Access authentication via blockchain in space information network.

Space Information Network (SIN) has significant benefits of providing communication anywhere at any time. This feature offers an innovative way for conventional wireless customers to access enhanced internet services by using SIN. However, SIN's characteristics, such as naked links and maximum signal latency, make it difficult to design efficient security and routing protocols, etc. Similarly, existing SIN authentication techniques can't satisfy all of the essentials for secure communication, such as privacy leaks or rising authentication latency. The article aims to develop a novel blockchain-based access authentication mechanism for SIN. The proposed scheme uses a blockchain application, which has offered anonymity to mobile users while considering the satellites' limited processing capacity. The proposed scheme uses a blockchain application, which offers anonymity to mobile users while considering the satellites' limited processing capacity. The SIN gains the likelihood of far greater computational capacity devices as technology evolves. Since authenticating in SIN, the technique comprises three entities: low Earth orbit, mobile user, and network control centre. The proposed mutual authentication mechanism avoids the requirement of a ground station, resulting in less latency and overhead during mobile user authentication. Finally, the new blockchain-based authentication approach is being evaluated with AVISPA, a formal security tool. The simulation and performance study results illustrate that the proposed technique delivers efficient security characteristics such as low authentication latency, minimal signal overhead and less computational cost with group authentication.

A word embedding technique for sentiment analysis of social media to understand the relationship between Islamophobic incidents and media portrayal of Muslim communities.

Islamophobia is a sentiment against the Muslim community; recently, atrocities towards Muslim communities witnessed this sentiment globally. This research investigates the correlation between how news stories covered by mainstream news channels impede the hate speech/Islamophobic sentiment. To examine the objective mentioned above, we shortlisted thirteen mainstream news channels and the ten most widely reported Islamophobic incidents across the globe for experimentation. Transcripts of the news stories are scraped along with their comments, likes, dislikes, and recommended videos as the users' responses. We used a word embedding technique for sentiment analysis, e.g., Islamophobic or not, three textual variables, video titles, video transcripts, and comments. This sentiment analysis helped to compute metric variables. The I-score represents the extent of portrayals of Muslims in a particular news story. The next step is to calculate the canonical correlation between video transcripts and their respective responses, explaining the relationship between news portrayal and hate speech. This study provides empirical evidence of how news stories can promote Islamophobic sentiments and eventually atrocities towards Muslim communities. It also provides the implicit impact of reporting news stories that may impact hate speech and crime against specific communities.

Provenance based data integrity checking and verification in cloud environments.

Cloud computing is a recent tendency in IT that moves computing and data away from desktop and hand-held devices into large scale processing hubs and data centers respectively. It has been proposed as an effective solution for data outsourcing and on demand computing to control the rising cost of IT setups and management in enterprises. However, with Cloud platforms user's data is moved into remotely located storages such that users lose control over their data. This unique feature of the Cloud is facing many security and privacy challenges which need to be clearly understood and resolved. One of the important concerns that needs to be addressed is to provide the proof of data integrity, i.e., correctness of the user's data stored in the Cloud storage. The data in Clouds is physically not accessible to the users. Therefore, a mechanism is required where users can check if the integrity of their valuable data is maintained or compromised. For this purpose some methods are proposed like mirroring, checksumming and using third party auditors amongst others. However, these methods use extra storage space by maintaining multiple copies of data or the presence of a third party verifier is required. In this paper, we address the problem of proving data integrity in Cloud computing by proposing a scheme through which users are able to check the integrity of their data stored in Clouds. In addition, users can track the violation of data integrity if occurred. For this purpose, we utilize a relatively new concept in the Cloud computing called "Data Provenance". Our scheme is capable to reduce the need of any third party services, additional hardware support and the replication of data items on client side for integrity checking.