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Publications

Publications by CTM

2023

An Analysis of Infractions and Fines in the Context of the GDPR

Authors
Dias, JC; Martins, A; Pinto, P;

Publication
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MARKETING COMMUNICATION AND NEW MEDIA

Abstract
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is the regulation that determines the directives inherent to the collection, processing, and protection of personal data in European Union (EU) countries. It was implemented in May 2018 and over the past few years, several public and private companies have been affected by serious penalties. With more than 1500 fines already registered, it is important to have an analysis and insights about them. This paper proposes a detailed analysis of the public records of fines under GDPR, understanding the average fines imposed, the main causes for their application and how they have evolved over time. It is also intended to understand the most affected sectors and point ways to mitigate these penalties. It is concluded that fines under GDPR have an increasing trend over time, both in number of fines and in value, with Industry and Commerce & Media, Telecoms and Broadcasting being the most affected sectors.

2023

An Analysis on the Implementation of Secure Web-Related Protocols in Portuguese City Councils

Authors
Junior, J; Carneiro, P; Paiva, S; Pinto, P;

Publication
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MARKETING COMMUNICATION AND NEW MEDIA

Abstract
The services supporting the websites, both public and private entities, may support security protocols such as HTTPS or DNSSEC. Public and private entities have a responsibility to ensure the security of their online platforms. Entities in the public domain such as city councils provide their services through their websites. However, each city council has its systems, configurations, and IT teams, and this means they have different standings regarding the security protocols supported. This paper analyzes the status of security protocols on Portuguese city council websites, specifically HTTPS and DNSSEC. The study evaluated 308 city council websites using a script developed for the research, and data was collected from the website of Direcao Geral das Autarquias Locais (DGAL) on December 14, 2022, and the websites were scanned on December 22, 2022. The results of this assessment reveal that around 97% of city council websites use RSA as their encryption algorithm and around 84% use 2048-bit length keys for digital certificate signing. Furthermore, about 53% of the city council websites are still supporting outdated and potentially insecure SSL/TLS versions, and around 95% of the councils are not implementing DNSSEC in their domains. These results highlight potential areas for improvement in cybersecurity measures and can serve as a baseline to track progress toward improving cybersecurity maturity in Portuguese city councils.

2023

An Energy-optimized Embedded load balancing using DVFS computing in Cloud Data centers

Authors
Javadpour, A; Sangaiah, AK; Pinto, P; Ja'fari, F; Zhang, WZ; Abadi, AMH; Ahmadi, H;

Publication
COMPUTER COMMUNICATIONS

Abstract
Task scheduling is a significant challenge in the cloud environment as it affects the network's performance regarding the workload of the cloud machines. It also directly impacts the consumed energy, therefore the profit of the cloud provider. This paper proposed an algorithm that prioritizes the tasks regarding their execution deadline. We also categorize the physical machines considering their configuration status. Henceforth, the proposed method assigns the jobs to the physical machines with the same priority class close to the user. Furthermore, we reduce the consumed energy of the machines processing the low-priority tasks using the DVFS method. The proposed method migrates the jobs to maintain the workload balance, or if the machines' class changed according to their scores. We have evaluated and validated the proposed method in the CloudSim library. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method optimized energy consumption by 12% and power consumption by 20%.

2023

Cyber-Physical Systems: Security Threats and Countermeasures

Authors
Hammoudeh, M; Epiphaniou, G; Pinto, P;

Publication
JOURNAL OF SENSOR AND ACTUATOR NETWORKS

Abstract
The recent proliferation of sensors and actuators, which is related to the Internet of Things (IoT), provide smart living to the general public in many data-critical areas, from homes and healthcare to power grids and transport [...]

2023

Privacy-Aware and AI Techniques for Healthcare Based on K-Anonymity Model in Internet of Things

Authors
Sangaiah, AK; Javadpour, A; Ja'fari, F; Pinto, P; Chuang, HM;

Publication
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ENGINEERING MANAGEMENT

Abstract
The government and industry have given the recent development of the Internet of Things in the healthcare sector significant respect. Health service providers retain data gathered from many sources and are useful for patient diagnostics and research for pivotal analysis. However, sensitive personal information about a person is contained in healthcare data, which must be protected. Individual privacy protection is a crucial concern for both people and organizations, particularly when those firms must send user data to data centers due to data mining. This article investigated two general states of increasing entropy by changing the entropy of the class set of characteristics based on artificial intelligence and the k-anonymity model in privacy in context, and also three different strategies have been investigated, i.e., the strategy of selecting the feature with the lowest number of distinct values, selecting the feature with the lowest entropy, and selecting the feature with the highest entropy. For future tasks, we can find an optimal strategy that can help us to achieve optimal entropy in the least possible repetition. The results of our work have been compared by lightweight and MH-Internet of Things, FRUIT methods and shown that the proposed method has high efficiency in entropy criteria.

2023

An Overview of HTTPS and DNSSEC Services Adoption in Higher Education Institutions in Brazil

Authors
Barreto, J; Almeida, H; Pinto, P;

Publication
2023 25TH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ADVANCED COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY, ICACT

Abstract
Cyberattacks are performed against all organizations including Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). When these attacks are successful, they can affect the regular operation of these institutions and may cause the leak of essential or sensitive data that can be misused or become inaccessible. Therefore, the adoption of current security services is important for devices and services exposed to the Internet that should run the latest and secure versions of web-related protocols and comply with the latest security-related guidelines and recommendations. This article surveys and analyzes the status of web-related security services, namely the Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) and the Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) services, in Brazilian HEIs. The results of this survey show that regarding HTTPS around 15% do not use any SSL / TLS certificate and of those supporting it, about 14% do not demand its usage. Regarding DNSSEC, the analysis shows that only around 2% of the HEIs are implementing this protocol. These results show that it is important to design an effective and continuous action plan for HEIs regarding the support or discontinuity of versions of these protocols, in order to improve their protection against cyberattacks.

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