Qafqaz University continue activities directed to raising of Public Awareness on Information Security

Qafqaz University continue activities directed to raising of Public Awareness on Information Security

The 1-st International Information Security Workshop

Azerbaijan, Baku, Qafqaz University
19 – 20 June 2012
http://ce.qu.edu.az/InfoSec

The Organizing Committee would like to invite all interested parties to attend the the 1-st International Information Security Workshop that will be held at the Qafqaz University in June 19 and 20, 2012 and co-organized by the Computer Engineering Department at the Qafqaz University (http://ce.qu.edu.az), BM Technologies (www.bmtech.az), BitDefender (www.bitdefender.com), Lancelot Institute (www.lancelotinstitute.com) and IEEE Computer Society Azerbaijan Chapter (http://chapters.computer.org/azerbaijan).

Workshop Statement:

Today, when cyber infrastructure has affected how we accomplish duties and job, how we get acquainted and communicate, how we teach and learn, how we entertain and spend time, etc. collecting and using personal, financial, governmental information, as well as the importance of protecting that information, is a complex challenge that has legal, business, political and technical ramifications.

The global cyber infrastructure has become the crucial environment for economic prosperity, government efficiency, and national security. At the same time the same environment which provides new inviting opportunities also makes possible new potential risks and threats. Protecting the vital information and critical infrastructure from cyberattacks becomes increasingly difficult and costly mission for governments, corporations, non-profit organizations, and even for citizens. Hacktivism, cyberwar, cyberweapons and their potential threats are becoming a reality.

It’s why high education research institutions, governments, businesses, public and private sector partners all together should work to find effective solutions to protect the confidentiality of sensitive information and resilience of national and global cyber infrastructure. We hope that the 1-st International Information Security Workshop would be successful example of such cooperation and will serve as a booster of public awareness and understanding of information security issues.

Dr. Abzetdin Adamov
Qafqaz University
Chair, Computer Engineering Department

Welcome to IEEE Computer Society Azerbaijan Chapter

IEEE as Global Student Engagement Professional Platform - IEEE Student Membership Benefits and Opportunities

Welcome to the website of the IEEE Computer Society, Azerbaijan Chapter. We currently have plans about our upcoming events. Information on past meetings and events can be reached at ieee.qu.edu.az. We are trying to build up this chapter to become the meeting place of choice for the computer community in the Azerbaijan Republic, so if you are involved in research or industrial activities that fit our scope, please do not hesitate in contacting us; you may end up being invited to present your work at one of our technical events. We are planning to conduct approximately 2-5 activities per year, so we hope you can join us at those events.
Let us know your feedback about possible co-operation. We’d love to hear from you!

Student Seminar – The IEEE Student Members are the Leaders of Tomorrow!

The main goal of seminar is to attract students to take advantage of being IEEE Student Member of community which is the world’s largest professional association of advanced technology. The student members are able to access the world’s most comprehensive source of electrical, electronic and computer engineering publications. Student members also benefit by networking with the members and the industry leaders, gaining leadership experience and developing interpersonal skills by getting involved in the local chapter activities.

Event Title: IEEE as Global Student Engagement Professional Platform (IEEE Student Membership Benefits and Opportunities)
Organizer: IEEE Azerbaijan Joint Chapter
Date/Time: December 17 (Saturday), 2011, 10:30
Location: Qafqaz University, Hall: A-128
Auditory: Students and Graduate Students from Azerbaijan Universities
Speaker: Dr. Abzetdin Adamov

Seminar program:

• IEEE History
• IEEE Student Membership: An Overview
• IEEE Student Member Benefits
• IEEE Student Branches, Clubs, Meetings and Conferences
• IEEE as an platform to engage Students
• Quick Start Student Membership
• Distribution of Promotion Matherials
• Questions
• Cocktail Reception

IEEE Computer Society Azerbaijan Chapter http://chapters.computer.org/Azerbaijan/
IEEE Azerbaijan Joint Chapter http://www.ieee.org/go/azerbaijan
IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) http://www.ieee.org

Want to be a IEEE Member? Go to http://www.ieee.org/join or contact us.

