Albert K . Kwansah Ansah (PhD) | University Of Mines and Technology, Tarkwa (original) (raw)

Papers by Albert K . Kwansah Ansah (PhD)

Mining operations adversely affects water bodies by way of releasing toxics into local streams an... more Mining operations adversely affects water bodies by way of releasing toxics into local streams and filling in entire valleys. There are fears that, mining activities could cause serious metal pollution to water resources in its catchment area. This poses a threat to human use as well as the existence of aquatic organisms. The number of victims affected by mining related disease is bound to escalate in the future if effective monitoring water resource around its catchment area is not conducted. In view of this, there is the need to have a system that would aid environmental authorities to monitor the pollution levels of these water bodies around the mining communities. This paper seeks to design a cost effective logger that could be used to monitor the degree of ionic concentration of these water bodies found around mine operation areas. The device measures and monitors the Total Dissolved Solids (TDS) levels of these water bodies around the mining areas.

After the emergence of IEEE 802.11, Wi-Fi has made a big impact on the wireless network environme... more After the emergence of IEEE 802.11, Wi-Fi has made a big impact on the wireless network environment. With decent data rate available lately at low cost, implementation of wireless networks are growing all over the place. To deliver bandwidth of around 54 Mbps, 802.11g was released. This paper seeks to compare wireless N (802.11n) and wireless G (802.11g) standards in terms of performance and reliability. Since security cannot be overemphasized when dealing with Wireless LAN, this paper also looks at the security implementation of these standards. It is worth nothing that the effectiveness of a wireless network depends on the structure of the building, interference with other networks and security implemented. This paper could be useful for those who want increase in bandwidth with strong security encryption activated. It is tuned to small and medium scale enterprises and also home users.

This paper seeks to design and implement a Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM) based wir... more This paper seeks to design and implement a Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM) based wireless power transmitter and receiver circuits for the control of various loads. The design is based on a self-resonating circuit which converts Direct Current (DC) to Alternating Current (AC) through a coupling coil. The results showed that power is effectively transferred wirelessly through resonance coupling technique. It was then concluded that the nearer the distance, the higher the voltage transferred. This system can be actuated remotely; thus has improved operational convenience and hence extends the frontiers of GSM technology by implication.

Computer networks are constantly under threats from intruders affectionately called hackers. This... more Computer networks are constantly under threats from intruders affectionately called hackers. This paper looks at assessing the extent to which the Internet abounds in easily accessible freeware computer security tools and online resources which can facilitate unauthorised computer network intrusions. The current position of open source computer network security tools, computer operating systems’ vulnerabilities and vendors’ responsibility towards their customers would be covered in this paper. The paper also looks at a couple of freeware computer security tools and a handful of computer system vulnerability websites as well. A virtual computer network environment was setup to demonstrate how some computer security tools can be exploited for malicious purposes. A survey to solicit opinions on freeware computer security toolkit was commissioned to ascertain the extent to which respondents use computer security freeware. The concept of some companies trading in computer system exploits...

BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making, 2020

Background A pandemic affects healthcare delivery and consequently leads to socioeconomic complic... more Background A pandemic affects healthcare delivery and consequently leads to socioeconomic complications. During a pandemic, a community where there lives an asymptomatic patient (AP) becomes a potential endemic zone. Assuming we want to monitor the travel and/or activity of an AP in a community where there is a pandemic. Presently, most monitoring algorithms are relatively less efficient to find a suitable solution as they overlook the continuous mobility instances and activities of the AP over time. Conversely, this paper proposes an EDDAMAP as a compelling data-dependent technique and/or algorithm towards efficient continuous monitoring of the travel and/or activity of an AP. Methods In this paper, it is assumed that an AP is infected with a contagious disease in which the EDDAMAP technique exploits a GPS-enabled mobile device by tagging it to the AP along with its travel within a community. The technique further examines the Spatio-temporal trajectory of the AP to infer its spati...

