Fran Casino

• Ph.D.
• PostDoc Position at University of Piraeus

The double-edged sword of continuous digitization of services and systems opens the door to a myriad of beneficial opportunities, as well as challenging threats. Currently, ransomware is catalogued as the first threat in cybersecurity due to its impact on organizations, critical infrastructure, industry, and society as a whole. Thus, devoting effor...

Alert fatigue is a common issue faced by software teams using the DevSecOps paradigm. The overwhelming number of warnings and alerts generated by security and code scanning tools, particularly in smaller teams where resources are limited, leads to desensitization and diminished responsiveness to security warnings, potentially exposing systems to vu...

The significant increase in software production driven by automation and faster development lifecycles has resulted in a corresponding surge in software vulnerabilities. In parallel, the evolving landscape of software vulnerability detection, highlighting the shift from traditional methods to machine learning and large language models (LLMs), provi...

As society’s dependence on information and communication systems (ICTs) grows, so does the necessity of guaranteeing the proper functioning and use of such systems. In this context, it is critical to enhance the security and robustness of the DevSecOps pipeline through timely vulnerability detection. Usually, AI-based models enable desirable featur...

The goal of this chapter is to illuminate the operational frameworks, key actors, and significant cybersecurity implications of the malware as a service (MaaS) ecosystem. Highlighting the transformation of malware proliferation into a service-oriented model, the chapter discusses how MaaS democratises access to sophisticated cyberattack capabilitie...

The adoption of decentralized, tamper-proof ledger systems is paving the way for new applications and opportunities in different contexts. While most research aims to improve their scalability, privacy, and governance issues, interoperability has received less attention. Executing transactions across various blockchains is notably instrumental in u...

The advent of decentralised systems and the continuous collection of personal data managed by public and private entities require the application of measures to guarantee the privacy of individuals. Due to the necessity to preserve both the privacy and the utility of such data, different techniques have been proposed in the literature. Microaggrega...

Digital evidence underpin the majority of crimes as their analysis is an integral part of almost every criminal investigation. Even if we temporarily disregard the numerous challenges in the collection and analysis of digital evidence, the exchange of the evidence among the different stakeholders has many thorny issues. Of specific interest are cro...

Malware authors continuously evolve their code base to include counter-analysis methods that can significantly hinder their detection and blocking. While malware execution in a sandboxed environment may provide insightful feedback about what the malware does in a machine, anti-virtualisation and hooking evasion methods may allow malware to bypass s...

Digital evidence underpin the majority of crimes as their analysis is an integral part of almost every criminal investigation. Even if we temporarily disregard the numerous challenges in the collection and analysis of digital evidence, the exchange of the evidence among the different stakeholders has many thorny issues. Of specific interest are cro...

Malware authors are continuously evolving their code base to include counter-analysis methods that can significantly hinder their detection and blocking. While the execution of malware in a sandboxed environment may provide a lot of insightful feedback about what the malware actually does in a machine, anti-virtualisation and hooking evasion method...

Many malware campaigns use Microsoft (MS) Office documents as droppers to download and execute their malicious payload. Such campaigns often use these documents because MS Office is installed on billions of devices and that these files allow the execution of arbitrary VBA code. Recent versions of MS Office prevent the automatic execution of VBA mac...

In recent years, traceability systems have been developed as practical tools for improving supply chain (SC) transparency and visibility, especially in health and safety-sensitive sectors like food and pharmaceuticals. Blockchain-related SC traceability research has received significant attention during the last several years, and arguably blockcha...

Due to its critical role in cybersecurity, digital forensics has received significant attention from researchers and practitioners alike. The ever increasing sophistication of modern cyberattacks is directly related to the complexity of evidence acquisition, which often requires the use of several technologies. To date, researchers have presented m...

The Internet of Things facilitates the collection of large amounts of data: sensors, smartphones, and even home appliances, generate a data deluge about individuals, their context and the events in their daily life. Providers can analyse these data in order to extract patterns and increase knowledge about their services, either on their own or by t...

Microsoft Office may be by far the most widely used suite for processing documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. Due to its popularity, it is continuously utilised to carry out malicious campaigns. Threat actors, exploiting the platform’s dynamic features, use it to launch their attacks and penetrate millions of hosts in their campaigns. This w...