Neglected point of Internet performance. How to choose the right DNS service

DNS Functioning, Secondary Nameserver and Resource Records

In order to make website or any other web-based service available 24/7 it is crucial to have reliable DNS service. It is because of DNS resolving is starting point of any potential visit of website, mapping human-friendly text-based domain like “www.qu.edu.az” name into computer-friendly IP address like “85.132.19.200”. So, if DNS is failed or too slaw, it may become the bottleneck of the important project. Generally, all web hosting providers, as well as some of domain name registrars, recommend customers to use freely their DNS servers but most of them are not enough reliable. Outsourcing of DNS service to professional DNS hosting provider with multiple DNS servers in multiple geographic locations can be one of the key factors in maintaining of the uptime critical web-projects.

There are several evidential properties of any Internet-based service like DNS service. These properties affirm in general that service is reliable.

Performance – short time of DNS resolving – high performance servers, geographically distributed (most close server responds to client’s request), implement load balancing and redundancy with anycast addressing
Security – protect from DNS specific attacks such as Denial-of-service (DoS) or cache poisoning – encrypt transfers between a primary and a secondary DNS server, forbid recursive DNS servers, use anycast, …
Manageability – provide user-friendly interface – web-based control panel enables management your DNS zone’s all DNS records
Reliability – provide service available 24/7 – all features above will guarantee 100% SLA

Actually all DNS providers decisively claim that their DNS service responds to all mentioned requirements. However, DNS service is too complex and these features are not enough, DNS service should also be useful, flexible and herewith cheap.

Here I will try to specify some additional DNS specific criteria of service which should be kept in mind in order to choose the right DNS service:

Existing of free/trial service (Free/Trial) – possibility to use service for free with restricted options (forever or just a trial term)
Minimal TTL value (TTL) – Time-of-Live, indicates how long resource records information will be stored in cache of the DNS server (critical, if your IP address is changed frequently)
Records per zone (RPZ) – indicate how many resource records (A, NS, CNAME, MX, …) you can add to your zone
Number of hosts/domains per account (Hosts/Domains) – number of A records you can specify for the different hosts of the same domain / how many domains you can add to your account without additional payment
Number of DNS queries per month (DNS queries) – indicates how many resolves per month are allowed for your zone (resolving occurs each time when somebody access to your website, sends email to your domain, …)
Minimal plan price (Min Price) – most cheap DNS service plan
Price of additional queries (+ Queries) – if the number queries provided by your plan is not enough, usually, you can request more
Price of additional domain (+ Domain) – in order to be able to collect all your domains within the same account and manage them all from one point.

The DNS Hosting Service Providers and their estimation in accordance to the mentioned criteria:

Company	Free/Trial	TTL	RPZ	Hosts/Domains	DNS Queries	Min Price	+ Queries	+ Domain
zoneedit.com	Yes (5 custom domain)	20 min	1000	unlimited/1	3000.000	12	1	11
dyndns.com	Yes (hostname in one of 18 domains)	20 sec	75	30/1	600.000	15	15	15
everydns.com	Yes (custom domain)	any	unlimited	20/1	600.000	15
dnspark.net	Yes (trial)	any	unlimited	unlimited/1	5000.000	14	5.5	14
easydns.com	–	20 sec	–	1	1000.000	20	2	20
dnsmadeeasy.com	Yes (trial)	5 sec	40	10/3	5000.000	30	1.6	2

Just in case, it’s third year I’m using dnspark.net DNS service for corporate website and my own need and really happy with it.

Don’t forget DNS service is backbone of your Internet presence and think before entrusting your business to company, which doing this work for free, so offer zero guarantee for service reliability

Fully Customized Search Engine by Google Search Ajax API

The information is most valuable wealth of humanity today. According to IDC Report we all are getting to be richer rapidly in this meaning. So that, according to this report (The Digital Universe Decade – Are You Rady? ) the amount of digital data worldwide (Digital Universe) will grow this year to 1.2 million petabytes or 1.2 zettabytes. Annual growth makes up more than 60%. By 2020 our Digital Universe will be 44 times as big as it was in 2009.
So, the ability to find appropriate piece of information within this tremendous amount structured and unstructured data getting to be more and more important. It’s why we all love Google so much! But Google is not self-centred (selfish), but rather Google makes his own technology opened for others to develop customized Search Engines, in particular (to be рonest this opennes is restricted, unfortunately).

I’m going to share with you my Fully Customized Search Engine developed by using Google Search Ajax API. If you have an idea how to improve it or you may want to share your mind, feel free to drop a comment.

