Sharif Digital Repository

With increasing use of computers in everyday life, improved communication between machines and human is needed. To make a right communication and understand a humankind face which is made in a graphical environment, implementing the audio and visual projects like lip reading, audio and visual speech recognition and lip modelling needed. The main goal in this project is natural representation of strings of lip movements for Farsi language. Lack of a complete audio and visual database for this application in Farsi language made us provide a new complete Farsi database for this project that is called SFAVD. It is a unique audio and visual database which covers the most applicable words, all... 

While data outsourcing provides some benefits, it suffers from new privacy and security concerns, mainly about the confidentiality and integrity of the stored sensitive data, as well as enforcing access control policies. Current solutions to these aims are not comprehensive and consider only one aspect of security requirements. A secure DBMS architecture is introduced that simultaneously considers confidentiality, integrity and access control enforcement requirements. The transparency of security functions from data owner, service providers, and applications facilitates the operationality of the solution.Additionally, a new indexing technique for character encrypted data is proposed that... 

One important problem in query optimization in centralized and decentralized databases is optimizing queries containing common sub-expressions, known as multi-query optimization. In processing these queries, the goal is to process a group of queries together and find a global execution plan with minimum cost for the query set. In most of researches which have approached this problem the focus were on exhaustive algorithms. Since size of the problem space for these algorithms grows exponential with query set size, these approaches are impractical. In this research we have presented six algorithms based on Ant Colony Optimization metaheuristic. We have compared the efficiency of these methods... 

Compound verbs (CVs) and its components, have been widely discussed in previous linguistics' researches as one of the most important and fundamental constructions of Persian language. Nevertheless most of the arguments and assumptions in those researches align with each other and studying CVs from another aspect with a different viewpoint has not been considered very much in order to solve nodes and issues in this area. We have endeavored in this thesis to review and criticize the portrayed definitions of the CVs, reconsider this construction and the syntactical and semantical roles of verbal and non-verbal elements in this combination from another point of view, and revise the previous... 

Using database encryption to protect data in some situations where access control is not soleley enough is inevitable. Database encryption provides an additional layer of protecton to conventional access control techniques. It prevents unauthorized users, including intruders breaking into a network, from viewing the sensitive data. As a result data remains protected even in the event that database is successfully attacked or stolen. However, encryption and decryption of data result in database performance degradation. In the situation where all the information is stored in encrypted form, one cannot make the selection on the database content any more. Data should be decrypted first, so an... 

Text-to-speech synthesis, one of the key technologies in speech processing, is a technique for generating speech signal from arbitrarily given text with target speaker’s voice characteristics and various speaking styles and emotional expressions. Statistical parametric speech synthesishasrecently been shown to be very effective in generating acceptable synthesized speech. Therefore, in this study,the main focus is on one of the instances of these techniquescalled hidden Markov model-based speech synthesis. In text-to-speech systems, it is desirable to synthesize high quality speech using a small amount of speech data; this goal would be achieved by employing speaker adaptation framework and... 

One of the security issues in data outsourcing scenario is the enforcement of data owner’s access control policies. This includes three challenges; 1) the average number of keys needed to access authorized resources, 2) efficient update of policies, and 3) confidentiality of data owner’s access control policies. Most of the existing proposed solutions address only one of these challenges, while they impose high overhead on both the data owner and users. Such an overhead prevents the model to be implemented in practical applications. In this thesis, we propose an approach to address all the aforementioned challenges with acceptable overhead. In this approach, which is based on selective... 

Recently, many organizations outsource their data on an external server to rescue the trouble of data maintenance. But, data owners do not trust in the external server to enforce defined access control policies. In recent years, many researches was dedicated to cryptographic access control on outsourced data, in order to solve this problem. We introduce a method based on Attribute-based Encryption to enforce access control on outsourced data. In this method we consider policy updating and administrative access control. As a result The owner is not only able to change access control policies on outsourced data but also to define administrative rights (grant/revoke) for some admin users. Our... 

Nowadays large volume of sensitive data of organizations are stored in the databases. Thus, databases are attractive to the attackers to execute different types of attacks with different purposes. The useful information that attackers try to achieve in the preliminary steps of the attacks against the databases, is the database structure or schema. One of the popular approach to extract the schema of a database is to analyze the returned error messages from its DBMS. Hence, a solution to prevent schema disclosure via the error messages is customizing and modifying them. To achieve this goal, in this thesis, we propose a framework to handle and customize the error messages automatically and... 

