Meek’s Blog

In my Cyber 100 class I have learned many important things about my career throughout the various assignments and videos. I would say one of the more important things that I have learned about in this course is about the various types of malware and security vulnerabilities discussed in the ZyBook. Not only was it interesting, but it will also be very useful information in the future.

Knowing about security vulnerabilities and the various types of malware will be very important to know for my future career. I learned about the various types of malware including worms, viruses and trojans. Not only did I learn about various types of malware, but also about various types of cyber attacks including DoS attacks where a router/server is flooded with packets in order to slow it down or disable it.

While I learned about the types of attacks and the types of malware, I also learned of some useful defenses to use against these threats. One of these defenses is a firewall and works by filtering network traffic to only allow certain things in and out. Another type of defense I learned about was antivirus software and how it can help to detect and delete malware. Overall it was very interesting information and will be very useful to me in the future.

The article I chose to summarize is “Cybersecurity for Cyber-Enabled Multimedia Applications” (Link: https://ieeexplore-ieee-org.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/document/8100676). I chose this article because I found it very interesting. This article discusses other articles about the security of multimedia. It looks at some proposals for security in these multimedia apps and is very interesting.

The article first looks at a proposal from Huining Li, Kun Wang, Xiulong Liu, Yanfei Sun, and Song Guo. This proposal was for a privacy protection method where encryption complexity to be selective to the systems resources and time limitations. This essentially means that encryption complexity would vary depending on time restraints or system resources restraints. This method was formulated in order to try and focus on privacy leakage issues in multimedia systems and come up with new solutions for it. According to the article, “Data is randomly divided into two parts and XOR operations are performed with a generated cipher key in different cloud storage servers to prevent users’ original information from being attacked by untrusted cloud operators. Extensive simulation results demonstrate the advantages and superiority of the proposed method over the prior schemes.” (IEEE, 2017).

The next proposal showcased by the article was Mobile Crowdsourcing (MCS). Researchers explored this as a solution due to the combination of advanced sensing technologies and human power and intelligence and how these two things could lead to a more secure platform. Most MCS schemes now however, are direct meaning that people each take their own tasks and work on them without cooperating with one another. This can hamper some time-constrained crowdsourced tasks. The article showcased in this section of the article is “Word of Mouth Mobile Crowdsourcing: Increasing Awareness of Physical, Cyber, and Social Interactions,” and is presented by Yufeng Wang, Wei Dai, Bo Zhang, Jianhua Ma, and Athanasios V. Vasilakos. This article explores the challenges and future of MCS. MCS has its challenges, but could also be a worthwhile solution to security in multimedia apps.

The next article showcased is “Flow Watermarking for Antinoise and Multistream Tracing in Anonymous Networks” by Ran Wang, Guangquan Xu, Bin Liu, Yan Cao, and Xiaohong Li. This article proposes an “interval-packet-size-based spread spectrum network flow watermark (IPS3).” This scheme would be able to solve noise interference and multi stream tracing in anonymous networks. The article states, “It tackles this issue by adjusting the carrier size in the process of watermarking modulation—that is, by taking the average packet size in a time interval as the watermarking carrier” (IEEE, 2017). Research shows that this IPS3 scheme outperforms traditional network flow watermarking technology.

The next article showcased is one about a child monitoring safety monitoring system. The article is titled, “ChildGuard: A Child-Safety Monitoring System” and was written by Zhigang Gao, Hongyi Guo, Yunfeng Xie, Yanjun Luo, Huijuan Lu, and Ke Yan. This system would be on mobile devices and would track children via mobile devices and would monitor the children in real time for parents to see them. This system has been shown to have higher positional accuracy than other systems of a similar nature.

The final article shown is titled, ” Crowdsensing Multimedia Data: Security and Privacy Issues” and was written by Yan Li, Young-Sik Jeong, Byeong-Seok Shin, and Jong Hyuk Park. The article talks about how using mobile devices, they can use crowdsensing to have normal people collectively gather and share multimedia data. Crowdsensing can also have its risks however.  According to the article, ” Multimedia crowdsensing has made large-scale participatory sensing viable in a speedy and cost-efficient manner, but it also introduces security and privacy concerns. Personally identifiable information of participants can be exposed in the process of sharing individually owned sensor data.” The article showcased specifically looks at security and privacy issues in multimedia crowdsensing and describes existing solutions for this issue.

Overall this article compiled some very useful information from many other articles and was a very interesting read.

Hi, my name is Lukas Miller, but my friends usually call me Meek and this is my blog. I am a sophomore and I am majoring in cybersecurity. A few of my hobbies include playing videogames and lifting weights. I wanted to go into cybersecurity because computers have always interested me and I feel as though it would be a very cool field to work in.

I have been around and using computer systems for basically all of my life and have a lot of experience with not only software, but hardware as well having built many computers in the past.

I have taken a class on computer hardware before in high school, I have helped many of my friends build computers, and I built my own computer. I also have experience with coding in python as I have taken both CMPSC 131 and 132.

I am pursing a degree in order to learn about computer systems and just cybersecurity in general in order to find a job that is well paying that I can enjoy doing. I have also read online that many jobs in the field have a great work life balance which is something that I would really enjoy in a career. Overall, I look forward to learning more about computers and their various systems during this course.