Blockchain DNS has emerged as an alternative solution to traditional DNS to address many of its inherent drawbacks. In this regard, a blockchain DNS approach is decentralised, resilient, provides high availability, and prevents censorship. Unfortunately, despite these desirable features, the major blockchain DNS solutions to date, Namecoin and Emer...

Due to its critical role in cybersecurity, digital forensics has received much focus from researchers and practitioners. The ever increasing sophistication of modern cyberattacks is directly related to the complexity of evidence acquisition, which often requires the use of different technologies. To date, researchers have presented many surveys and...

Programming errors in Ethereum smart contracts can result in catastrophic financial losses from stolen cryptocurrency. While vulnerability detectors can prevent vulnerable contracts from being deployed, this does not mean that such contracts will not be deployed. Once a vulnerable contract is instantiated on the blockchain and becomes the target of...

The financial crime landscape is evolving along with the digitisation of financial services. Laws, regulations and forensic methodologies cannot efficiently cope with the growth pace of novel technologies, which translates into late adoption of measures and legal voids, providing a fruitful landscape for malicious actors. In this regard, the featur...

As the digitization of information-intensive processes gains momentum in nowadays, the concern is growing about how to deal with the ever-growing problem of cybercrime. To this end, law enforcement officials and security firms use sophisticated digital forensics techniques for analysing and investigating cybercrimes. However, multi-jurisdictional m...

Dear Colleagues, Sustainable supply chain (SC) management has attracted significant attention from researchers and practitioners in recent years across all three sustainability’s dimensions. SC networks are beginning to incorporate more environmentally and financially viable practices, particularly in light of climate change and the ever-growing c...

A crucial technical challenge for cybercriminals is to keep control over the potentially millions of infected devices that build up their botnets, without compromising the robustness of their attacks. A single, fixed C&C server, for example, can be trivially detected either by binary or traffic analysis and immediately sink-holed or taken-down by s...

Cybercrime is continuously growing in numbers and becoming more sophisticated. Currently, there are various monetisation and money laundering methods, creating a huge, underground economy worldwide. A clear indicator of these activities is online marketplaces which allow cybercriminals to trade their stolen assets and services. While traditionally...

The collection of personal data is exponentially growing and, as a result, individual privacy is endangered accordingly. With the aim to lessen privacy risks whilst maintaining high degrees of data utility, a variety of techniques have been proposed, being microaggregation a very popular one. Microaggregation is a family of perturbation methods, in...

Nowadays, malware campaigns have reached a high level of sophistication, thanks to the use of cryptography and covert communication channels over traditional protocols and services. In this regard, a typical approach to evade botnet identification and takedown mechanisms is the use of domain fluxing through the use of Domain Generation Algorithms (...

Programming errors in Ethereum smart contracts can result in catastrophic financial losses from stolen cryptocurrency. While vulnerability detectors can prevent vulnerable contracts from being deployed, this does not mean that such contracts will not be deployed. Once a vulnerable contract is instantiated on the blockchain and becomes the target of...

Many malware campaigns use Microsoft (MS) Office documents as droppers to download and execute their malicious payload. Such campaigns often use these documents because MS Office is installed in billions of devices and that these files allow the execution of arbitrary VBA code. Recent versions of MS Office prevent the automatic execution of VBA mac...

Ubiquitous computing systems are commonplace. They have opened the door to great benefits for society as a whole. However, they have to be used with care, otherwise they can cause serious risks for their users. In this chapter, we analyze the privacy risks of ubiquitous computing systems from a new individual-centred perspective based on five priva...

During the last few years, there has been an upsurge of social media influencers who are part of the adult entertainment industry, referred to as Performers. To monetize their online presence, Performers often engage in practices which violate community guidelines of social media, such as selling subscriptions for accessing their private “premium”...

During the last few years, there has been an upsurge of social media influencers who are part of the adult entertainment industry, referred to as Performers. To monetize their online presence, Performers often engage in practices which violate community guidelines of social media, such as selling subscriptions for accessing their private "premium"...

The financial crime landscape is evolving along with the digitization in financial services. In this context, laws and regulations cannot efficiently cope with a fast-moving industry such as finance, which translates in late adoption of measures and legal voids, providing a fruitful landscape for malicious actors. In parallel, blockchain technology...