In recent years, there has been a trend toward outsourcing data to the cloud provider. These companies must tackle the data security challenges. Generally these parties are assumed to be honest but curious. In past years, the research communities have been investigating different solution to ensure confidentiality.
In addition to data confidentiality access and pattern confidentiality is a high-priority issue in some cases so. potential adversary should be unable to drive information from the observed access pattern to the outsourced data. Despite the fact that there are more investigation in the field of data confidentiality, concern over data security are the rise in outsourcing data,... 

Protecting sensitive data stored in database systems, especially in outsourced ones, has become a major concern in many organizations. One of the main possible solutions is to encrypt data before storing them on databases. Bucket-based encryption is among different approaches proposed to accomplish this goal which besides its various benefits, suffers from generating false-positive results. Multi-join queries are one of the most important operations in database systems and their usage grows rapidly in comparison to other types of queries by increasing the size of stored information. While using the decision support systems and data mining solutions are growing continuously, executing... 

An important class of applications which have been rapidly growing recently is the one that create and use time series data. These types of data sets are ordered based on the timestamps associated to their data items. In practice, traditional relational databases are unable to satisfy the requirements of these data sets; however, NoSQL databases with column-wide data structure are appropriate infrastructure for them. These databases are very efficient in read and write operations (especially for time series data, which are ordered) and are able to store unstructured data. Time series data may contain valuable and sensitive information; hence, they should be protected from the information... 

SQL injection is one of the most important security threats in web applications with backend SQLbased database. An attacker can abuse an application’s vulnerability to change the queries sent from the application to the database. Many techniques and frameworks have been proposed for detecting and preventing SQL injection. But most of them cannot detect all types of SQL injection such as second-order attacks. In this thesis, we propose a new method to detect and prevent all types of this attack. The proposed method is a kind of anomaly-based intrusion detection methods and could be considered as a proxy between the application server and the database server. The proposed method, can detect... 

Nowadays, NGOs have a special roll in solving social problems in the world. In regards to the developing state of these organizations in Iran, the need of adopting a systematic approach in managing these organizations, is bold. Renewing of the old methods of work in these organizations, is an aid to removing the barriers of development faced by these organizations.
In this regard, this thesis subjects the reengineering of business processes of Rayehe Charity Foundation which is an NGO dealing with empowerment of households women.
After studding the literature of reengineering, the thesis continues on introducing the organization and its activities in more detail. It categorizes... 

The ever-increasing volume of data and the lack of computational and storage facilities have caused a managerial challenge to organizations. The existence of these challenges on the one hand and the increase of storage services on the other hand have compelled the organizations to delegate their storage and management of data to the server providers of cloud storage services. The outsourcing of data to servers obviates the need for purchasing exorbitant storage equipment and recruiting professional workforce in the organization. Since the organization’s data will be kept outside the organization’s ambience in case of using such services in form of outsourcing, and the data will not be under... 

Automatic translation of a high-level specification language to an executable implementation would be highly useful in maximizing the benefits of formal methods. We will introduce a set of translation functions to fill the specification-implementation gap in the domain of database applications. We chose Z, SQL and Delphi languages to illustrate our methodology. We extend Delphi libraries to support mathematical objects exist in Z. Then, based on the extended libraries, we extract the translation functions from Z to Delphi. The translation functions from Z to SQL are more easily extracted, because the mathematical foundation of Z has many properties in common with SQL. Based on the extracted... 

In the secure data outsourcing scenario, verification of the reply of an unreliable server includes assessing the authenticity, completeness and it’s integrity. In this thesis, an efficient method, with emphasis on freshness, has been introduced to evaluate the correctness of the replies from a server. It takes in hand different application needs, inherent differences in the data, and different update mechanisms. This method evaluates freshness by using timestamps alongside the data being out sourced. Due to the requirement of verifying not only the freshness of the response, but the correctness of the timestamps as well, two general methods for evaluating and verifying the responses were... 

One of the security issues in database outsourcing scenario is the correctness of the query results. Correctness verification includes integrity, completeness and freshness of the results. Most of the proposed approaches for correctness verification impose high overhead on the components of the scenario which prevents the scenario to implemented in practical applications. In this thesis, we have proposed a probabilistic approach which imposes acceptable overhead for correctness verification of returned results of service provider. The approach uses the previous behavior of the service provider to calculate a trust value toward it which is used to adjust the imposed overhead. In other words,...