Covert channels are used for the secret transfer of information. Encryption only protects communication from being decoded by unauthorised parties, whereas covert channels aim to hide the very existence of the communication. Initially, covert channels were identified as a security threat on monolithic systems i.e. mainframes. More recently focus has shifted towards covert channels in computer network protocols. The huge amount of data and vast number of different protocols in the Internet seems ideal as a high-bandwidth vehicle for covert communication. This article is a survey of the existing techniques for creating covert channels in widely deployed network and application protocols. We also give an overview of common methods for their detection, elimination, and capacity limitation, required to improve security in future computer networks.

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Anomaly detection in high dimensional data is becoming a fundamental research problem that has various applications in the real world. However, many existing anomaly detection techniques fail to retain sufficient accuracy due to so-called “big data” characterised by high-volume, and high-velocity data generated by variety of sources. This phenomenon of having both problems together can be referred to the “curse of big dimensionality,” that affect existing techniques in terms of both performance and accuracy. To address this gap and to understand the core problem, it is necessary to identify the unique challenges brought by the anomaly detection with both high dimensionality and big data problems. Hence, this survey aims to document the state of anomaly detection in high dimensional big data by representing the unique challenges using a triangular model of vertices: the problem (big dimensionality), techniques/algorithms (anomaly detection), and tools (big data applications/frameworks). Authors’ work that fall directly into any of the vertices or closely related to them are taken into consideration for review. Furthermore, the limitations of traditional approaches and current strategies of high dimensional data are discussed along with recent techniques and applications on big data required for the optimization of anomaly detection.

Software metrics offer us the promise of distilling useful information from vast amounts of software in order to track development progress, to gain insights into the nature of the software, and to identify potential problems. Unfortunately, however, many software metrics exhibit highly skewed, nonGaussian distributions. As a consequence, usual ways of interpreting these metrics -for example, in terms of "average" values -can be highly misleading. Many metrics, it turns out, are distributed like wealth -with high concentrations of values in selected locations. We propose to analyze software metrics using the Gini coefficient, a higherorder statistic widely used in economics to study the distribution of wealth. Our approach allows us not only to observe changes in software systems efficiently, but also to assess project risks and monitor the development process itself. We apply the Gini coefficient to numerous metrics over a range of software projects, and we show that many metrics not only display remarkably high Gini values, but that these values are remarkably consistent as a project evolves over time.

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