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A study on impact of celebrity endorsement on customer attitude towards the brand and purchase intention
Today celebrity endorsement has become a trend and been used as a winning formula and celebrities in India are the role models; people in the country are so influenced that they are attracted & follow the trends, styles also, consume the product they endorse and they associate the brand with the celebrity therefore the companies and the marketers believe that celebrity changes the purchase intention of the buyer. So this has been conducted to find out the impact of celebrity endorsement on customer attitude towards the brand and intention to purchase. To achieve the objective a questionnaire has been formed to collect the primary data of minimum of 200 respondents that will help to come to a conclusion about the impact if celebrity endorsement. The study also tries out to find out the various factors that affect a buyer purchase intention. For this study attributes of a celebrity and the brand have been studied also the attitude towards the brand. To acquire the required results the questionnaire was distributed to the target group aged 15-50 and the data collected was studied , analyzed to come to the conclusion whether celebrity influence the target group of consumers. -
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Secure authentication framework for cloud
The growing popularity of cloud based services is prompting organizations to consider shifting applications and data onto cloud. However, organizations dealing with highly sensitive information are apprehensive of moving its applications & data to public cloud owing to concern about security of its information. It is hence incumbent on service providers that only legitimate Users will access its services and resources in cloud. Verifying authenticity of remote users is a necessary pre-requisite in a cloud environment before allowing access to secure resources/services/ applications. The simplest & most commonly used user authentication mechanism is password based authentication. However, Users tend to choose easy to remember password, and many a times use same password for multiple accounts, which makes it often the weakest link in security. Furthermore, service providers authenticating Users on the basis of password, stores password verification information in their databases and such authentication schemes with verification table are known to be vulnerable to various attacks. From the perspective of authentication requirements, service providers in a cloud environment can be broadly categorized into two. Those service providers dealing with highly sensitive information and working in a regulated environment can be grouped into category one ?? as in those offering services for sectors like health care, finance. These providers require a strong and secure authentication mechanism to authenticate its users, without any additional functionality. Similarly, there is a second category of service providers dealing with secure information but operate in a collaborative environment ?? as providers providing their applications bundled through a web portal. To provide the Users with a seamless authentication experience, while accessing multiple services during a session, the second category of service providers prefer to have Single Signon functionality. Two-factor authentication technology overcomes the limitations of password authentication and decreases the probability that the claimant is presenting false evidence of its identity to verifier. If different service providers set up their own two-factor authentication services, Users have to do registration and login process repeatedly. Also, Users accessing multiple cloud services may be required to hold multiple authentication tokens associated with various service providers. Authentication factors such as crypto-tokens and smart cards with cryptographic capabilities have been vastly used as a second authentication factor. However, Users are required to always carry these authentication tokens which make it cumbersome from practical usability perspective. Also its usage involves cost thus restricting its adoption to corporate environments. The authentication process can be made more user-convenient if the authentication factor chosen is such that it is commonly used by all types of Users. Leveraging the use of mobile phone as an authentication factor can help address issue of user convenience at no extra cost while improving the security of authentication schemes. Though, there has been an increasing focus on strengthening the authentication methods of cloud service users, there is no significant work that discusses an authentication scheme that can be adopted by the two categories of cloud Service Providers. Taking cognizance of aforesaid issues related to secured authentication in cloud environment, this research focused on designing secure Two-Factor authentication schemes that can be adopted by the two categories of service providers. This research carried out in different levels, proposes authentication architecture and protocols for the two categories of service providers. At the first level, research proposes Direct Authentication architecture for cloud Service Providers who prefer to authenticate its users by using a strong authentication mechanism and does not require Single Sign-On (SSO) functionality. For those Providers who prefer to provide its user with a SSO functionality the research proposes Brokered Authentication architecture. The next level of research focuses on proposing User Authentication Protocols for both Direct Authentication Service Providers (DASPs) and Brokered Authentication Service Providers (BASPs). The research proposes use of strong, Two-Factor Authentication Protocols without Verifier Table. The suggested protocols, provides Users with flexibility of using a Password and either a Crypto-token or a Mobile-token to authenticate with Service Providers. The proposed approach eliminates the requirement of the User to remember multiple identities to access multiple services and provides the benefit of a higher level of security on account of second authentication factor and non-maintenance of verifier table at server. Access to different services offered by multiple service providers using a single authentication token requires interoperability between providers. Also, the Service Providers will have to address the task of issuing the second authentication factor to Users. As a result, the research intends to propose the utilization of proposed two-factor authentication scheme within a specific environment which includes a trusted entity called an Identity Provider (IdP), with whom Users and Service Providers will be registered. The IdP is responsible for issuing and managing the second authentication factor. In brokered authentication, the IdP playing the role of an authentication broker also provides Single Sign-on functionality. The Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) is used by BASPs and the IdP to exchange authentication information about Users. A major objective of this research is to propose an authentication model that can be adopted by both categories of service providers. Hence, this research proposes an authentication framework for cloud which supports an integrated authentication architecture that provides the service providers with the flexibility to choose between direct and brokered authentication. The integrated two-factor authentication protocol, which does not require the server to maintain a verifier table, supported by the frame work allows users to do a single registration and access services of both direct & brokered authentication service providers using the same crypto-token/mobile-token. To verify claims about security strengths of the proposed authentication protocols, security analysis is done using theoretical intuition. The proposed protocols are found to offer desirable security features such as resistance to replay attack, stolen verifier attack, guessing attack, user impersonation attack etc. To verify the efficiency of the proposed protocols, the communication and computation costs are compared with similar schemes and it is seen that the costs are comparable. To validate the resistance of protocols to authentication attacks, they are analyzed using automated verification tool called ????Scyther??? and the protocol strength is verified by ???no attacks??? results. -
