Concordia University

About: Concordia University is a education organization based out in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Control theory & Population. The organization has 13565 authors who have published 31084 publications receiving 783525 citations. The organization is also known as: Sir George Williams University & Loyola College, Montreal.

k-Zero Day Safety: A Network Security Metric for Measuring the Risk of Unknown Vulnerabilities

Abstract: By enabling a direct comparison of different security solutions with respect to their relative effectiveness, a network security metric may provide quantifiable evidences to assist security practitioners in securing computer networks. However, research on security metrics has been hindered by difficulties in handling zero-day attacks exploiting unknown vulnerabilities. In fact, the security risk of unknown vulnerabilities has been considered as something unmeasurable due to the less predictable nature of software flaws. This causes a major difficulty to security metrics, because a more secure configuration would be of little value if it were equally susceptible to zero-day attacks. In this paper, we propose a novel security metric, k-zero day safety, to address this issue. Instead of attempting to rank unknown vulnerabilities, our metric counts how many such vulnerabilities would be required for compromising network assets; a larger count implies more security because the likelihood of having more unknown vulnerabilities available, applicable, and exploitable all at the same time will be significantly lower. We formally define the metric, analyze the complexity of computing the metric, devise heuristic algorithms for intractable cases, and finally demonstrate through case studies that applying the metric to existing network security practices may generate actionable knowledge.

A Printed Monopole Antenna With Two Steps and a Circular Slot for UWB Applications

Abstract: This letter presents a printed monopole antenna with two steps and a circular slot for ultrawide band (UWB) applications. The proposed antenna is fabricated and tested. The proposed antenna has a wide frequency bandwidth of 8.4 GHz starting from 3 GHz up to 11.4 GHz for a return loss (S_11) of less than - 10dB and gain flatness over the frequency range. Measured results show also that the proposed antenna features satisfactory radiation characteristics within the achieved impedance bandwidth. By introducing a simple and proper narrow slot in the radiating element, frequency-notched characteristics can be obtained and a good band-notched performance in the 56 GHz band can be achieved.