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Purpose Nowadays, to design the information security mechanism for computing and communication systems, there are various approaches available like cryptographic approach, game-theoretic approach, quantitative–qualitative analysis-based approach, cognitive-behavioral approach, digital forensic-based approach and swarm computing-based approach. The contemporary research in these various fields is independent in nature. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between these various approaches to information security and cybernetics. Design/methodology/approach To investigate the relationship between information security mechanisms and cybernetics, Norbert Wiener’s concepts and philosophy of the cybernetics have been used in the present work. For a detailed study, concepts, techniques and philosophy of the cybernetics have been extracted from the books of Norbert Wiener titled “The human use of human beings” and “Cybernetics or control and communication in the animal and the machine”. Findings By revisiting the concepts of the cybernetics from the information security perspectives, it has been found that the aspects of information security and the aspects of cybernetics have great bonding. Originality/value The present paper demonstrates how bonding between cybernetics and information security can be used to solve some of the complex research challenges in information security area.

In last few decades, web browser has become one of the most used computer applications. The web browser is available on many devices such as desktops, laptops, palm devices and even in cars. According to recent research reports, the browser is targeted most by exploits in attacks on both home and corporate users. The default browser security configuration may leak user's sensitive information. It may also give remote code execution facility to attacker. In this paper, a framework to detect web browser security misconfiguration is proposed. The misconfiguration leads to data sharing to third party and insecure data transfer. The system scans browser configuration and determine deviation of configuration from secure settings. In addition, the system provides facility to achieve the level of security configuration with respect to recommended settings.

Purpose Any computing architecture cannot be designed with complete confidentiality. As a result, at any point, it may leak the information. So, it is important to decide leakage threshold in any computing architecture. To prevent leakage more than the predefined threshold, quantitative analysis is helpful. This paper aims to provide a method to quantify information leakage in service-oriented architecture (SOA)-based Web services. Design/methodology/approach To visualize the dynamic binding of SOA components, first, the orchestration of components is modeled. The modeling helps to information-theoretically quantify information leakage in SOA-based Web services. Then, the paper considers the non-interference policy in a global way to quantify information leakage. It considers not only variables which interfere with security sensitive content but also other architectural parameters to quantify leakage in Web services. To illustrate the attacker’s ability, a strong threat model has been proposed in the paper. Findings The paper finds that information leakage can be quantified in SOA-based Web services by considering parameters that interfere with security sensitive content and information theory. A hypothetical case study scenario of flight ticket booking Web services has been considered in the present paper in which leakage of 18.89 per cent information is calculated. Originality/value The paper shows that it is practically possible to quantify information leakage in SOA-based Web services. While modeling the SOA-based Web services, it will be of help to architects to identify parameters which may cause the leakage of secret contents.

Autonomous systems like self-driving cars, unmanned aerial and marine vehicles, smart robots etc., are rapidly emerging in scientific and industrial sectors for mission-critical applications, in recent times. Critical systems are developed using component-based software engineering paradigm by most of the software developers. Each activity in a component-based system is performed by different components of the system and each dynamic component integration with the system gives an opportunity for adversaries to insert malicious code into the system for execution through the components. In present work, a security model is proposed using concept of slack space of software components, for authentication of components to safely integrate with an autonomous system. By using this methodology, a mission-critical autonomous system can detect tampered components and prevent integrating them.

Nowadays, robot manipulators are an important part of the automation and control sector, so they indicate the significance of the associated control methodologies. These finds broad applications in various areas, especially in medical, aerospace and industrial assembly processes. Rigid robot manipulators form an important class of manipulators where they interact with the environment physically. Robot manipulator is a non-collocated system that leads to inaccurate system performance. To solve the aforesaid issue, a vision sensor can be employed for direct measurement of tip position instead of the traditional mechanical sensors. The major objective of the work presented here is development of a vision-based method for controlling the tip position of a planar 2-DOF single-link rigid robot manipulator (2DSLRM) from one point to another. In this paper, to achieve the desired tip position, feedback is taken from an encoder and visual sensor from the tip of Single-Link Robot Manipulator (SLRM). The acquired results show that the developed control method improves tip position control performance of 2DSLRM as compared to the traditional mechanical sensors. Simulation and experiment have been performed to study the performance of the proposed tip position control of 2DSLRM.