Energy efficient routing protocols for wireless sensor networks
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have gained universal attention now a day???s owing to the advancements made in the fields of information and communication technologies and the electronics field. This innovative sensing technology incorporate an immense number of sensor nodes or motes set up in an area to perceive any continuously fluctuating physical phenomena. These tiny sensor nodes sense and process the sensed data and transfer this information to a base station or sink via radio frequency (RF) channel. The small size of these sensors is an advantage as it can be easily embedded within any device or in any environment. This feature has attracted the use of WSNs in immense applications especially in monitoring and tracking; the most prominent being the surveillance applications. But this tiny size of sensor nodes restricts the resource capabilities. Usually the WSNs are installed in application areas where the human intervention is quite risky or difficult. The sensed information might be needed to take critical decisions in emergency applications. So maintaining the connectivity of the network is of utmost importance. The efficient use of the available resources to the maximum extend is a necessity to prolong the network lifetime. If any node runs out of power, the entire network connectivity collapses and intend of the deployment might become futile. Because of this reason most of the research in the area of WSNs has concentrated on energy efficiency where the design of energy efficient routing protocols plays a major role. This research work titled ???Energy Efficient Routing Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks??? proposes to develop energy efficient routing protocol strategies so as to enhance the lifetime of the WSNs. A thorough study of the existing literature serves as the back bone for attaining acquaintance concerning the pertinent scenario, the problems faced and the application of the WSNs. The use of clustering and sink mobility to enhance the energy utilisation is explored in this research. A modification of the most traditional energy efficient routing protocol for WSNs, LEACH (Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy) is implemented initially by modifying the clustering mechanism. An enhancement of it by incorporating sink mobility, to further augment the energy efficiency is executed next. A modification of HEED (Hybrid Energy Efficient Distributed Clustering Hierarchy) protocol using the unequal clustering technique is also proposed. The modified protocols are simulated using MATLAB under different circumstances by varying the number of sensor nodes and the area of deployment. These modified protocols are intended for delay tolerant applications that require periodic sensing. The performance of the modified protocols is evaluated using metrics like residual energy of the network, packet delivery ratio, energy consumed by the network, delay, and the number of live nodes. The simulation outcomes showcased the effectiveness of the modified protocols compared to the relevant existing protocols in literature. -
Establishing a service composition frame work for smart healthcare system
As the idea of location awareness has already matured and numerous applications are flooded in today???s word, the logical next step reasons out, to context-awareness. Though the idea of context-awareness has been in the research field for close to two decades, the recent advancement in Internet of Things has brought a more compelling thrust in its research. Sensor networks integrating billions of sensors and actuators will be prevalent in the near future producing big data. Filtering and analysing this data with the contextual information will yield more significant results. But deducing the context information itself poses many challenges and unresolved research problems. Context-awareness systems involve acquiring, analysing, reasoning the data and composing the services for suitable action. Service composition either by orchestrating or choreographing technique has been deployed in certain applications, however, each domain requires unique methodology. Healthcare has always been the top priority when it comes to applying novel technologies. Applying context-awareness computing in the healthcare service sector is of paramount importance. The problem context for this research lies in a cardiology speciality hospital???s Intensive Therapy Unit or the post-surgery recovery ward which has lot of scenarios emanating that involves course of actions to be delivered by the healthcare professionals depending on the context. Depending on mere human service may not be adequate. With the available advancements in technologies, it would be possible to leverage optimum service in that time critical situations, provided technology can sense the changes in context and act accordingly. The course of actions to be taken involves an amalgamation of understanding the location, presence availability, relevance of and coordination among various departments, machines and personnel. This can be summarized as ???Response??? with ???Context-Awareness???. The primarily task is to sense the context and then determine and locate the relevant services, which are distributed in the World Wide Web, to achieve a goal situation as a solution to the problem. In order to deliver such a solution we need to develop an exclusive context-aware framework. The existing frameworks will not be adequate to meet such a demanding situation and hence, the research problem is to evolve a comprehensive service composition framework for smart healthcare systems. In order to solve this problem, a use-case approach was followed. After identifying an appropriate use-case, the solution was first modelled using Automata. The concept of service automata and timed automata were fused to deliver a timed-service automaton which is appropriate to model and test the framework and algorithm for service composition. As a solution to the research problem, a composition based framework of a context-aware smart healthcare system has been presented. It will guide software developers to deploy services for critical healthcare, under the umbrella of Service Oriented Architecture. The matured concept of Automata has been tweaked to present novel timed-service automata which will enable service composition precisely for meeting the time constrained demands of modern healthcare service requirements. It has been tested with UPPAAL verification tool for validity and concurrency. A prototype has been implemented to study the validity of the established framework. Apache JMeter tool was used to test the strength of the services and engine developed based on the proposed algorithm for effective service composition. -
East West Interface In 20Th Century India: Analysis Of Western Women???S Responses
In the twenty-first century, the Western world is seeking a greater understanding of the people and nations of Asia, India in particular. The thesis, ???East West Interface in 20th century India: Analysis of Western women???s responses??? is an attempt to illuminate at least an aspect of that interface during a given period of the past, so as to help shed some light on the present day Western approach to India. Throughout the colonial period, Western women got attracted to India. However, during the 20th century, arrival of four eminent Western women from diverse backgrounds, with different intentions had far-reaching impact for India. Katherine Mayo, Margaret Elizabeth Noble, Annie Besant and Madeline Slade, not only got actively involved with the Indian society but in their own ways contributed towards transforming the Indian society. They left an overwhelming impact on the Indian political fabric. The thesis aims to analyze the contribution of these four outstanding Western women and attempts to understand how Indian socio-political and cultural structure got influenced by and drew inspirations from them. This work also attempts to add to the process of evolution of understanding the East by the West. -
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