Azzah A. AlGhamdi, Mahmood Niazi, Mohammad Alshayeb, Sajjad Mahmood
{"title":"Organizations' readiness for insider attacks: A process‐oriented approach","authors":"Azzah A. AlGhamdi, Mahmood Niazi, Mohammad Alshayeb, Sajjad Mahmood","doi":"10.1002/spe.3327","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/spe.3327","url":null,"abstract":"ContextOrganizations constantly strive to protect their assets from outsider attacks by implementing various security controls, such as data encryption algorithms, intrusion detection software, firewalls, and antivirus programs. Unfortunately, attackers strike not only from outside the organization but also from within. Such internal attacks are called insider attacks or threats, and the people responsible for them are insider attackers or insider threat agents. Insider attacks pose more significant risks and can result in greater organizational losses than outsider attacks. Thus, every organization should be vigilant regarding such attackers to protect its valuable resources from harm. Finding solutions to protect organizations from such attacks is critical. Despite the importance of this topic, little research has been conducted on providing solutions to mitigate insider attacks.ObjectiveThis study aims to develop an organizational readiness model to assess an organization's readiness for insider attacks.MethodWe conducted a multivocal literature review to identify practices that can be used to assess organizations' readiness against insider attacks. These practices were grouped into different knowledge areas of insider attacks for organizations. The insider attack readiness model was developed using identified best practices and knowledge areas: compliance, top management, human resources, and technical.ResultsThis model was evaluated at two levels—academic and real‐world environments. The evaluation results show that the proposed model can identify organizations' readiness against insider attacks.ConclusionThe proposed model can guide organizations through a secure environment against insider attacks.","PeriodicalId":21899,"journal":{"name":"Software: Practice and Experience","volume":"128 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140150211","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Hugo G. Reyes‐Anastacio, Jose L. Gonzalez‐Compeán, Victor J. Sosa‐Sosa, Ricardo Marcelín‐Jiménez, Miguel Morales‐Sandoval
{"title":"Kulla‐RIV: A composing model with integrity verification for efficient and reliable data processing services","authors":"Hugo G. Reyes‐Anastacio, Jose L. Gonzalez‐Compeán, Victor J. Sosa‐Sosa, Ricardo Marcelín‐Jiménez, Miguel Morales‐Sandoval","doi":"10.1002/spe.3328","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/spe.3328","url":null,"abstract":"This article presents the design and implementation of a reliable computing virtual container‐based model with integrity verification for data processing strategies named the reliability and integrity verification (RIV) scheme. It has been integrated into a system construction model as well as existing workflow engines (e.g., Kulla and Makeflow) for composing in‐memory systems. In the RIV scheme, the reliability (R) component is in charge of providing an implicit fault tolerance mechanism for the processes of data acquisition and storage that take place in a data processing system. The integrity verification (IV) component is in charge of ensuring that data transmitted/received between two processing stages are correct and are not modified during the transmission process. To show the feasibility of using the RIV scheme, real‐world applications were created by using different distributed and parallel systems to solve use cases of satellite and medical imagery processing. This evaluation revealed encouraging results as some solutions that assumed the cost (overhead) of using the RIV scheme, for example, Kulla (the Kulla‐RIV solution), achieve better response times than others without the RIV scheme (e.g., Makeflow) that remain exposed to the risks caused by to the lack of RIV strategies.","PeriodicalId":21899,"journal":{"name":"Software: Practice and Experience","volume":"44 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140126443","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Full-mesh VPN performance evaluation for a secure edge-cloud continuum","authors":"Vojdan Kjorveziroski, Cristina Bernad, Katja Gilly, Sonja Filiposka","doi":"10.1002/spe.3329","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/spe.3329","url":null,"abstract":"The recent introduction of full-mesh virtual private network (VPN) solutions which offer near native performance, coupled with modern encryption algorithms and easy scalability as a result of a central control plane have a strong potential to enable the implementation of a seamless edge-cloud continuum. To test the performance of existing solutions in this domain, we present a framework consisted of both essential and optional features that full-mesh VPN solutions need to support before they can be used for interconnecting geographically dispersed compute nodes. We then apply this framework on existing offerings and select three VPN solutions for further tests: Headscale, Netbird, and