HTML Code of Customized Search String Input within Container. Don’t forget to get your own Google Ajax API Key at http://code.google.com/apis/loader/signup.html
Download all in one: GSearchEngine.zip

Primary JavaScript Code based on Google Search Ajax API

//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
// Abzetdin Adamov
// Fully Customized Search Engine by Google Search Ajax API
// JavaScript Code based on Google AJAX API
// Last modified 03/13/2011
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

var searchControl;
window.onload = onLoad;

function onLoad() {
searchControl = new GSearchControl();
//SMALL_RESULTSET, LARGE_RESULTSET
searchControl.setResultSetSize(google.search.Search.LARGE_RESULTSET);

//EXPAND_MODE_PARTIAL, EXPAND_MODE_OPEN, EXPAND_MODE_CLOSED
searchOptions = new google.search.SearcherOptions();
searchOptions.setExpandMode(google.search.SearchControl.EXPAND_MODE_OPEN);

var webSrearch = new GwebSearch();
webSrearch.setUserDefinedLabel("myWeb");
searchControl.addSearcher(webSrearch, searchOptions);

var siteSearch = new GwebSearch();
siteSearch.setUserDefinedLabel("Adamov.net.ru");
siteSearch.setSiteRestriction("adamov.net.ru");
searchControl.addSearcher(siteSearch);

var blogsSrearch = new GblogSearch();
blogsSrearch.setUserDefinedLabel("myBlogs");
searchControl.addSearcher(blogsSrearch);

var imgSrearch = new GimageSearch();
imgSrearch.setUserDefinedLabel("myImages");
searchControl.addSearcher(imgSrearch);

var drawOptions = new GdrawOptions();
// DRAW_MODE_TABBED, DRAW_MODE_LINEAR
drawOptions.setDrawMode(GSearchControl.DRAW_MODE_TABBED);
drawOptions.setInput(document.getElementById('queryInput'));
searchControl.draw(document.getElementById("searchcontrol"), drawOptions);

inputBlur();
}
var query = null;
document.onkeydown = function(event) { kd(event); };

document.getElementById('queryInput').onfocus = function(event) { inputFocus(event); };
document.getElementById('queryInput').onblur = function(event) { inputBlur(event); };

var searched = false;
function kd(e) {
if (!e) e = event;
if (query == null)
query = document.getElementById('queryInput');
if (e.keyCode == 27) {
query.value = '';
searchControl.clearAllResults();
}
query.focus();
}

function inputFocus() {
var queryInput = document.getElementById('queryInput');
queryInput.style.color = "#555";
if (queryInput.value && queryInput.value == "Введите строку для поиска в Adamov.net.ru") {
queryInput.value = "";
}
}

function inputBlur() {
var queryInput = document.getElementById('queryInput');
queryInput.style.color = "#bbb";
if (!queryInput.value) {
queryInput.value = "Введите строку для поиска в Adamov.net.ru";
}
}

Fully Customized Search Engine: DEMO
Download all in one: GSearchEngine.zip

Simple and Small Captcha to Diminish the Vulnarability of your Website

Simplest and Smallest Captcha

The interactivity is most recent trend in Web Application Development. To attract more visitors to any Web project owner should offer more interactive services like subscription, voting/polls, forums, comments, … One cannot deny that such a interactivity where visitor can enter a data, increases the vulnerability of the web project. Your website may fall a victim of brute-force attack, automated data injection through your forms, SQL injection, … Easiest solution to avoid such problems is to use Captcha. Captcha helps to make sure that only humans perform certain actions with your website, protecting it from spam bots (software). It prevents abuser from injection of vast number records and spamming your system.
You can use one of Google solutions Recaptcha at http://www.google.com/recaptcha. But sometimes you can’t use this solution for some reasons:

1. You may not want your server connect to any resources in Internet (as in my case)
2. You may not want to use software of other party
3. Google Recaptcha don’t offer the level of customization you need
4. …

Because of the similar reasons I’ve decided to develop my own captcha. As a result you can see following code of very simple and small, but at the same time enough robust and flexible Captcha. You can define any length for Captcha string as well as the type of string: numbers, chars or combination of numbers and chars. It can be easily used just by following to the short instructions.

Include this code just before proceeding the data you get from form. It verify the captcha image with value entered to cahtcha input (reg_captch).