Browser configuration settings play important role such that no or less information of user or user's system will be available to attacker or rogue website. The default browser configuration is often not adequate to stop or minimise information leakage to the attacker. In this paper, a novel model (framework) to bridge the gap between default and recommended configuration is proposed. The framework is developed using machine learning algorithm, as huge set of browser configuration states need to be classified into different security levels. A prototype browser add-on is developed using the framework to assess browser security level and modify it to increase security level if required.

Online polling or i-polling is the process of polling by using Internet. Many countries are trying to move from polling to i-polling, to make polling easy and fast. For key management system research community mostly uses (t, n) threshold secret sharing scheme, which enforces the presence of ‘t’ number of authorities out of ‘n’ authorized members to construct secret key and use it to decrypt votes and completes the counting part of polling. However, it opens a new challenge, i.e. the probability of corrupting ‘t’ people is more than ‘n’ because, in (t, n) secret sharing scheme, ‘t’ is less than ‘n’. A solution to such issue is proposed by making sure that other security objectives of polling have been addressed. For counting votes, Homomorphic encryption technique has been used in this work along with (n, n) secret sharing scheme and Paillier version of (n, n) secret sharing is proposed. This scheme enforces the requirement of presence of all ‘n’ number of authorized members in the making of the secret key. It is found that by using (n, n) secret sharing scheme the trust on polling system increases.

Online Social Networks (OSNs) are the hottest trend in the internet, allowing people to socialize and share information among themselves. The social networking platform especially Facebook presents the problem of non-restrictive change in the privacy policy associated with an object and the risks affecting the privacy of other users. Research communities have identified and discussed the problems that arises when a user changes the privacy of a particular post previously posted under ‘public’ privacy settings into ‘only me’ settings in Facebook. Any post allows other users to comment on it when it is in public mode. Changing the privacy settings to ‘only me’, grants restricted access to the post where only the owner can access that post and its related comments, there by violating the privacy of other users who had commented on the said post. We propose a novel approach to tackle this problem. We introduce an additional option called ‘My Comments' through which a user can access his comments even after the post's owner changes the privacy of that post from ‘Public’ to ‘only me'. This feature will provide the owner of the comment unprecedented access to all his comments/ likes for any post allowing him the freedom to delete, edit existing comments.

The title compound, C30H29Cl2F2N3O7, crystallizes in the triclinic crystal system and space group P-1 with cell parameters a = 7.0250(18) A, b = 14.311(5) A, c = 15.841(6) A, α = 107.437(7)°, β = 91.69(2)°, γ = 100.36(2)°, V = 1488.7(9) A3 for Z = 2. The structure exhibits inter-molecular hydrogen bonds of the type N-H…O.

Background: Obesity is a major health problem worldwide and in India also & is a major risk factor associated with significant morbidity and mortality due to comorbid conditions. Surgery is the only effective modality for significant and sustained weight loss & in resolution of associated diabetes, hypertension, sleep apnea and osteoarthritis. Laparoscopic Bariatric surgery is a unique field, this proven surgical approach provide marked improvement in quality of life with quick recovery. Methods: Retrospective data analysis of 145 laparoscopic bariatrics surgery 123 LSG & 22 RYGBP done in patients of morbid obesity alone or with T2DM , HT was analyzed in the study Over a period of three years with mean follow up period of 1-2 years. Patients were evaluated in terms of resolution of percentage weight loss & T2DM. Results: In Present study 145 cases of bariatric surgery (mainly SG & RYGB) were included. Significant weight control of around 40-60 kgs was observed. BMI reduction shift from 29-77 to 21.1-46.6kg/m2 was recorded. In all diabetes pt, post op reduction in HbA1c

Information security related training is extremely important nowadays for various organizations. But for the trainer, it is difficult to know the existing skill levels of trainees in information security area and their expectations from the training. As a result, to decide the time allocation for each level of training also becomes a difficult task for the trainer. To solve this challenge, present work proposes neuroevolution based algorithm. The algorithm can also be useful for online training or web service/mobile app based training. The trainer needs to execute the algorithm in pre-training time and based on the result he/she can adjust or modify training content and time allocation for each training level.