ZeroTier. We evaluate their features in the context of establishing an underlay network on top of which a Kubernetes overlay network can be created. We test pod-to-pod TCP and UDP throughput as well as Kubernetes application programming interface (API) response times, in multiple scenarios, accounting for adverse network conditions such as packet loss or packet delay. Based on the obtained measurement results and through analysis of the underlying strengths and weaknesses of the individual implementations, we draw conclusions on the preferred VPN solution depending on the use-case at hand, striking a balance between usability and performance.","PeriodicalId":21899,"journal":{"name":"Software: Practice and Experience","volume":"39 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140117483","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Javier Romero-Álvarez, Jaime Alvarado-Valiente, Enrique Moguel, Jose Garcia-Alonso, Juan M. Murillo
{"title":"Enabling continuous deployment techniques for quantum services","authors":"Javier Romero-Álvarez, Jaime Alvarado-Valiente, Enrique Moguel, Jose Garcia-Alonso, Juan M. Murillo","doi":"10.1002/spe.3326","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/spe.3326","url":null,"abstract":"Early advances in quantum computing have provided new opportunities to tackle intricate problems in diverse areas such as cryptography, optimization, and simulation. However, current methodologies employed in quantum computing often require, among other things, a broad understanding of quantum hardware and low-level programming languages, posing challenges to software developers in effectively creating and implementing quantum services. This study advocates the adoption of software engineering principles in quantum computing, thereby establishing a higher level of hardware abstraction that allows developers to focus on application development. With this proposal, developers can design and deploy quantum services with less effort, which is similar to the facilitation provided by service-oriented computing for the development of conventional software services. This study introduces a continuous deployment strategy adapted to the development of quantum services that covers the creation and deployment of such services. For this purpose, an extension of the OpenAPI specification is proposed, which allows the generation of services that implement quantum algorithms. The proposal was validated through the creation of an application programming interface with diverse quantum algorithm implementations and evaluated through a survey of various developers and students who were introduced to the tool with positive results.","PeriodicalId":21899,"journal":{"name":"Software: Practice and Experience","volume":"25 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140073959","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"State‐of‐the‐practice in quality assurance in Java‐based open source software development","authors":"Ali Khatami, Andy Zaidman","doi":"10.1002/spe.3321","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/spe.3321","url":null,"abstract":"SummaryTo ensure the quality of software systems, software engineers can make use of a variety of quality assurance approaches, for example, software testing, modern code review, automated static analysis, and build automation. Each of these quality assurance practices have been studied in depth in isolation, but there is a clear knowledge gap when it comes to our understanding of how these approaches are being used in conjunction, or not. In our study, we broadly investigate whether and how these quality assurance approaches are being used in conjunction in the development of 1454 popular open source software projects on GitHub. Our study indicates that typically projects do not follow all quality assurance practices together with high intensity. In fact, we only observe weak correlation among some quality assurance practices. In general, our study provides a deeper understanding of how existing quality assurance approaches are currently being used in Java‐based open source software development. Besides, we specifically zoom in on the more mature projects in our dataset, and generally we observe that more mature projects are more intense in their application of the quality assurance practices, with more focus on their ASAT usage, and code reviewing, but no strong change in their CI usage.","PeriodicalId":21899,"journal":{"name":"Software: Practice and Experience","volume":"25 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140036125","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Sergio Infante, Cristian Martín, Julia Robles, Bartolomé Rubio, Manuel Díaz, Rafael González Perea, Pilar Montesinos, Emilio Camacho Poyato