<?php
session_start();
$captcha = $_POST["reg_captch"]; 
if (isset($captcha) && isset($_SESSION["captch"])){
	if ($captcha == $_SESSION["captch"]){
		// call appropriate function here or do nothing to continue to run the rest script
	} else {
		exit("Captcha error...");
	}
} else {
	exit("Captcha error...");
}
?>

Add the following HTML code into your Form (before Submit button may be the right place)

<input class=in_text type=text name=reg_captch id=reg_captch>
<img id="captch" src="captcha.php?rnd=&lt;?=rand();?&gt;" width="100" height=">
<!-- I'm using random values here to prevent image caching in browser, it's important for Firefox, Chrome, ... -->
<img style="cursor:pointer" src="images/refresh.png" alt="Refresh" onClick="javascript:document.getElementById('captch').src='captcha.php?' + Math.random();">

Here you can get main code of captcha (captcha.php), as well as zip file with captcha background image (security_background.gif) and text font to display captcha value (feel free to use your own …)

Main Code – captcha.php
Resource Files – resources

First IEEE Seminar in Azerbaijan “IEEE Membership Benefits and Opportunities”

First IEEE Seminar in Azerbaijan "IEEE Membership Benefits and Opportunities"

held in 26 January 2011 (10:00 – 12:30) at Qafqaz University
http://ieee.qu.edu.az

Meeting was openned with welcome speech of Qafqaz University rector Prof. Ahmet Sanic. In the context of speech Prof. Sanic noticed the importance of professional membership as framework for cooperation and collaboration of people with the same professional interests.

Dr. Abzetdin Adamov had the speech on IEEE Membership Benefits and Opportunities. The speech enclosed following topics:

Short Presentation:  “IEEE Membership Benefits and Opportunities” (PDF)

• IEEE History
• IEEE by Statistics (Quick Facts)
• IEEE Membership Benefits and Opportunities
• Special Interest Memberships – IEEE Societies
• Membership Options: New Opportunity – e-Membership
• Quick Start your Membership
• AICT2011 International Conference (www.aict.info)
• Distribution of Promotion Matherials
• Filling in a Forms
• Questions

"IEEE Membership Benefits and Opportunities"

Briefly about e-Membership Opportunity

The IEEE new initiative called e-Membership was introduces to participants. e-Membership is new membership option for for professionals from developing countries. Members with e-Membership have access to the same benefits and opportunities as standard members, but for lower proce ($63). Only Professional Members are aligible to apply for e-Membership (Students and Staduate Students are not aligible …).

About AICT2011 International Conference

Participants also were informed on 5th International Conference on Application of Information and Communication Technologies (AICT2011) will be held in Bakuon the 12, 13 and 14th of October 2011. Dr. Abzetdin Adamov as a General Chair of upcoming event welcomed all participants to AICT2011 initiated by Qafqaz University under IEEE technical sponsorship. He also announced the Qafqaz University’s decision to support IEEE Members from Azerbaijan during AICT2011 International Conference. Thus, all IEEE Memebers from Azerbaijan are allotted with opportunity to join to all activities during AICT2011 for free (paper publication, openning program, keynote speechs, tutorials, banquet dinner, …).

Representatives of the following Universities, organizations and companies have shown an interest to the subject of seminar:

• Baku State University,
• Academy of Public Administration,
• Cybernetics Institute of ANAS (Azerbaijan National Academy of Science),
• Institute of Information Technology of ANAS,
• Azerbaijan State Oil Academy,
• National Aviation Academy,
• Azerbaijan State Economic University,
• Modern Educational Complex,
• Sumgayit Municipal Department for Public Education,
• British Council,
• Microsoft,
• Azercell Telecom,
• Sinam LTD,
• Saybernet MMC,
• Azerfon LLC,
• DIA Holding,
• Information Policy Analytical Center.

For further information:

• on IEEE Seminar, please, visit http://ieee.qu.edu.az
• on AICT2011 International Conference, please, visit http://www.aict.info
• to join to IEEE go to www.ieee.org/join

GTK2HS Installation under Windows and Haskell/GUI Programming with GTK2HS.