Tiny Encryption Algorithm (TEA) is one of the fastest Encryption Algorithms. It is a lightweight cryptographic algorithm with minimal source code. Due to its simple logic in key scheduling TEA has suffered from related key and equivalent key attacks. Therefore a modified key schedule is proposed for TEA. The new key schedule applies Boolean function based SBox to generate different round keys for TEA. The resultant Modified TEA achieves better security than original TEA. The execution time analysis of modified TEA is also presented.

Recently, quantitative analysis of information flow and information leakage is widely used to decide the threshold of the leakage of information in the computing system. As a result, quantitative analysis based confidentiality policies are also used to protect the information in a computing system. In the present work, one such policy, negative information flow based confidentiality policy and its drawbacks have been discussed. To eliminate the drawbacks of negative information flow policy, a new confidentiality policy has been proposed in the present work. The proposed policy is based on the noise that can be imposed on the system in a controlled way without changing significant system behavior and reliability. The algorithm which can calculate the amount of noise that can be imposed on the computing system without affecting the system reliability is also discussed in the present work.

Password remains one of the main authentication methods in today’s time. The challenge with password as authentication system is due to its dependency on humans. Its strength and weakness is decided by the alphanumeric string set by users. A number of the websites demand users to use strong passwords even though they do not safeguard any critical information assets. This results in an unnecessary cognitive burden on users. It can be reduced by minimizing the number of strong passwords that he/she has to remember. A password composition scheme that considers criticality of information asset is required for this purpose. This article presents one such scheme using inverse document frequency. Users are authenticated based on a valid English sentence. Sentences leave alphanumeric strings behind in recall due to their semantic nature. Users select their authentication sentence by using an image as context. Humans are good at recalling context based information.

We have reported some novel N’-[(1)-ethylidene]-2-(6-methyl-2-oxo-2H-chromen-4-yl) acetohydrazide synthesized by conventional method. The reaction of 2-(6-methyl-2-oxo-2H-chromen-4-yl)acetohydrazide with substituted benzaldehyde in methanol as a solvent yielded a series of (7a-l). The structures of all synthesized compounds are well characterized by Mass, FT-IR, 1H NMR, 13C NMR and elemental analysis. Moreover, all synthesized compounds were screened for In Vitro antimicrobial activity against the gram positive (Staphylococcus aureus, Bacilluas subtilis) and gram negative (Escherichia coli, P. aeruginosa, K. pneunonae, Enterobacter) bacterial strain. In which some the compounds show potential inhibition against the test organisms.

Automobiles gradually favors computers on wheels-complete with various advance safety facilities such as emergency brake assist, safety belts, airbags, Tire-pressure monitoring, etc. Internally automobiles consist of 70 and above Electronic Control Units (ECUs), which communicate with each other using in-vehicle network example- Controller Area Network (CAN). The real time communication between the ECUs via CAN protocol is responsible for supervising safety related issues of car such as an automatic braking system, etc. There is no source ECU authentication in this protocol which leads to various security concerns because safety is futile without security. Security of the car can be compromised by connecting malicious ECU in CAN. Malicious ECU ejecting malign commands can threaten the functioning of steering, brakes, airbags, windows, headlights, etc. This gives rise to safety concern of people in and around the car. To avoid this, we propose a system, which authenticate the ECUs before allowing them to perform any function. The proposed authentication system consists of Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) and BCH. PUF known for its physical and mathematical unclonability is used to provide a unique signature to the system. On giving a challenge for n times it generates n random response, having closeness within them. This closeness is validated by calculating their hamming distance. The response of PUF is prone to noise, hence to remove these noises proposed approach uses BCH. For a challenge, the noise free response being generated is measured for closeness using hamming distance. If the closeness measured is enough, then the ECU is authentic, else it is suspected as malign.