A crucial technical challenge for cybercriminals is to keep control over the potentially millions of infected devices that build up their botnets, without compromising the robustness of their attacks. A single, fixed C&C server, for example, can be trivially detected either by binary or traffic analysis and immediately sink-holed or taken-down by s...

Traceability has become a critical element in supply chain management, particularly in safety-sensitive sectors like food, pharmaceuticals, etc. Upstream (manufacturers, producers, etc.) and downstream (distributors, wholesalers, etc.) supply chain members need to store and handle traceability-related information for providing proof of regulatory c...

The current landscape of the core Internet technologies shows considerable centralisation with the big tech companies controlling the vast majority of traffic and services. This situation has sparked a wide range of decentralisation initiatives with blockchain technology being among the most prominent and successful innovations. At the same time, o...

The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is employed extensively nowadays by many blockchain projects to store personal data off-chain to comply with the Right to be Forgotten (RtbF) requirement of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the new regulatory regime for personal data protection in the EU. In such a way, when a request for content...

As the digitization of information-intensive processes gains momentum in nowadays, the concern is growing about how to deal with the ever-growing problem of cybercrime. To this end, law enforcement officials and security firms use sophisticated digital forensics techniques for analyzing and investigating cybercrimes. However, multi-jurisdictional m...

Human beings produce electronic waste (e-waste) at an unprecedented pace. Mobile phones and other inter-connected smart devices make a significant contribution to the generation of e-waste. Reverse logistics (RL) activities play an essential role in managing mobile phones during their end-of-life. However, remanufacturing and/or refurbishing of mob...

In this paper, an enhancement of a hybrid simulation technique based on combining collaborative filtering with deterministic 3D ray launching algorithm is proposed. Our approach implements a new methodology of data depuration from low definition simulations to reduce noisy simulation cells. This is achieved by processing the maximum number of permi...

Recent advances in telecommunications and database systems have allowed the scientific community to efficiently mine vast amounts of information worldwide and to extract new knowledge by discovering hidden patterns and correlations. Nevertheless, all this shared information can be used to invade the privacy of individuals through the use of fusion...

The widespread adoption of the new generation of decentralised architectures, leveraged by blockchain and decentralised file storage (DFS) systems, enables a myriad of new applications and opportunities. Nevertheless, their remarkable features, namely auditability, availability and, among all, immutability, do not come without a cost. In this artic...

Nowadays, malware campaigns have reached a high level of sophistication, thanks to the use of cryptography and covert communication channels over traditional protocols and services. In this regard, a typical approach to evade botnet identification and takedown mechanisms is the use of domain fluxing through the use of Domain Generation Algorithms (...

The current landscape of the core Internet technologies shows considerable centralisation with the big tech companies controlling the vast majority of traffic and services. This has sparked a wide range of decentralisation initiatives with perhaps the most profound and successful being the blockchain technology. In the past years, a core Internet i...

Modern malware can take various forms, and has reached a very high level of sophistication in terms of its penetration, persistence, communication and hiding capabilities. The use of cryptography, and of covert communication channels over public and widely used protocols and services, is becoming a norm. In this work, we start by introducing Resou...

Blockchain's evolution during the past decade is astonishing: from bitcoin to over 2.000 altcoins, and from decentralised electronic payments to transactions programmable by smart contracts and complex tokens governed by decentralised organisations. While the new generation of blockchain applications is still evolving, blockchain's technical charac...

Information overload is a phenomenon of our days due to the unprecedented penetration of information and communication technologies (ICT) in our daily lives. As a result, people often end up with more options than they can process to choose from and therefore may opt for choices which do not fit best to their preferences. To address these issues, r...

The amount of available information is growing steadily and, as a result, Internet users benefit from recommender systems, which help them find information, services and products that best fit their needs. A common technique used in recommender systems is Collaborative Filtering, which is based on users’ collaboration to make recommendations. Howev...

There is a continuous increase in the sophistication that modern malware exercise in order to bypass the deployed security mechanisms. A typical approach to evade the identification and potential takedown of a botnet command and control server is domain fluxing through the use of Domain Generation Algorithms (DGAs). These algorithms produce a vast...

