Health providers need to share patient information across healthcare networks efficiently and securely to improve medical and health services. Timely data synchronization among relevant parties is crucial for effectively containing and preventing the worsening of the condition. However, ensuring rapid information sharing while maintaining the security of sensitive patient data remains a pressing concern. In this paper, we introduce a cloud storage integrity auditing scheme that can protect auditors from procrastinating and preserve the privacy of sensitive information. Our proposed system requires healthcare institutions to encrypt sensitive patient data before uploading it to the cloud. It mandates the use of a data sanitizer for the secure processing of encrypted data blocks. Auditors must verify data integrity and promptly submit their audit results to the blockchain within a predefined time frame. Leveraging the time-sensitive nature of blockchain technology, healthcare institutions can monitor auditor compliance within the allotted validation timeframe. We conducted comprehensive security analysis and performance evaluations to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of our solution in addressing the challenges of secure and timely cloud storage in healthcare settings.
Recent software development methodologies emphasize iterative and incremental evolution to align with stakeholders’ needs. This perpetual and rapid software evolution demands ongoing research into verification practices and technologies that ensure swift responsiveness and effective management of software delta increments. Strategies such as code review have been widely adopted for development and verification, ensuring readability and consistency in the delta increments of software projects. However, the integration of techniques to detect and visually report delta changes within the Graphical User Interface (GUI) software applications remains an underutilized process. In this paper, we set out to achieve two objectives. First, we aim to conduct a comprehensive review of existing studies concerning GUI change detection in desktop, web, and mobile applications to recognize common practices. Second, we introduce a novel change detection tool capable of highlighting delta GUI changes for this diverse range of applications. To accomplish our first objective, we performed a systematic mapping of the literature using the Scopus database. To address the second objective, we designed and developed a GUI change detection tool. This tool simultaneously transits and compares state models inferred by a scriptless testing tool, enabling the detection and highlighting of GUI changes to detect the widgets or functionalities that have been added, removed, or modified. Our study reveals the existence of a multitude of techniques for change detection in specific GUI systems with different objectives. However, there is no widely adopted technique suitable for the diverse range of existing desktop, web, and mobile applications. Our tool and findings demonstrate the effectiveness of using inferred state models to highlight between 8 and 20 GUI changes in software delta increments containing a large number of changes over months and between 4 and 6 GUI changes in delta increments of small iterations performed over multiple weeks. Moreover, some of these changes were recognized by the software developers as GUI failures that required a fix. Finally, we expose the motivation for using this technique to help developers and testers analyze GUI changes to validate delta increments and detect potential GUI failures, thereby fostering knowledge dissemination and paving the way to standard practices.
Accessibility is an important component in the implementation of Web systems to ensure that these are usable, engaging, and enjoyable by all regardless of the level of ability, condition, or circumstances. Despite manifold efforts, the Web is still largely inaccessible for a plurality of reasons (e.g. poor navigation, lack of/unsuitable alternative text, complex Web forms) with significant impact on disabled users. The impact of Web accessibility barriers varies per disability, but current measures for the impact of barriers treat disabilities as a homogeneous group. In this work, we present a scoping review of the Web accessibility research landscape. Following a structured approach, 112 studies were reviewed, and findings are reported on common Web accessibility barriers and practices within the Web Accessibility Lifecycle. An assessment framework is further proposed to measure the impact of such barriers across disabled groups. Finally, the need for extensive qualitative research into organizational change and multinational studies on Web activity and disturbance by barriers per disabled user group are discussed as future avenues for accessibility research.
The evolution of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) has allowed the industry to overcome long-lasting problems and challenges. Many belong to the stream processing domain, whose central aspect is continuously receiving and processing data from streaming data producers such as cameras and sensors. Nonetheless, programming GPUs is challenging because it requires deep knowledge of many-core programming, mechanisms and optimizations for GPUs. Current GPU programming standards do not target stream processing and present programmability and code portability limitations. Among our main scientific contributions resides GSParLib, a C++ multi-level programming interface unifying CUDA and OpenCL for GPU processing on stream and data parallelism with negligible performance losses compared to manual implementations; GSParLib is organized in two layers: one for general-purpose computing and another for high-level structured programming based on parallel patterns; a methodology to provide unified and driver agnostic interfaces minimizing performance losses; a set of parallelism strategies and optimizations for GPU processing targeting stream and data parallelism; and new experiments covering GPU performance on applications exposing stream and data parallelism.
The increasing ubiquity of Android devices has precipitated a concomitant surge in sophisticated malware attacks, posing critical challenges to cybersecurity infrastructures worldwide. Existing models have achieved significant strides in malware detection but often suffer from high false-positive rates, lower recall, and computational delays, thus demanding a more efficient and accurate system. Current techniques primarily rely on static features and simplistic learning models, leading to inadequate handling of temporal aspects and dynamic behaviors exhibited by advanced malware. These limitations compromise the detection of modern, evasive malware, and impede real-time analysis. This paper introduces a novel framework for Android malware detection that incorporates Temporal and Dynamic Behavior Analysis using Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks and Attention Mechanisms. We further propose development of an efficient Grey Wolf Optimized (GWO) Decision Trees to find the most salient API call patterns associated with malwares. An Iterative Fuzzy Logic (IFL) layer is also deployed before classification to assess the "trustworthiness" of app metadata samples. For Ongoing Learning, we propose use of Deep Q-Networks (DQNs), which helps the reinforcement learning model to adapt more quickly to changes in the threat landscapes. By focusing on crucial system calls and behavioral characteristics in real-time, our model captures the nuanced temporal patterns often exhibited by advanced malwares. Empirical evaluations demonstrate remarkable improvements across multiple performance metrics. Compared to existing models, our approach enhances the precision of malware identification by 8.5 %, accuracy by 5.5 %, and recall by 4.9 %, while also achieving an 8.3 % improvement in the Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve (AUC), with higher specificity and a 4.5 % reduction in identification delay. In malware pre-emption tasks, our model outperforms by improving precision by 4.3 %, accuracy by 3.9 %, recall by 4.9 %, AUC by 3.5 %, and increasing specificity by 2.9 %. These gains make our framework highly applicable for real-time detection systems, cloud-based security solutions, and threat intelligence services, thereby contributing to a safer Android ecosystem.