Multiple Target Tracking is an essential requirement for modern air surveillance system employing with multiple sensors to interpret the environment. The fundamental problem in a multiple target tracking system is that of data association - with the goal of choosing most probable association between a particular observation and target to be tracked. This paper presents an Optimized Multi-Sensor Multi-Target Tracking algorithm (OMSMTT) that solves measurement to track association conflicts in sensor data reports and capable of initiating and terminating new tracks. The proposed solution enhances the Multiple Hypotheses Tracking (MHT) algorithm with multidimensional assignment approach by modified scoring procedure which improves performance of the tracker. The work exploits a generalized assignment problem structure; formulate the new framework which treats measurement to track assignment for each target as a random variable and transform it to the particle filter for non maneuvering multi-target models. The algorithm is tested with non maneuvering targets with sparse scenarios in presence of clutter against traditional Multiple Hypothesis Tracker (MHT) under extreme conditions such as track swap and coalescences and analyzes it using different performance metrics.

Web site defacement is one of the most common attacks on the Internet, the most vulnerable being those of critical government organizations such as banking and finance, oil and gas, and emergency services. In this context, website defacement is the malicious act of modifying its contents with offending data aimed at making the intrusion evident to a visitor. The defacement of an organization’s website misleads users with wrong information and can cause potential damage until the unauthorized change is noticed by the Web administrator. A wide variety of motives may exist for hackers to hack a Web server and modify the hosted website contents but it is probably safe to assume that in all cases the content provider would not prefer to present tampered content to the browsing world. Although implementation of security management policies and usage of Web security tools can avoid this kind of embarrassment, the complexity in current systems often exposes that loopholes exist. A good information protection policy addresses protection, detection of security breach, and immediate reaction to such cyberattack. This paper proposes a software system that utilizes operating systems’ kernel feature for file system monitoring to detect changes (add, delete, modify) and the system is combined with a secure hardware component called the trusted platform module (TPM) for authenticating modifications to dynamic and active website contents. The initial testing result shows that our system is effective in detecting changes and is able to classify file modification operations performed by the Web administrator and hacker without a false-positive error quotient.

One need to be very accurate in what the products and services are costing. Inaccurate cost components could cost an organization more dearly. So, to full fill our present and future requirements and ambitions in all respect of life, it is essential enhance our expertise to link the power of today's information technology with the tools of economic theory and business strategy.[2] This paper aims at throwing new lights on various developments and formulate strategy for their implementation.

Background: Nowadays, service-oriented architectures and cloud-based infrastructures are widely used in manufacturing industries and IT organizations. These architectures and infrastructures are based on shared system resources. In some organizations, system resources like a printer, photocopy machines, and scanners are also shared among the members of the organization. The purpose of the proposed work is to model various types of shared system resources, shared system resources based architecture/infrastructure and analyze the model to identify the possible security risk associated with shared system resources and shared system resources based architecture/infrastructure. Design Approach: To model shared system resources and shared system resources based architecture/Infrastructure, Petri net and its variations are used. For security analysis of the Petri net based model of the shared system resource, Petri net algebra based concepts are applied. Results: The present paper successfully demonstrates that the proposed Petri net based modeling approach can be used for quantitative and qualitative security analysis of shared system resources and shared system resources based architecture/infrastructure. For quantitative analysis of security risk associated with shared system resources, information theoretic concepts are used. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, case studies are also incorporated in the present paper. The proposed approach can take various security risk factors like timing analysis attack, information leakage due to confidentiality policy violation and power analysis attack into the consideration while analyzing the security of shared system resources in the industrial environment.

Background: Obesity is a complex disorder that involves some degree of over-consumption1 coupled with a metabolic derangement. There are some direct and indirect anthropometric and bio chemical indicators which if measured can provide some clue about development of diabetes among vulnerable group of population.Methods: This observational cross sectional study was conducted in the Department of Biochemistry at MGM Medical College and MY Hospital. All the patients and controls were clinically examined, and routine biochemical tests were analyzed for all subjects.Results: Positive and significant correlation was found between BMI and FBS, HBA1C, Leptin, HOMA IR respectively, whereas negative correlation was found between BMI and adiponectin. Same way positive correlation was found between W/H ratio and Leptin, HOMA IR respectively and negative correlation was found with adiponectin.Conclusions: This is very much evident through this study that various anthropometric and biochemical indicators may be treated as prognostic predictor of diabetes either linked to obesity or not.

