute to the layers’ design and fundamental performance limitations. We will be able to develop low-latency networks only if we address the problem of these complex interactions from the new point of view of submilliseconds latency. In this paper, we propose a holistic analysis and classification of the main design principles and enabling technologies that will make it possible to deploy low-latency wireless communication networks. We argue that these design principles and enabling technologies must be carefully orchestrated to meet the stringent requirements and to manage the inherent tradeoffs between low latency and traditional performance metrics. We also review currently ongoing standardization activities in prominent standards associations, and discuss open problems for future research.

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Low-Latency Networking: Where Latency Lurks and How to Tame It

Renewable energy harvesting schemes in wireless sensor networks: A Survey

Am I eclipsed?: a smart detector of eclipse attacks for Ethereum

Record route IP traceback

Recent advances in Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) promote the Internet as the main communication technology for monitoring, controlling and managing the physical entities as well as exchanging information between the physical entities and human users. On the other hand, the Internet introduces a variety of vulnerabilities that may put the security and privacy of CPSs under risk. The consequences of cyber-attacks to CPSs might be catastrophic because they are usually part of human habitat. One of the most perilous threats in the Internet is the Denial of Service (DoS) attack and its variations such as Distributed DoS (DDoS). In this work-in-progress, we propose a novel probabilistic packet marking scheme to infer forward paths from an attacker to a victim site and delegate the defense to the upstream Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Our results show that the victim site can construct a forward path from the attacker after receiving 23 packets on the average.

Defending Cyber-Physical Systems against DoS Attacks

Telesurgical Robot Systems (TRSs) have been the focus of research in academic, military, and commercial domains for many years. Contemporary TRSs address mission critical operations emerging in extreme fields such as battlefields, underwater, and disaster territories. The lack of wirelined communication infrastructure in such fields makes the use of wireless technologies including satellite and ad-hoc networks inevitable. TRSs over wireless environments pose unique challenges such as preserving a certain reliability threshold, adhering some maximum tolerable delay, and providing various security measures depending on the nature of the operation and communication environment. In this study, we present a novel approach that uses information coding to integrate both light-weight privacy and adaptive reliability in a single protocol called Secure and Statistically Reliable UDP (SSR-UDP). We prove that the offered security is equivalent to the existing AES-based long key crypto systems, yet, with significantly less computational overhead. Additionally, we demonstrate that the proposed scheme can meet high reliability and delay requirements of TRS applications in highly lossy environments while optimizing the bandwidth use. Our proposed SSR-UDP protocol can also be utilized in similar cyber-physical wireless application domains.

/pdf/adaptive-information-coding-for-secure-and-reliable-wireless-3mets61tzc.pdf

Adaptive Information Coding for Secure and Reliable Wireless Telesurgery Communications

Studying structural and functional characteristics of large scale graphs (or networks) has been a challenging task due to the related computational overhead. Hence, most studies consult to sampling to gather necessary information to estimate various features of these big networks. On the other hand, using a best effort approach to graph sampling within the constraints of an application domain may not always produce accurate estimates. In fact, the mismatch between the characteristics of interest and the utilized network sampling methodology may result in incorrect inferences about the studied characteristics of the underlying system. In this study we empirically investigate the sources of information loss in a sampling process; identify the fundamental factors that need to be carefully considered in a sampling design; and use several synthetic and real world graphs to elaborately demonstrate the mismatch between the sampling design and graph characteristics of interest.

/pdf/impact-of-sampling-design-in-estimation-of-graph-2x3ssic5eh.pdf

Impact of sampling design in estimation of graph characteristics

The simple question "Was this review helpful to you?" increases an estimated $2.7B revenue to Amazon.com annually 1. In this paper, we propose a solution to the problem of electronic product review accumulation using helpfulness prediction. The popularity of e-commerce and online retailers such as Amazon, eBay, Yelp, and TripAdvisor are largely relying on the presence of product reviews to attract more customers. The major issue for the user submitted reviews is to quantify and evaluate the actual effectiveness by combining all the reviews under a particular product. With the varying size of reviews for each product, it is quite cumbersome for the customers to get hold of the overall helpfulness.Therefore, we propose a feature extraction technique that can quantify and measure helpfulness for each product based on user submitted reviews.

Mehmet Engin Tozal

Papers

Record route IP traceback

Defending Cyber-Physical Systems against DoS Attacks

Adaptive Information Coding for Secure and Reliable Wireless Telesurgery Communications

Impact of sampling design in estimation of graph characteristics

Helpfulness Prediction of Online Product Reviews