{"title":"Integrating FMI and ML/AI models on the open-source digital twin framework OpenTwins","authors":"Sergio Infante, Cristian Martín, Julia Robles, Bartolomé Rubio, Manuel Díaz, Rafael González Perea, Pilar Montesinos, Emilio Camacho Poyato","doi":"10.1002/spe.3322","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/spe.3322","url":null,"abstract":"The realm of digital twins is experiencing rapid growth and presents a wealth of opportunities for Industry 4.0. In conjunction with traditional simulation methods, digital twins offer a diverse range of possibilities. However, many existing tools in the domain of open-source digital twins concentrate on specific use cases and do not provide a versatile framework. In contrast, the open-source digital twin framework, OpenTwins, aims to provide a versatile framework that can be applied to a wide range of digital twin applications. In this article, we introduce a re-definition of the original OpenTwins platform that enables the management of custom simulation services and the management of FMI simulation services, which is one of the most widely used simulation standards in the industry and its coexistence with machine learning models, which enables the definition of the next-gen digital twins. Thanks to this integration, digital twins that reflect reality better can be developed, through hybrid models, where simulation data can feed the scarcity of machine learning data and so forth. As part of this project, a simulation model developed through the hydraulic software Epanet was validated in OpenTwins, in addition to an FMI simulation service. The hydraulic model was implemented and tested in an agricultural use case in collaboration with the University of Córdoba, Spain. A machine learning model has been developed to assess the behavior of an FMI simulation through machine learning.","PeriodicalId":21899,"journal":{"name":"Software: Practice and Experience","volume":"17 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140047573","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Juan Alberto Llopis, Antonio Jesús Fernández-García, Javier Criado, Luis Iribarne, Antonio Corral
{"title":"A data model for enabling deep learning practices on discovery services of cyber-physical systems","authors":"Juan Alberto Llopis, Antonio Jesús Fernández-García, Javier Criado, Luis Iribarne, Antonio Corral","doi":"10.1002/spe.3325","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/spe.3325","url":null,"abstract":"The W3C Web of Things (WoT) is a leading technology that facilitates dynamic information management in the Internet of Things (IoT). In most IoT scenarios, devices and their associated information change continuously, generating a large amount of data. Hence, to correctly use the information and the data generated by different devices, a new perspective of managing and ensuring data quality is recommended. Applying Data Science techniques to create the data model can help to manage and ensure data quality by creating a common schema that can be reused in future projects, as well as producing recommendations to facilitate Service Discovery. In addition, due to the dynamic devices that change over time or under specific circumstances, the data model created must be sufficiently abstract to add new instances and to support new requirements that devices should incorporate. The use of models helps to raise the abstraction level, adapting it to the continuous changes of devices by defining instances associated with the data model. This paper proposes two data models: one for Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) to define device information fetched by a Discovery Service, and another for applying Deep Learning in natural language problems through a Transformer approach. The latter matches user queries in natural language sentences with WoT devices or services. These data models expand the Thing Description model to help find similar CPSs by giving a confidence level to each CPS based on features such as security and the number of times the device was accessed. The results show how the proposed models support the search process of CPSs in syntactic and natural language searches. Furthermore, the four levels of the FAIR principles are validated for the proposed data models, thus ensuring the data's transparency, reproducibility, and reusability.","PeriodicalId":21899,"journal":{"name":"Software: Practice and Experience","volume":"40 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140047358","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Agrawal Luckykumar Dwarkadas, Viswanath Talasila, Rama Krishna Challa, Srinivasa K G
{"title":"A review of the application of virtual and augmented reality in physical and occupational therapy","authors":"Agrawal Luckykumar Dwarkadas, Viswanath Talasila, Rama Krishna Challa, Srinivasa K G","doi":"10.1002/spe.3323","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/spe.3323","url":null,"abstract":"This paper includes a research review in five bibliographic databases on using the application of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) in physical and occupational therapy (POT). This literature review addresses five research questions and two sub‐research questions. A total of 36 relevant studies were selected in the review based on the defined keywords and inclusion‐exclusion criteria. The primary motivation for using the application of VR and AR in POT is that it is accurate, involves higher patient participation, and requires less therapy recovery time. The standard software tool used is the Unity 3D game engine, and the common device used is the Oculus Rift