In continuation of our research program on new antitubercular agents, this article is a report of the synthesis of 97 various symmetrical, unsymmetrical, and N-substituted 1,4-dihydropyridines. The synthesized molecules were tested for their activity against M. tuberculosisH37Rv strain with rifampin as the standard drug. The percentage inhibition was found in the range 3–93%. In an effort to understand the relationship between structure and activity, 3D-QSAR studies were also carried out on a subset that is representative of the molecules synthesized. For the generation of the QSAR models, a training set of 35 diverse molecules representing the synthesized molecules was utilized. The molecules were aligned using the atom-fit technique. The CoMFA and CoMSIA models generated on the molecules aligned by the atom-fit method show a correlation coefficient (r2) of 0.98 and 0.95 with cross-validated r2(q2) of 0.56 and 0.62, respectively. The 3D-QSAR models were externally validated against a test set of 19 molecules (aligned previously with the training set) for which the predictive \({r^{2} (r^{2}_{\rm pred})}\) is recorded as 0.74 and 0.69 for the CoMFA and CoMSIA models, respectively. The models were checked for chance correlation through y-scrambling. The QSAR models revealed the importance of the conformational flexibility of the substituents in antitubercular activity.

Potato (Solanum tuberosum L.) is an important crop of the Western Himalayas. However, its productivity is low due to imbalanced fertilizer use. Studies were carried out to enhance yield and profitability of potato through integrated production system. Trials were conducted for two summer seasons in 2003 and 2004 in farmers' fields potato in dry, temperate, region (Lahaul Valley) of Himachal Pradesh, India. The effect of synthetic macro- and micronutrients along with organic manure and microorganisms (Phosphorus Solubilizing Bacteria and Azotobacter) was observed on yield, profitability, concentration of nutrients in plant and quality of potato. The effect on soil status was also assessed after harvest. Tuber yield and profit increased by 34.1 and 31.5%, respectively, with the combined use of fertilizers and organic manure as compare to farmer's practice. Soil status was improved after harvest and concentrations of nutrients increased with use of a mix of synthetic fertilizer, organic manure, and ...

2,6-Dimethyl-5-(phenylcarbamoyl)-4-(3-nitrophenyl)-1,4-dihydropyridine-2-carboxylate was synthesized in two steps and was characterized spectroscopically and confirmed by X-ray diffraction studies. The molecule crystallizes in the monoclinic crystal class in the spacegroup P21/c with cell parameters a = 10.5960(6) A, b = 10.2450(7) A, c = 19.5790(11) A, β = 107.448(3)° and Z = 4. The 1,4-dihydropyridine ring in the structure adopts a flattened boat conformation. 2,6-Dimethyl-5-(phenylcarbamoyl)-4-(3-nitrophenyl)-1,4-dihydropyridine-2-carboxylate was synthesized in two steps and was characterized spectroscopically and confirmed by X-ray diffraction studies. The molecule crystallizes in the monoclinic crystal class in the spacegroup P21/c with cell parameters a = 10.5960(6) A, b = 10.2450(7) A, c = 19.5790(11) A, β = 107.448(3)° and Z = 4. The 1,4-dihydropyridine ring in the structure adopts a flattened boat conformation.

This article evaluates frother performance by studying a two-phase gas-liquid system. Surface tension, foamability, foam stability, and bubble-size distribution were measured as a function of frother type, frother dosage, and solution pH. Variation of bubble size with respect to frother concentration was used for predicting the critical coalescence concentration (CCC) of selected alcohol and polyglycol ether family frothers. An inverse relationship was found between critical coalescence concentration and dynamic foamability index (DFI). Frothers DF-1012 and PPG were found to be more powerful in terms of stability, foamability, and CCC than frothers belonging to the alcohol family. Frother effectiveness was found to be relatively better in alkaline pH.