As the vehicles are gradually transformed into the connected-vehicles, standard features of the past (i.e., immobilizer, keyless entry, self-diagnostics) were neglected to be software updated and hardware upgraded so they do not “align” with the cyber-security demands of the new ICT era (IoT, Industry 4.0, IPv6, sensor technology) we have stepped i...

There is a continuous increase in the sophistication that modern malware exercise in order to bypass the deployed security mechanisms. A typical approach to evade the identification and potential take down of a botnet command and control server is domain fluxing through the use of Domain Generation Algorithms (DGAs). These algorithms produce a vast...

Traceability has become a critical element in supply chain management, particularly in safety-sensitive sectors like food, pharmaceuticals, etc. Upstream (manufacturers, producers, etc.) and downstream (distributors, wholesalers, etc.) supply chain members need to store and handle traceability-related information for providing proof of regulatory c...

Vendor-managed inventory (VMI) is a commonly used collaborative inventory management policy in which man-ufacturers/vendors manage the inventory of retailers and take responsibility for making decisions related to the timing and extent of inventory replenishment. Several prerequisites exist for successfully implementing a VMI strategy like informat...

Tracing products and processes across complex supply chain networks has become an integral part of current supply chain management practices. However, the effectiveness and efficiency of existing supply chain traceability mechanisms are hindered by several barriers including lack of data interoperability and information sharing, opportunistic behav...

Blockchain's evolution during the past decade is astonishing: from bitcoin to over 2.000 altcoins, and from decentralised electronic payments to transactions programmable by smart contracts and complex tokens governed by decentralised organisations. While the new generation of blockchain applications is still evolving, blockchain's technical charac...

Modern malware can take various forms, and has reached a very high level of sophistication in terms of its penetration, persistence, communication and hiding capabilities. The use of cryptography, and of covert communication channels over public and widely used protocols and services, is becoming a norm. In this work, we start by introducing Resour...

As the size and source of network traffic increase, so does the challenge of monitoring and analysing network traffic. Therefore, sampling algorithms are often used to alleviate these scalability issues. However, the use of high entropy data streams, through the use of either encryption or compression, further compounds the challenge as current sta...

Identifying the optimal granularity level of traceable units is necessary when implementing traceability, particularly in food supply chains. In this paper we propose a generic framework for defining granularity levels based on product's unique characteristics, supply chain processes and stakeholders engagement. We determine different levels of gra...

As the size and source of network traffic increase, so does the challenge of monitoring and analysing network traffic. Therefore, sampling algorithms are often used to alleviate these scalability issues. However, the use of high entropy data streams, through the use of either encryption or compression, further compounds the challenge as current sta...

Traceability has become a critical element in supply chain management, particularly in safety-sensitive sectors like food, pharmaceuticals, etc. Upstream (manufacturers, producers, etc.) and downstream (distributors, wholesalers, etc.) supply chain members need to store and handle traceability-related information for providing proof of regulatory c...

Tracing products and processes across complex supply chain networks has become an integral part of current supply chain management practices. However, the effectiveness and efficiency of existing supply chain traceability mechanisms are hindered by several barriers including lack of data interoperability and information sharing, opportunistic behav...

This work provides a systematic literature review of blockchain-based applications across multiple domains. The aim is to investigate the current state of blockchain technology and its applications and to highlight how specific characteristics of this disruptive technology can revolutionise "business-as-usual" practices. To this end, the theoretica...

In order to implement context aware scenarios, seamless interactivity is a necessary requirement, achieved mainly through the use of multiple wireless communication systems. The increase in the number and density of transceivers as well as limiting conditions such as reduced form factors and user presence require system analysis as well as wireless...

Implementing accurate radio planning studies and channel characterization within complex environments is a difficult task mainly due to the multipath propagation. Besides, each specific scenario needs a particular analysis since the morphology of the scenario and the topology of the wireless network have a great impact on the radio propagation. For...

Blockchain technology is rapidly gaining traction in healthcare industry as one of the most exciting technological developments. In particular, blockchain technology presents numerous opportunities for healthcare industry such as reduced transaction costs, increased transparency for regulatory reporting, efficient healthcare data management and hea...

Smart cities have sensors and communication infrastructures that provide humongous amounts of data. People can extend this infrastructure, acting as independent, mobile sensors through their smartphones, enabling opportunistic sensing. This information provides locality and timeliness of measurements that would otherwise be unavailable. Researchers...

