141 research outputs found
Development of Hypervideo Platform Using Object Databases
No full textWeb users are seizing on interactive capabilities that software suppliers have developed so far, and are eagerly awaiting new interactive capabilities now being demonstrated. This paper focuses the development of rich information environment based on a customized platform enabling hyperlinks on objects within a digital video. With the help of such environment, the viewer is able to view multiple videos concurrently and browse them temporally as well as spatially with the help of an object database. Specifically, the platform enables to traverse through that object by linking, and such links have been explored and created. The link may connect to within a video, or multiple running videos and/or World Wide Web object. The issues such as open hypermedia link base (static, generic or dynamic) and object database versus multiple videos are also investigated
Influence of Bacterial Secondary Symbionts in Sitobion avenae on Its Survival Fitness against Entomopathogenic Fungi, Beauveria bassiana and Metarhizium brunneum
No full textThe research was focused on the ability of wheat aphids Sitobion avenae, harboring bacterial secondary symbionts (BSS) Hamiltonella defensa or Regiella insecticola, to withstand exposure to fungal isolates of Beauveria bassiana and Metarhizium brunneum. In comparison to aphids lacking bacterial secondary symbionts, BSS considerably increased the lifespan of wheat aphids exposed to B. bassiana strains (Bb1022, EABb04/01-Tip) and M. brunneum strains (ART 2825 and BIPESCO 5) and also reduced the aphids’ mortality. The wheat aphid clones lacking bacterial secondary symbionts were shown to be particularly vulnerable to M. brunneum strain BIPESCO 5. As opposed to wheat aphids carrying bacterial symbionts, fungal pathogens infected the wheat aphids lacking H. defensa and R. insecticola more quickly. When treated with fungal pathogens, bacterial endosymbionts had a favorable effect on the fecundity of their host aphids compared to the aphids lacking these symbionts, but there was no change in fungal sporulation on the deceased aphids. By defending their insect hosts against natural enemies, BSS increase the population of their host society and may have a significant impact on the development of their hosts
INSUFFICIENCY AND EXCESES OF CHOLECALCIFEROL (VITAMIN D3) CAUSES ADVERSE EFFECT ON HEALTH
No full textFirst author: Shakeel Ahmed
(Hazara University Department of Biochemistry)
Second author: Anhum Aslam
(Hazara University Department of Biochemistry
On the Control Plane of a Self-Service Cloud Platform
No full textSelf-service Cloud Computing (SSC) [5] is a recentlyproposed model that empowers clients of public cloud platforms in two ways. First, it improves the security and privacy of client data by preventing cloud operators from snooping on or modifying client VMs. Second, it provides clients the flexibility to deploy services, such as VM introspection-based tools, on their own VMs. SSC achieves these goals by modifying the hypervisor privilege model. This paper focuses on the unique challenges involved in building a control plane for an SSC-based cloud platform. The control plane is the layer that facilitates interaction between hosts in the cloud infrastructure as well as between the client and the cloud. We describe a number of novel features in SSC’s control plane, such as its ability to allow specification of VM dependencies, flexible deployment of network middleboxes, and new VM migration protocols. We report on our design and implementation of SSC’s control plane, and present experimental evaluation of services implemented atop the control plane.Technical report DCS-tr-70
Retraction note: Assessment of Titanium Dioxide Nanoparticles (TiO2-NPs) Induced Hepatotoxicity and Ameliorative Effects of <em>Cinnamomum cassia</em> in Sprague-Dawley Rats (<em>Biological Trace Element Research</em>, (2018), 182, 1, (57-69), 10.1007/s12011-017-1074-3)
No full text\ua9 The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2024.The Editors-in-Chief have retracted this article after concerns were raised about data presented in Tables 2, 4, and 5 and error bars in Figs. 1, 2, 3, 12, 13, 14, and 15. The authors failed to provide raw data and evidence of ethical approval. The Editors-in-Chief therefore have lost confidence in the data presented in this article. Authors, Muhammad Shakeel, Farhat Jabeen, and Sadia Zafar do not agree to this retraction. Authors, Rehana Iqbal, Abdul Shakoor Chaudhry, Muhammad Ali, Muhammad Saleem Khan, Adeel Khalid, Samina Shabbir, and Muhammad Saleem Asghar have not responded to any correspondence from the editor/publisher about this retraction
Self-service cloud computing
No full textCloud computing has transformed the IT industry. Clients can acquire computing resources on demand from the cloud, and can drastically reduce their maintenance, management and startup cost. Many new companies rely exclusively on the cloud and according to Gartner’s study [23], by 2015, 90% of government agencies and large companies will be using the cloud. However, many challenges remain in ensuring wide adoption of the cloud. In this work, we have focused on two such challenges. The first challenge is that of security and privacy. When clients choose to use public cloud infrastructure, the confidentiality and integrity of their code and data can be compromised by insider attacks (e.g., malicious system administrators). The second challenge is that of inadequate flexibility provided to the clients. Clients must typically rely on the cloud provider to deploy useful services, such as security services (NIDS or Rootkit and Malware detectors) or deduplication services