Flotation feed is a mixture of coarse and ultra-fine fractions. During conditioning of the flotation feed with collector and frother, the finer fraction consumes more reagents as compared to coarser particles. This is mainly due to more specific surface area of the ultra fine than the coarse fraction. This favors the adsorption of reagents toward ultra-finer fractions leads to less complete surface coverage of coarse particles and more entrainment of finer gangue particles. This results in the lower yield of coarse fractions from the flotation circuit and loss in selectivity. Hence, the major challenge is to improve the recovery of the coarser fraction and selectivity of ultra-fine fractions by improving flotation kinetics of all size fractions. This article deals with an approach to overcome the improper reagent adsorption by fine and coarse coal fractions in the flotation circuit through an innovative washing circuit containing gravity operation and flotation processes. Flotation performance between a n...

The frothers of alcohol family (MIBC and Alpha-terpineol) were compared with polyglycol ethers (DF-1012) in terms of two phase characterization parameters like foamability, foam stability, surface activity and bubble size distribution. In this research, fundamental two phase frother characterization parameters were linked with three phase coal flotation behavior. The frothers are found to have a major impact on bubble size. It seems that frothers not only prevent bubble coalescence, but also, affect the bubble break-up process. DF-1012 is more efficient in preventing bubble coalescence and provides more stable and viscous foams compare to MIBC and Alpha-terpineol. The least surface-active frother, MIBC, produces the finest bubbles and the largest bubbles are observed when the most surface-active frother DF-1012 is used. DF-1012 is showing parallel (loop and coil) orientation at the air–water interface. DF-1012 is showing maximum frothing performance (max. retention time) and foam stability (max. collapse time) at all pH. DF-1012, Alpha-terpineol and MIBC are insensitive to solution pH. Two phase frother characterization indices and observations are well correlating with three phase flotation performance indices like selectivity, kinetics and size wise flotation efficiency.

A field experiment was conducted over two years in a Western Himalayan Entisol to demonstrate the effects of synthetic fertilizers and organic manure on the productivity of a commonly used tomato (Lycopersicon esculentum Mill.)-tomato-cauliflower (Brassica oleracea var. botrytis) rotation. The region's farmers currently fertilize with farmyard manure (FYM) supplemented with synthetic N, resulting in P and K deficiencies relative to N. Three fertilizer regimes reflecting a range of current farmer practices were compared with four regimes in which FYM applications were supplemented with synthetic NPK to better meet plant nutrient needs. Balanced nutrient applications increased soil organic C and available P and K content relative to farmer practice treatments, and increased overall profitability of system by 2–20%.

Roux-en-Y gastric bypass (RYGB) is one of the most widely used bariatric surgeries for treatment of moderate and severe obesity. Placing a band around the pouch to band the gastric bypass operation has been reported to increase the restriction resulting in better weight loss and weight loss maintenance. A retrospective comparative study of banded versus nonbanded gastric bypass was done to see if banding the pouch made a difference in the weight loss and quality of life outcome in the patients. Data from all patients who had a gastric bypass in the year 2012 at our centre were reviewed. They were divided into two groups the banded and the nonbanded groups. Patients with complete 2-year follow-up were analysed in terms of weight loss, weight regain and quality of life changes. Two hundred ten patients had gastric bypass in 2012; 165 had complete 2-year follow-up; 64 were banded and 101 nonbanded. The preoperative patient profile in terms of weight, gender and comorbid conditions was similar in both groups except the body mass index (BMI) was significantly higher in the banded group. The perioperative and postoperative complication rates were similar. The weight, BMI and percentage excess weight loss (PEWL) at 2 years were 80.93 kg, 29.45 kg/m2 and 60.76 % in the nonbanded group and 77.06 kg, 27.66 kg/m2 and 71.45 % in the banded group, respectively. Resolution of comorbid conditions was the same in both groups. The overall Gastrointestinal Quality of Life Index went from 88.98 preoperatively to 109.33 postoperatively in the nonbanded group and 92.5 to 112.81 in the banded group, respectively. The patients with banded gastric bypass had significantly better results in terms of weight loss, weight stability and Gastrointestinal Quality of Life Index scores at 2 years.