In this article, we explain in detail the internal structures and databases of a smart health application. Moreover, we describe how to generate a statistically sound synthetic dataset using real-world medical data.

Simulation techniques based on deterministic methods such as Ray Tracing and Ray Launching, are widely used to perform radioplanning tasks. However, the quality of the simulations depends on the number of rays and the angular resolution. The computational cost of these simulations in High Definition prevents their use in complex environments and th...

Planning the deployment of antennas in complex environments is a difficult task that requires the analysis of each specific scenario. In many cases, real measurements are taken so as to map signal strengths, interferences, and so on. However, taking real measurements is very time consuming and becomes impractical in complex, large scenarios. With t...

In this paper, the results of power levels estimation by combining a deterministic 3D Ray Launching code with methods such as neural networks or collaborative filtering in order to minimize computational cost and hence enabling the analysis of large and complex scenarios are presented. These scenarios correspond with indoor systems with a potential...

In order to predict radio propagation behaviour within a context-aware scenario and to make better decisions on the deployment of antennas and sensors for particular purposes, the state of the art proposes plenty of simulation techniques based on deterministic methods like Ray Tracing and Ray Launching, combining Geometric Optics and Uniform Theory...

The evolution of health systems derives in the implementation of Smart Health, integrated within the framework of Smart Cities and Smart Regions. In this context, vehicular communications provide additional means of interaction among users, administration and health professionals. In this work, characterization of wireless communication between amb...

This paper presents a novel hybrid simulation method based on the combination of an in-house developed 3D ray launching algorithm and a collaborative filtering (CF) technique, which will be used to analyze the performance of ZigBee-based wireless sensor networks (WSNs) to enable ambient assisted living (AAL). The combination of Low Definition resul...

Smart cities are equipped with sensors and communications infrastructures that can provide lots of data. In addition, citizens might use their smartphones to share information with the city and with other users. With the aim to use the infrastructure of smart cities to improve the quality of life of citizens and their healthcare system, the concept...

This article proposes a new technique for Privacy Preserving Collaborative Filtering (PPCF) based on microaggregation, which provides accurate recommendations estimated from perturbed data whilst guaranteeing user k-anonymity. The experimental results presented in this article show the effectiveness of the proposed technique in protecting users' pr...

One of the main challenges in order to achieve sustainability as well as quality of living levels is to achieve an adequate balance between required resources for healthcare and the derived economic cost. In this sense, Ambient Assisted Living, m-Health and the more broad concept of Smart Health, in which contextual information within a Smart City...

Nowadays, plenty of simulation techniques based on deterministic methods like Ray Tracing and Ray Launching, combining Geometric Optics and Uniform Theory of Diffraction, are used to predict waves’ behaviour within a defined environment and to make better decisions on the deployment of antennas for particular purposes. However, simulations’ quality...

One of the fundamental elements in order to implement context aware scenarios to enable the deployment of Smart Health is the use of wireless transceivers. Modern wireless systems make use of high order modulation schemes in order to increase spectral efficiency dynamically, leading to interference dependent coverage-capacity relations. In this wor...

Wandering and disorientation are problems usually suffered by people with dementia. Automatically detecting these mobility patterns is a complex task that has captured the attention of the research community for a long time. Several research projects have been devoted to the analysis of those patterns and their relation with Alzheimer and other cog...

We present the FP7 European Project GAME-ABLING developed from December 2012 to January 2015. This project aimed at the development of a platform for the creation of games for patients with Cerebral Palsy (CP). A key point of the platform is that the framework can be used by personal with no specific skill in game creation, permitting caregivers an...

Pain is an issue that medicine considers of great importance. The treatment of pain and discomfort is essential during hospitalisation procedures, specially for newborn infants because, first, they are not able to communicate that they are in pain; and second large periods of pain or discomfort can lead to major issues. In order to assess the pain/...

Automatic recommender systems have become a cornerstone of e-commerce, especially after the great welcome of Web 2.0 based on participation and interaction of Internet users. Collaborative Filtering (CF) is a recommender system that is becoming increasingly relevant for the industry due to the growth of the Internet, which has made it much more dif...