ABSTRACT
Over the last few years, private and public organizations have suffered an increasing number of cyber-attacks owing to excessive exploitation of technological vulnerabilities. The major objective of these attacks is to gain illegal profits by extorting organizations which adversely impact their normal operations and reputation. To mitigate the proliferation of attacks, it is significant for manufacturers to evaluate their IT products through a set of security-related functional and assurance requirements. Common Criteria (CC) is a well-recognized international standard, focusing on ensuring security functionalities of an IT product along with the special emphasis on IS design and life-cycle. Apart from this, it provides a list of assurance classes, families, component, and elements based on which security EALs can be assigned to IT products. In this survey, we have provided a quick overview of the CC followed by the analysis of country-specific implementation of CC schemes to develop an understanding of critical factors. These factors play a significant role by providing assistance in IT products evaluation in accordance with CC. To serve this purpose, a comprehensive comparative analysis of four schemes belonging to countries including US, UK, Netherlands, and Singapore has been conducted. This comparison has aided to propose best practices for realizing an efficient and new CC scheme for the countries which have not designed it yet and for improving the existing CC schemes. Finally, we conclude the paper by providing some future directions regarding automation of the CC evaluation process.
ABSTRACT
CpG islands (CGIs) are aggregation of CpG dinucleotides in the promoters of mammalian genes. These CGIs are present in almost all the housekeeping genes and some tissue-specific genes in the mammalian genome. Extensive research has been done on the prevalence and role of CGIs in protein-coding genes. However, little is known about CGIs in pseudogenes. In the current research project, we focused on CGIs in three main classes of pseudogenes e.g., duplicated pseudogenes (DPGs), processed pseudogenes (PPGs), and unitary pseudogenes (UPGs). We discovered a predominant absence of CGIs in the promoters of all three pseudogenes. We also compared the CGI profile of these pseudogenes with their parent genes and found that unitary pseudogenes (UPGs) differ from the DPGs and PPGs in the sense that in the latter, lack of CGIs is a consequential event while in UPGs, this lack of CGIs in their promoters is not a result of pseudogenization process. We also discussed the implication of the results obtained from this comparison. To our knowledge, this is the first-ever study highlighting this aspect of UPGs throwing new insights into the evolution of genome in general and especially in the context of pseudogenes.