Haskell WinGHCI Interface

Recently I tried to make necessary settings to do GUI programming in Haskell under Windows. It turned out, that it’s not so easy as may seem. There are a lot of contradictory tutorials on the Web. Even, official download address of GTK2HS (www.haskell.org/gtk2hs/download) annonced by many tutorials is not existing now. So the official instructions for building gtk2hs on Windows have out of date information and leave out some important issues, so here’s how I got it all working on Windows XP, I believe steps are same for Windows 7. Now step by step we will go though installation process:

1. Haskell Platform
   Install latest release from http://hackage.haskell.org/platform/ (I installed version 2010.2.0.0 ) 

2. GTK+
   Download the GTK+ all-in-one bundle 2.16 version (2.22 has some problems) all-in-one bundle from here http://www.gtk.org/download-windows.html
   Extract to folder you would like (for example d:\gtk)
   Add \bin (d:\gtk\bin) to PATH (environmental) variable.
   Run CMD and check command

   > pkg-config –cflags gtk+-2.0
   If you will get some paths instead of failure message, things are going well

3. MinGW
   You don’t need to install MinGW separately, it already exists within your Haskell Platform. Only you should do – add MinGW \bin to to PATH (environmental) variable (I’ve installed Haskell Platform to D:\Haskell Platform\2010.2.0.0, so my path is D:\Haskell Platform\2010.2.0.0\mingw\bin).

4. GTK2HS
   Now you should have everything you need to install gtk2hs from Hackage:
   
cabal update
cabal install gtk2hs-buildtools
cabal install gtk


Depend on you Internet download speed, computer perfomance and releases of packages we talked above, each step will take some time. Whole process may vary from 20 to 40 minutes.

Congratulation! Now you can make sure that GTK2HS wors properly by running the following advanced “Hello World” code:

import Graphics.UI.Gtk

main :: IO ()
main =
    do initGUI
       win <- windowNew
       windowSetTitle win "Adamov's Example"
       win `onDestroy` mainQuit

       ent <- entryNew
       btn <- buttonNew

       col <- vBoxNew False 5
       containerAdd col ent
       containerAdd col btn

       buttonSetLabel btn "Click to Print"
       entrySetText ent "Hello World"

       btn `onClicked` do s <- entryGetText ent
                          print s

       containerAdd win col
       widgetShowAll win
       mainGUI

Haskell/GUI Programming with GTK2HS. Advanced "Hello World"

Mobile Communication Impact on Education – New Opportunities and Challenges.

Mobile Communication Impact on Education - New Opportunities and Challenges.

TeliaSonera Eurasia International Conference on Mobile Communications for Social Change
November 25, Baku, Gulustan Palace

Qafqaz University’s vision to mobile communication

The Net Generation or so-called digital natives are today’s college and university students seem completely at home in the digital world. They adopt technologies rapidly. When they want information, they just use the Internet to find for themselves. Students are not only consumers of information but also active information creators – including text, images, audio, and video.

Mobile phones are almost ubiquitous with 97% of university students and about 50% of them use smartphones expecting new services and applications. For them the small screen of the mobile phone is ‘a window to an infinite space’ through which they perform following learning processes: searching information, listening, reading, questioning, estimating, practicing, etc. anywhere, anytime.

Qafqaz University’s vision to mobile communication lies on five research directions (are all significant issues in m-learning) and all need to be better investigated:

1. extending the ongoing e-learning project to m-learning;
2. fostering interactivity on-campus using mobile devices – developing mobile version of existing SIS;
3. ubiquitous learning infrastructure – establishing comprehensive wireless network to support mobility;
4. m-learning for some disciplines at first stage – creating appropriate content,
5. strategies including technical solutions for low-cost connectivity and m-learning use.

TeliaSonera Eurasia International Conference on Mobile Communications for Social Change

Qafqaz University and Azercell joint projects

Qafqaz University was involved to several projects initiated by Azercell as contribution to education. One of them is Barama project. The unique feature of this project is that students get both practical knowledge and case studies on problems companies faced with. According to feedbacks we got from students this research project helped them to get more comprehensive knowledge on problem solving and on the way of transformation a good ideas to the possible projects.

Beautiful Science project was started in Azerbaijan as a result of cooperation between British Council, Azercell and Qafqaz University. Beautiful Science was focused on helping to young scientists to communicate to non-professional audience, as well as to promote engineering education among young.

As initiative towards enhancing mobile technology literacy Azercell and Qafqaz University started a joint educational project. The purpose of the project is to introduce and popularize telecommunication technologies among students; as a result, bridging the gap between the current demand for qualified specialists in the telecommunication market and the number of graduates. As the first stage of the project, a new module “Next Generation Networks” has been added into the curriculum of the Computer Engineering Department as an elective course in 2010-2011 academic year. The course will be offered by several specialists and experts in area of telecommunication from Azercell. As the second stage of project, it is proposed to set up a mobile telecommunication laboratory by Azercell Company. It will give an opportunity for students to implement theoretical knowledge they get as well as to apply new ideas on application development for next generation networks.