The growing use of the internet has resulted in an exponential rise in the use of web applications. Businesses, industries, financial and educational institutions, and the general populace depend on web applications. This mammoth rise in their usage has also resulted in many security issues that make these web applications vulnerable, thereby affecting the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of associated information systems. It has, therefore, become necessary to find vulnerabilities in these information system resources to guarantee information security. A publicly available web application vulnerability scanner is a computer program that assesses web application security by employing automated penetration testing techniques that reduce the time, cost, and resources required for web application penetration testing and eliminates test engineers’ dependency on human knowledge. However, these security scanners possess various weaknesses of not scanning complete web applications and generating wrong test results. Moreover, intensive research has been carried out to quantitatively enumerate web application security scanners’ results to inspect their effectiveness and limitations. However, the findings show no well-defined method or criteria available for assessing their results. In this research, we have evaluated the performance of web application vulnerability scanners by testing intentionally defined vulnerable applications and the level of their respective precision and accuracy. This was achieved by classifying the analyzed tools using the most common parameters. The evaluation is based on an extracted list of vulnerabilities from OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project).

Internet of things is widely used in the current era to collect data from sensors and perform specific tasks through processing according to the requirements. The data collected can be sent to a blockchain network to create secure and tamper-resistant records of transactions. The combination of blockchain with IoT has huge potential as it can provide decentralized computation, storage, and exchange for IoT data. However, IoT applications require a low-latency consensus mechanism due to its constraints. In this paper, CBCIoT, a consensus algorithm for blockchain-based IoT applications, is proposed. The primary purpose of this algorithm is to improve scalability in terms of validation and verification rate. The algorithm is developed to be compatible with IoT devices where a slight delay is acceptable. The simulation results show the proposed algorithm’s efficiency in terms of block generation time and transactions per second.

The demand for low resource devices has increased rapidly due to the advancements in Internet-of-things applications. These devices operate in environments that have limited resources. To ensure security, stream ciphers are implemented on hardware due to their speed and simplicity. Amongst different stream ciphers, the eSTREAM ciphers stand due to their frugal implementations. This work probes the effect of unrolling on the efficiency of eSTREAM ciphers, including Trivium, Grain (Grain 80 and Grain 128) and MICKEY (MICKEY 2.0 and MICKEY-128 2.0). It addresses the question of optimal unrolling for designing high-performance stream ciphers. The increase in the area consumption is also bench-marked. The analysis is conducted to identify efficient design principles for ciphers. We experimentally show that the resulting performance after unrolling may disagree with the theoretical prediction when the effects of technology library are considered. We report pre-layout synthesis results on 65 and 130 nm ASIC technology as well as synthesis results for Xilinx FPGA platform in support of our claim. Based on our findings, cipher design and implementation suggestions are proposed to aid hardware designers. Furthermore, we explore why and where area-efficiency for these ciphers saturate.