Although many businesses are aware of the importance of network security practices such as firewalls, ISP filtering, and public DNS precautions for their networks, few people know the details of the Row Level Security practices that are required to protect the applications. Some malware can bypass firewalls, infiltrate existing applications, and compromise security on a computer or business network. Security can also be compromised by e-commerce apps, interactive programs on your website or any other electronic communication channel between your business and customers. In this age of internet access, internal sabotage is a serious possibility.
In order to ensure a secure system, there are many application-level vulnerabilities that must be fixed. Every application should have its own monitor that can determine if it is acting appropriately. Malware, hacking or internal sabotage can all lead to inappropriate application behavior. These are some of the methods that can be used to monitor and control this behavior:
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Standards Validation
Check that the program’s communication meets protocol standards. If it does not, shut it down. This is why network administrators have created and/or implemented these standards. Even if your network does not have specific protocol standards, your network administrator can raise red flags to alert you if an application takes an action that isn’t in line with expected usage.
If a file download program only downloads one file at once, but is downloading all files from the database, it may not violate protocol standards. However, it is certainly unusual behavior that should be investigated.
Data Limitation
If one application is compromised in a network, it can be fixed. It is possible to spread a virus to the network if the application transmits corrupted data to other programs and machines. Limiting the data applications can send one another is an important part of any application-level security system.
Application Control
A web application should only be able to accept electronic payments and deposit them into an account at the company. Application level security will ensure that the application doesn’t have access to any other information. Your security will not allow malicious code to cause the application to attempt re-route payments to hacker accounts.
Outsourcing and Application Level Security
Maintaining a secure system is very difficult on the application layer, and requires the oversight of an information security professional. While it is not difficult to monitor, it is important to ensure that hackers are stopped before they do too much damage.
You have two choices: you can either hire a full-time information security professional to sit around for most of the day waiting for something bad to happen, or you can outsource your application level security to a trusted information security company for a lot less money, time and effort. It should not be difficult to choose.
E Learning Company Case
Paraschool, a French e-learning company, approached INRIA to develop an algorithm that would allow Paraschool’s existing software to adapt to user preferences. After many brainstorming sessions, where evolutionary algorithms, neural networks, and other artificially intelligent methods were discussed, it was decided that swarm-like algorithms could possibly be used. This is due to the large number of users (more than 10000), and especially the ant-based probabilistic optimization that could easily be grafted onto the existing pedagogical diagram created by Paraschool software.
Ant Colony systems also have the unique property of exhibiting emergent behavior that allows individuals to benefit from the dynamic experience gained by the collective. This means that a student could learn from the pedagogic lessons gleaned from his peers’ failures and successes.
These algorithms produce results that exceed the Paraschool company’s expectations. They will soon be testing in real-size the automatic dynamic optimization of their pedagogic graph, which is their set of interconnected lessons. This paper presents a brief description of human-learning concepts, their software implementation, and a description of the technical implementation for the Ant-Colony-based optimization algorithm. It also discusses the various selection operators. The system can automatically correct erroneous probabilities by performing a series of experiments.