In the present generation, the social life of every person has become associated with online social networks (OSN). These sites have made drastic changes in the way we socialize. Making friends and keeping in contact with them as well as being updated of their activities, has become easier. But with their rapid growth, problems like fake profiles, online impersonation have also increased. The risk lies in the fact that anybody can create a profile to impersonate a real person on the OSN. The fake profile could be exploited to build online relationship with a targeted person purely through online interactions with the friends of victim.In present work, we have proposed experimental framework with which detection of fake profile is feasible within the friend list, however this framework is restricted to a specific online social networking site namely Facebook. This framework extracts data from the friend list and uses it to classify them as real or fake by using unsupervised and supervised machine learning.

SOCs are getting complex day by day which makes IP design reuse a key approach. To prove functional performance of the IP in SOC, stimulus is required which activates the particular feature of the logic and output is matched with the golden values. Real time experience shows that it is not feasible to test all the features of the IP in SOC, specially negative scenarios such as timeout while enumerating the device. In this paper we propose a novel Validation Framework which validates USBPHY-IP as slave controlled by prototype model implemented in FPGA. Modifications are made in IP as soon as bugs are found and after successful validation (zero bugs), IP finally occupies space into SOC. This approach is capable of checking all the features of USB 2.0 which are currently posing major challenges in SOC validation. This could be a systematic approach to root cause many issues because of the easiness to play with logic sitting inside FPGA. This paper discusses the challenges for USBPHY IP validation and addresses the issues using this innovative framework. Some of the results are presented in the form of case studies for 45nm silicon.

Internet and its growing usage by young generation in India have changed the way consumers shop and buy goods and services. The Indian retail market is witnessing a revolution i.e. young consumers are playing important role in online shopping and looking towards Internet as a unique platform for selling online. In India the visitors of e-tailing sites are accounted to be 40% of youth population, which comprises of youngsters between 15 to 34 years of age. These visitors are part of Indian Internet Population. Not only metros but tier II and III cities are also attracting online retailers. Brand awareness and gap in demand and supply are the main reasons for popularity of online retailers in small cities like Bhopal in India. The study focuses on factors that online buyers consider while shopping online. Some of the factors identified in this research are; scarcity of time with the buyer, availability of payment options like COD, variety of products availability, product pricing, discounts and offers etc. The data is collected using a questionnaire on the sample of 100 people in the age bracket of 15 to 60 years and percentage analysis is done for analyzing the collected data.

The web browser has become one of most accessed process/applications in recent years. The latest website security statistics report about 30% of vulnerability attacks happen due to the information leakage by browser application and its use by hackers to exploit privacy of an individual. This leaked information is one of the main sources for hackers to attack individual's PC or to make the PC a part of botnet. A software controller is proposed to track system calls invoked by the browser process. The designed prototype deals with the systems calls which perform operations related to read, write, access personal and/or system information. The objective of the controller is to confine the leakage of information by a browser process.

The protection of the root user is an important requirement for Linux systems. Recent developments in the area of cyber security have tackled this issue with the use of mandatory access control (MAC) mechanisms. Though MAC policies confine the root as per organizational requirements, yet security problems arise during the management of critical components. This gives rise to the need for incorporation of additional authentication mechanisms into the current scheme for the protection of security-sensitive components under the administration of root. We propose a scheme which uses MAC policies as a base for external device authentication of the root user.

This paper outlines the potential problem of information leakage between programs running inside a web browser. A program to which user’s information is voluntarily provided can leak it to other malicious programs; likewise, a program may steal information from another program. A number of ways through which such leakage may take place using the operating system’s inter process communication mechanism is listed. The proposed solution includes a ’controller’ that monitors all processes running in a browser for their access to the kernel’s services through system calls, intercepts and thwarts an attempt at communication with another process.