HMD. Various applications of VR and AR consist of different VR environments and AR contents used in POT. Post‐stroke rehabilitation, rehabilitation exercises, pain management, mental and behavioral disorders, and autism in children are the main aspects addressed through the VR and AR environments. Literature review indicates that questionnaires, interviews, and observation are the primary metrics for measuring therapy's effectiveness. The study's findings show positive results such as reduced treatment time, nervousness, pain, hospitalization period, making therapy enjoyable and encouraging, improved quality of life, and focus on using the application of VR and AR in POT. This review will be relevant to researchers, VR and AR application designers, doctors, and patients using the application of VR and AR in POT. Further research addressing multiple participants with clinical trials, adding new VR environments and AR content in VR and AR applications, including follow‐up sessions, and increasing training sessions while using the application of VR and AR in POT are recommended.","PeriodicalId":21899,"journal":{"name":"Software: Practice and Experience","volume":"62 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140017429","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Fly: Femtolet-based edge-cloud framework for crop yield prediction using bidirectional long short-term memory","authors":"Tanushree Dey, Somnath Bera, Bachchu Paul, Debashis De, Anwesha Mukherjee, Rajkumar Buyya","doi":"10.1002/spe.3324","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/spe.3324","url":null,"abstract":"Crop yield prediction is a crucial area in agriculture that has a large impact on the economy of a country. This article proposes a crop yield prediction framework based on Internet of Things and edge computing. We have used a fifth generation network device referred to as femtolet as the edge device. The femtolet is a small cell base station that has high storage and high processing ability. The sensor nodes collect the soil and environmental data, and then the collected data is sent to the femtolet through the microcontrollers. The femtolet retrieves the weather-related data from the cloud, and then processes the sensor data and weather-related data using Bi-LSTM. The femtolet after processing the data sends the generated results to the cloud. The user can access the results from the cloud to predict the suitable crop for his/her land. This is observed that the suggested framework provides better accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score compared to the state-of-the-art crop yield prediction frameworks. This is also demonstrated that the use of femtolet reduces the latency by ˜25% than the conventional edge-cloud framework.","PeriodicalId":21899,"journal":{"name":"Software: Practice and Experience","volume":"77 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140003886","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Junhua Wu, Xiangmei Bu, Guangshun Li, Guangwei Tian
{"title":"Data privacy protection model based on blockchain in mobile edge computing","authors":"Junhua Wu, Xiangmei Bu, Guangshun Li, Guangwei Tian","doi":"10.1002/spe.3315","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/spe.3315","url":null,"abstract":"Mobile edge computing (MEC) technology is widely used for real‐time and bandwidth‐intensive services, but its underlying heterogeneous architecture may lead to a variety of security and privacy issues. Blockchain provides novel solutions for data security and privacy protection in MEC. However, the scalability of traditional blockchain is difficult to meet the requirements of real‐time data processing, and the consensus mechanism is not suitable for resource‐constrained devices. Moreover, the access control of MEC data needs to be further improved. Given the above problems, a data privacy protection model based on sharding blockchain and access control is designed in this paper. First, a privacy‐preserving platform based on a sharding blockchain is designed. Reputation calculation and improved Proof‐of‐Work (PoW) consensus mechanism are proposed to accommodate resource‐constrained edge devices. The incentive mechanism with rewards and punishments is designed to constrain node behavior. A reward allocation algorithm is proposed to encourage nodes to actively contribute to obtaining more rewards. Second, an access control strategy using ciphertext policy attribute‐based encryption (CP‐ABE) and RSA is designed. A smart contract is deployed to implement the automatic access control function. The InterPlanetary File System is introduced to alleviate the blockchain storage burden. Finally, we analyze the security of the proposed privacy protection model and statistics of the GAS consumed by the access control policy. The experimental results show that the proposed data privacy protection model achieves fine‐grained control of access rights, and has higher throughput and security than traditional blockchain.","PeriodicalId":21899,"journal":{"name":"Software: Practice and Experience","volume":"16 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139954592","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}