International Journal of Information Privacy, Security and Integrity, 2019

Journal of Physics: Conference Series, 2020

Despite the existing advances on research and education in cybersecurity and its applications, th... more Despite the existing advances on research and education in cybersecurity and its applications, the field is still under discovery and new technologies are evolving. In recent years, Bitcoin as a cryptocurrency cyber application that records all financial transactions present on a blockchain where users can reach a secure and robust consensus on transactions emerges as the most popular peer-to-peer electronic payment system. Cryptocurrencies mostly rely on blockchain, as a secure decentralised append-only ledger to exchange digital currencies, and thereby attracting a billion-dollar economy. Bitcoin allows input transactions to link addresses and this can be used by an adversary to reveal real user identity. This obviously attracts privacy issues such as user’s information and identity leakage. Several existing techniques are found not satisfactory to fulfil practical and compatible anonymity requirements for users and their transaction. We present in this paper, a secure privacy-pre...

This paper presents a mobile application that could be used during geological field exploration p... more This paper presents a mobile application that could be used during geological field exploration placing emphasis on Geochemical Soil Sampling technique to capture data. Geological Soil Sampling Field data recorded digitally benefits from quick processing, hence facilitating the mineral exploration task and reducing exploration duration. This paper describes a prototype application developed with NetBeans IDE 6.7/J2ME Wireless Toolkit 2.2 emulator platform, which could run on any MIDP compatible devices.

Wireless Communications, 2011

Wireless networking is one of the exciting developments in the world of networking technology. Af... more Wireless networking is one of the exciting developments in the world of networking technology. After the introduction of IEEE 802.11 Ethernet standard, Wi-Fi has become the most widely adopted wireless networking type on the wireless network environment. Since wireless networking is easy to deploy and upgrade and with decent data rate available today at low cost, implementation of wireless networking is growing all over the place. Organizations and enterprises are switching from the traditional wired networks to wireless networking. Wireless can serve in many capacities, from a simple extension to a distribution point. One of the leading glitches with wireless networking is that, the wireless networking devices provide no security as they come out of their boxes. Considering the fact that wireless networks are built on a shared medium and data packets float through the air on radio waves, security cannot be overemphasized when dealing with wireless networking. It is arguable that many network users don't have procedures when they deploy their WLAN for the first time. It is the dearth of procedures that help attackers get into any networks they want. This paper seeks to demystify the security issues of the IEEE 802.11 wireless standards. The paper goes on to address these security concerns and points out the method used to secure a wireless network.

International Journal of Electronic Governance, 2013

Delivery of services to citizens efficiently and at affordable cost is a major concern of many go... more Delivery of services to citizens efficiently and at affordable cost is a major concern of many governments today. Many national electronisation projects today aim at empowering governments to implement and accept digitally signed tax returns, execute transactions securely and tighten border controls while maintaining strong security and streamlining administration under affordable costs. To do this, the need for technologies and policies to ensure trusted transactions and identities become very significant. In line with this, digitally enhanced travel and identity documents, e–health and business authentication methods are gaining great popularity and importance in recent times. The public key infrastructure (PKI) using X.509 digital certificates can provide a great framework for handling such government services and concerns with high level of integrity. This paper seeks to develop a architecture of a government PKI, efficient and effective for providing secure government services to citizens.

International Journal of Computational Science and Engineering, 2020

The concept of coin mixing is significant in blockchain and achieves anonymity and has merited ap... more The concept of coin mixing is significant in blockchain and achieves anonymity and has merited application in bitcoin. Albeit, several coin mixing schemes have been proposed, we point out that they either hoard input transactions and address mapping or not fully satisfy all requirements of practical anonymity. This paper proposes a coin mixing scheme (mixing countersignature scheme, ring signature, and coin mixing approach) that allows users to transact business untraceably and unlinkably without having to trust a third party to ensure coins are safe. Our proposed novel countersignature scheme simulation results prove the countersignature scheme's correctness with an average running time of 4 μs using PBC type A.80. The scheme's security and privacy are met with standard ring signature, ECDSA unforgeability and our countersignature. We demonstrated the efficiency of the mixing scheme using bitcoin's core regtest mode to set up a private bitcoin network. The mix takes 80, 160, 320, 640, 800 secs to service 500, 1,000, 2,000, 4,000, 5,000 users respectively. It was observed that the number of users scales linearly with average running time.

