Understanding Research Trends in Android Malware Research Using Information Modelling Techniques

Android has been dominating the smartphone market for more than a decade and has managed to capture 87.8%of the market share.Such popularity of Android has drawn the attention of cybercriminals and malware developers.The malicious applications can steal sensitive information like contacts,read personal messages,record calls,send messages to premium-rate numbers,cause financial loss,gain access to the gallery and can access the user’s geographic location.Numerous surveys on Android security have primarily focused on types of malware attack,their propagation,and techniques to mitigate them.To the best of our knowledge,Android malware literature has never been explored using information modelling techniques.Further,promulgation of contemporary research trends in Android malware research has never been done from semantic point of view.This paper intends to identify intellectual core from Android malware literature using Latent Semantic Analysis(LSA).An extensive corpus of 843 articles on Android malware and security,published during 2009–2019,were processed using LSA.Subsequently,the truncated singular Value Decomposition(SVD)technique was used for dimensionality reduction.Later,machine learning methods were deployed to effectively segregate prominent topic solutions with minimal bias.Apropos to observed term and document loading matrix values,this five core research areas and twenty research trends were identified.Further,potential future research directions have been detailed to offer a quick reference for information scientists.The study concludes to the fact that Android security is crucial for pervasive Android devices.Static analysis is the most widely investigated core area within Android security research and is expected to remain in trend in near future.Research trends indicate the need for a faster yet effective model to detect Android applications causing obfuscation,financial attacks and stealing user information.

Infrared image segmentation method based on 2D histogram shape modification and optimal objective function

In the methods of image thresholding segmentation,such methods based on two-dimensional(2D) histogram and optimal objective functions are important.However,when they are used for infrared image segmentation,they are weak in suppressing background noises and worse in segmenting targets with non-uniform gray level.The concept of 2D histogram shape modification is proposed,which is realized by target information prior restraint after enhancing target information using plateau histogram equalization.The formula of 2D minimum Renyi entropy is deduced for image segmentation,then the shape-modified 2D histogram is combined with four optimal objective functions(i.e.,maximum between-class variance,maximum entropy,maximum correlation and minimum Renyi entropy) respectively for the application of infrared image segmentation.Simultaneously,F-measure is introduced to evaluate the segmentation effects objectively.The experimental results show that F-measure is an effective evaluation index for image segmentation since its value is fully consistent with the subjective evaluation,and after 2D histogram shape modification,the methods of optimal objective functions can overcome their original forms' deficiency and their segmentation effects are more or less improvements,where the best one is the maximum entropy method based on 2D histogram shape modification.

Virtual reconfigurable architecture for evolving combinational logic circuits

A virtual reconfigurable architecture(VRA)-based evolvable hardware is proposed for automatic synthesis of combinational logic circuits at gate-level.The proposed VRA is implemented by a Celoxica RC1000 peripheral component interconnect(PCI)board with an Xilinx Virtex xcv2000E field programmable gate array(FPGA).To improve the quality of the evolved circuits,the VRA works through a two-stage evolution: finding a functional circuit and minimizing the number of logic gates used in a feasible circuit.To optimize the algorithm performance in the two-stage evolutionary process and set free the user from the time-consuming process of mutation parameter tuning,a self-adaptive mutation rate control(SAMRC)scheme is introduced.In the evolutionary process,the mutation rate control parameters are encoded as additional genes in the chromosome and also undergo evolutionary operations.The efficiency of the proposed methodology is tested with the evolutions of a 4-bit even parity function,a 2-bit multiplier,and a 3-bit multiplier.The obtained results demonstrate that our scheme improves the evolutionary design of combinational logic circuits in terms of quality of the evolved circuit as well as the computational effort,when compared to the existing evolvable hardware approaches.

Sparsity-Aware Channel Estimation for mmWave Massive MIMO: A Deep CNN-Based Approach

The deep convolutional neural network(CNN)is exploited in this work to conduct the challenging channel estimation for mmWave massive multiple input multiple output(MIMO)systems.The inherent sparse features of the mmWave massive MIMO channels can be extracted and the sparse channel supports can be learnt by the multi-layer CNN-based network through training.Then accurate channel inference can be efficiently implemented using the trained network.The estimation accuracy and spectrum efficiency can be further improved by fully utilizing the spatial correlation among the sparse channel supports of different antennas.It is verified by simulation results that the proposed deep CNN-based scheme significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art benchmarks in both accuracy and spectrum efficiency.