There have been numerous investigations targeted at identifying whether a drug lag exists in the mature markets of the US, EU and Japan. This work focuses on the emerging markets because of the potential they hold for the future of the pharmaceutical industry as a consequence of rapid economic and political development. The aims of this work are to ascertain whether a drug lag exists in the emerging markets and how it has changed over time from the 1960s to the 2000s. It will also highlight key regulatory barriers which may contribute to drug lag. The date of the marketing authorisation (MA) approval by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was used as a reference point. A comparison against the company database regarding emerging market specific approval enabled the difference in time and thus the drug lag for that particular market to be calculated. This work concludes that the overall relative drug lag in the emerging markets has decreased over time and that there are seven key regulatory barriers which need to be targeted in order to make further improvements; ′Western Approval′, local clinical development (LCD), Certificate of Pharmaceutical Product (CPP), Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP), pricing approval, document authentication and harmonisation.

Changes due to new upgrades in the software which is having several concurrently running components are certain to impact the existing system's execution and performance. The present paper defines a formal approach that can be applied for validation of the system after component integration in the dynamic adaptive environment. One important means of assuring the validation of such system is through analyzing interactions among different components in the multithreaded environment. A technique has been proposed and developed to capture the run-time components interactions using. NET CLR mechanism, which has been able to successfully capture the interactions among components across all application threads which are running concurrently. Captured components interactions are traced into formal method based on pi-calculus and pi-calculus specifications of the system have been validated by Mobility Workbench (MWB). A case study has been presented on multithreaded dynamic-adaptive system.

In context-aware system, components are dynamically adapted without requiring system to restart, in response to all possible changes in the execution environment. Existing approaches to make such a system more vigorous and safe, are both brittle and time intense. A approach has been devised for dynamic adaptation, to automate the component integration process at runtime by accessing the equivalent component from a set of diversified components. The .NET technology allows developers to adapt run-time component by specifying assertions on the component’s services and also allows performing comparison of these assertions. These assertions will help us to compute metadata for each component in the repository. This metadata-driven component selection is an efficient and promising mechanism. In this paper, we describe the mechanism for component adaptation using .NET approach, by considering a system in dynamic context having proxy switcher and network switcher components.

A set of 25 coumarin-4-acetic acid benzylidene hydrazides were synthesized and characterized by NMR, IR and mass spectroscopic techniques. The compounds were evaluated for their anti-tubercular activity against Mycobacterium tuberculosis H37Rv strain using the BACTEC 460 system to determine percentage inhibition. To understand the relationship between structure and activity, a 3D-QSAR analysis has been carried out by Comparative Molecular Field Analysis (CoMFA). Several statistically significant CoMFA models were generated. The CoMFA model generated with database alignment was the best in terms of overall statistics. The CoMFA contours provide a good insight into the structure activity relationships of the compounds reported herein. 2008 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.

The title compound, C14H14O4, was synthesized and characterized by X-ray diffraction analysis. The compound crystallizes in the monoclinic crystal class in the space group P21/c with cell parameters a = 9.6970(7)A, b = 10.3820(7)A, c = 12.9440(9)A, β = 110.130(3)° and Z = 4. The structure exhibits inter and intramolecular hydrogen bonds of the type C-H…O.

Communications takes place between unknown entities with no prior relationship and no common security domain. These entities are mostly based on challenge-response authentication protocol in which one party presents a “challenge” and another party must provide a valid “response” to be authenticated. The simplest example of a challenge-response protocol is password authentication, where the challenge is asking for the password and the valid response is the correct password. This type of system suffers from weak authentication and is open with vulnerabilities. An adversary can take advantage of these vulnerabilities as backdoors. A malicious developer can modify source or binary code or insert malicious code in original source code to bypass authentication programming logic. Proposed approach eliminates these backdoors from authentication system and provides trusted authentication between parties. Authentication system has been designed which consist functions which are involved in generating verification signature and comparing challenge and response. The approach includes two steps; first, verify whether authentication system is temper proof. Second, is to separate execution of authentication system from other applications running on server. The execution of authentication system needs to be kept secure at low level where instructions are translated and memory is allocated for execution. Proposed approach reduces the possibility of return oriented programming attacks. Also it prevents authentication system from getting affected by extra parameters, global variables and malicious application running on server, and do not let authentication logic to bypass.