True anonymity may not be fully satisfied in Bitcoin. Linking transactions to input and output ad... more True anonymity may not be fully satisfied in Bitcoin. Linking transactions to input and output addresses to reveal user identity is possible. The author proposes a mixing scheme that modifies the mix coin protocol to hide the mapping of input transactions to addresses from the mixing server. The author used a ring signature scheme and an append-only log to achieve anonymity and accountability. The scheme ensures that transactions do not reveal any linkage between input transactions and retrieving addresses, and also, the mix does not store input transactions-addresses mapping. RingCoin achieves a higher degree of user anonymity against malicious mix and dishonest nodes.

Bitcoin as cryptocurrency cyber application records transactions on a Blockchain network but its ... more Bitcoin as cryptocurrency cyber application records transactions on a Blockchain network but its anonymity is not fully explored. Users information and identity leakage vulnerabilities possibly exist due to Bitcoins public address system. This attracts privacy issues. Practical and compatible anonymity requirements for users are still not satisfactory despite several attempts provided in existing techniques. In this paper, we propose a privacypreservation scheme that ensures users carry out anonymous bitcoin transactions based on bilinear pairing, elliptic curve cryptography, and other cryptographic primitives. We theoretically analysed and evaluate our scheme which is proven secure to implement for preserving users privacy in bitcoin

Background: A pandemic affects healthcare delivery and consequently leads to socioeconomic compli... more Background: A pandemic affects healthcare delivery and consequently leads to socioeconomic complications. During a pandemic, a community where there lives an asymptomatic patient (AP) becomes a potential endemic zone. Assuming we want to monitor the travel and/or activity of an AP in a community where there is a pandemic. Presently, most monitoring algorithms are relatively less efficient to find a suitable solution as they overlook the continuous mobility instances and activities of the AP over time. Conversely, this paper proposes an EDDAMAP as a compelling data-dependent technique and/or algorithm towards efficient continuous monitoring of the travel and/or activity of an AP. Methods: In this paper, it is assumed that an AP is infected with a contagious disease in which the EDDAMAP technique exploits a GPS-enabled mobile device by tagging it to the AP along with its travel within a community. The technique further examines the Spatio-temporal trajectory of the AP to infer its spatial time-bounded activity. The technique aims to learn the travels of the AP and correlates them to its activities to derive some classes of point of interests (POIs) in a location. Further, the technique explores the natural occurring POIs via modelling to identify some regular stay places (SP) and present them as endemic zones. The technique adopts concurrent object feature localization and recognition, branch and bound formalism and graph theory to cater for the worst error-guaranteed approximation to obtain a valid and efficient query solution and also experiments with a real-world GeoLife dataset to confirm its performance. Results: The EDDAMAP technique proofs a compelling technique towards efficient monitoring of an AP in case of a pandemic. Conclusions: The EDDAMAP technique will promote the discovery of endemic zones and hence some public healthcare facilities can rely on it to facilitate the design of patient monitoring system applications to curtail a global pandemic.

IOP Publishing, 2020

Despite the existing advances on research and education in cybersecurity and its applications, th... more Despite the existing advances on research and education in cybersecurity and its applications, the field is still under discovery and new technologies are evolving. In recent years, Bitcoin as a cryptocurrency cyber application that records all financial transactions present on a blockchain where users can reach a secure and robust consensus on transactions emerges as the most popular peer-to-peer electronic payment system. Cryptocurrencies mostly rely on blockchain, as a secure decentralised append-only ledger to exchange digital currencies, and thereby attracting a billion-dollar economy. Bitcoin allows input transactions to link addresses and this can be used by an adversary to reveal real user identity. This obviously attracts privacy issues such as user's information and identity leakage. Several existing techniques are found not satisfactory to fulfil practical and compatible anonymity requirements for users and their transaction. We present in this paper, a secure privacy-preservation scheme based on bilinear pairing and other cryptographic primitives. We proved that our proposed scheme is robust and can be implemented to preserve users and transaction privacy in the Bitcoin system by theoretical analysis and evaluation.