e.g.,memory or storage deduplication. In virtualized cloud infrastructures, a Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) governs the execution of client virtual machines (VMs). Both the challenges discussed above arise from the way VMMs assign privilege to client VMs. In this work, we have designed and implemented Self-service Cloud Computing (SSC), a new cloud computing model that introduces novel abstractions to improve the security and privacy of client code and data, and gives clients more flexible control over their VMs. In SSC, the privilege model of a commodity VMM is modified and a new cloud management platform is designed and implemented, which uses the modified VMM to solve the security and flexibility problem without affecting the benefits of cloud computing like low maintenance and management cost. SSC incorporates protocols based on Trusted Platform Module (TPM) to establish client’s trust on the SSC enabled infrastructure. To demonstrate the utility of SSC, we have implemented and evaluated multiple security, storage and networking services.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical referencesby Shakeel But
The effectiveness of sales people on customer loyalty : a quantitative research into the Irish printing industry
No full textRelationship selling is not a new concept and has been written about by many authors however it is very rarely industry specific and little is known about the effect modern relationship managers have over customer’s loyalty given the new concept of readily available digital information. It is also evident viewing literature previously written that the arguments and assumptions based around relationship selling is from the view of the sales person and not the buying organisation,
It is the authors aim to ascertain the effect relational sales people have over customer loyalty in the modern Irish printing industry and more specifically are they still worth the high wages these sales people have become accustomed to.
The researcher performed a survey of the entire printing industry in both north and south Ireland in July 2014 using a questionnaire and model previously used in America and performed a comparative analysis by which he came to his conclusions.
The author overcame preconceived ideas pertaining to the sales environment and the views of buying organisations over sales people’s behaviours, realising that relational behaviours are the single most important skill a sales person can have and or develop. Author keywords: Customer loyalty, relationship sales people, business to business marketin
Ensuring System Integrity Using Limited Local Memory
No full textSystem integrity monitors, such as rootkit detectors, rely critically on the ability to fetch and inspect pages containing code and data of a target system under study. To avoid being infected by malicious or compromised targets, state of the art system integrity monitors rely on virtualization technology to set up a tamper-proof execution environment. Consequently, the virtualization infrastructure is part of the trusted computing base. However, modern virtual machine monitors are complex entities, with large code bases that are difficult to verify. In this paper, we present a new machine architecture called limited local memory (LLM), which we leverage to set up an alternative tamper-proof execution environment for system integrity monitors. This architecture leverages recent trends in multicore chip design to equip each processing core with access to a small, private memory area. We show that the features of the LLM architecture, combined with a novel secure paging mechanism, suffice to bootstrap a tamper-proof execution environment without support for hardware virtualization. We demonstrate the utility of this architecture by building a rootkit detector that leverages the key features of LLM. This rootkit detector can safely inspect a target operating system without itself becoming the victim of infection.Technical report DCS-TR-69
Protecting Commodity Operating System Kernels from Vulnerable Device Drivers
No full textDevice drivers on commodity operating systems execute with kernel privilege and have unfettered access to kernel data structures. Several recent attacks demonstrate that such poor isolation exposes kernel data to exploits against vulnerable device drivers, for example through buffer overruns in packet processing code. Prior architectures to isolate kernel data from driver code either sacrifice performance, execute too much driver code with kernel privilege, or are incompatible with commodity operating systems. In this paper, we present the design, implementation and evaluation of a novel security architecture that better isolates kernel data from device drivers without sacrificing performance or compatibility. In this architecture, a device driver is partitioned into a small, trusted kernel-mode component and an untrusted user-mode component. The kernel-mode component contains privileged and performance-critical code. It communicates via RPC with the user-mode component which contains the rest of the driver code. A RPC monitor mediates all control and data transfers between the kernel- and user-mode components. In particular, it verifies that all data transfers from the untrusted user-mode component to the kernel-mode component preserve kernel data structure integrity. We also present a runtime technique to automatically infer such integrity specifications. Our experiments with a Linux implementation of this architecture show that it can prevent compromised device drivers from affecting the integrity of kernel data and do so without impacting common-case performance.Technical report DCS-TR-64
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