The use of mobile telephones may be nuisance at certain areas and functional places where silence... more The use of mobile telephones may be nuisance at certain areas and functional places where silence is imperative. This paper seeks to design a pocket sized Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) jammer device that transmit signals on the same frequency at which GSM system operates to prevent cellular phones from receiving and transmitting signals to the base station. The artistry used is designing systematic combination of analogue components including, capacitors, inductors, transistors and resistors which helps to generate the frequency (Noise) needed and then amplified to increase the transmitted power. The generated frequency lies in the range of 860 MHz and 1900MHz in order to match the frequency of the main serving base station. The circuit detects the incoming and outgoing calls, SMS and video transmission even if the mobile phone is kept in the silent mode. Our GSM jamming system provides cost effective solution in any area where cellular communications ring tones frequently cause nuisance.

N e w Y o r k S c i e n c e J o u r n a l 2 0 1 0 ; 3 ( 4 ) Abstract: This paper presents a mobil... more N e w Y o r k S c i e n c e J o u r n a l 2 0 1 0 ; 3 ( 4 ) Abstract: This paper presents a mobile application that could be used during geological field exploration placing emphasis on Geochemical Soil Sampling technique to capture data. Geological Soil Sampling Field data recorded digitally benefits from quick processing, hence facilitating the mineral exploration task and reducing exploration duration. This paper describes a prototype application developed with NetBeans IDE 6.7/J2ME Wireless Toolkit 2.2 emulator platform, which could run on any MIDP compatible devices. [New York Science Journal 2010;3(4):54-65]. (ISSN: 1554-0200).

IJACSA

The proliferation of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) coupled with sophisticated ... more The proliferation of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) coupled with sophisticated network protocols have unveiled new avenues for enterprises and organizations and the hospitality industries cannot be left out. Technology-based systems stand in a pivotal position to offer better service to the populace. Hospitality industries such as hotels can take advantage of the pervasiveness of ICT vis-à-vis technology-based systems to advance some of their operations. This paper seeks to assess the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in a front office operation of chain hotels in Ghana. The paper determines the extent of the use of information technology in a front office operation of chain hotels in Ghana. The paper continues to assess the effect of the use of information technology in the front office operation of chain hotels in Ghana, thus if the use of IC s. The paper further makes recommendations to chain hotel operators and the Ghana Tourist Authority (GTA) and policy makers on the use of information and communications technology in front office operation in chain hotels. Three chain hotels in Ghana were assessed.

BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making, 2020

International Journal of Information Privacy, Security and Integrity, 2019

Journal of Physics: Conference Series, 2020

Wireless Communications, 2011

International Journal of Electronic Governance, 2013

International Journal of Computational Science and Engineering, 2020

IOP Publishing, 2020

Despite the existing advances on research and education in cybersecurity and its applications, th... more Despite the existing advances on research and education in cybersecurity and its applications, the field is still under discovery and new technologies are evolving. In recent years, Bitcoin as a cryptocurrency cyber application that records all financial transactions present on a blockchain where users can reach a secure and robust consensus on transactions emerges as the most popular peer-to-peer electronic payment system. Cryptocurrencies mostly rely on blockchain, as a secure decentralised append-only ledger to exchange digital currencies, and thereby attracting a billion-dollar economy. Bitcoin allows input transactions to link addresses and this can be used by an adversary to reveal real user identity. This obviously attracts privacy issues such as user's information and identity leakage. Several existing techniques are found not satisfactory to fulfil practical and compatible anonymity requirements for users and their transaction. We present in this paper, a secure privacy-preservation scheme based on bilinear pairing and other cryptographic primitives. We proved that our proposed scheme is robust and can be implemented to preserve users and transaction privacy in the Bitcoin system by theoretical analysis and evaluation.

IJACSA

─Smart homes automations no longer exist as design concepts for the future generation. With the f... more ─Smart homes automations no longer exist as design concepts for the future generation. With the fast growing and increasing trends in technologies in smart systems, the development of smart homes have seen innovative trends in designs. The aged, Alzheimer and Anosmia patients and people with disability face many difficulties in going about their routines at home. The challenges they encounter especially when they are at home alone pose a threat to their safety and security. This paper seeks to design and prototype a smart home which consists of a lighting control system developed with photo sensors to regulate the external and internal lighting and a vibrating alert system to assist the deaf when the doorbell rings or scenarios that may endanger them using Arduino microcontroller. A human-movement detection system was also integrated into the design to enhance security. The Alzheimer patient is assisted by a gas detection system. The smart home developed is monitored and controlled remotely using a web browser. The prototype has been tested and found to be very assistive to the aged and disabled.