Biblio

Large scale cloud networks consist of distributed networking and computing elements that process critical information and thus security is a key requirement for any environment. Unfortunately, assessing the security state of such networks is a challenging task and the tools used in the past by security experts such as packet filtering, firewall, Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) etc., provide a reactive security mechanism. In this paper, we introduce a Moving Target Defense (MTD) based proactive security framework for monitoring attacks which lets us identify and reason about multi-stage attacks that target software vulnerabilities present in a cloud network. We formulate the multi-stage attack scenario as a two-player zero-sum Markov Game (between the attacker and the network administrator) on attack graphs. The rewards and transition probabilities are obtained by leveraging the expert knowledge present in the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS). Our framework identifies an attacker's optimal policy and places countermeasures to ensure that this attack policy is always detected, thus forcing the attacker to use a sub-optimal policy with higher cost.

In recent years, developments in the field of computer vision have allowed deep learning-based techniques to surpass human-level performance. However, these advances have also culminated in the advent of adversarial machine learning techniques, capable of launching targeted image captioning attacks that easily fool deep learning models. Although attacks in the image domain are well studied, little work has been done in the video domain. In this paper, we show it is possible to extend prior attacks in the image domain to the video captioning task, without heavily affecting the video's playback quality. We demonstrate our attack against a state-of-the-art video captioning model, by extending a prior image captioning attack known as Show and Fool. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first successful method for targeted attacks against a video captioning model, which is able to inject 'subliminal' perturbations into the video stream, and force the model to output a chosen caption with up to 0.981 cosine similarity, achieving near-perfect similarity to chosen target captions.

A recent proposed physical layer encryption technique uses an all-optical setup based on spatial light modulators to split two or more wavelength division multiplexed (WDM) signals in several spectral slices and to shuffle these slices. As a result, eavesdroppers aimed to recover information from a single target signal need to handle all the signals involved in the shuffling process. In this work, computer simulations are used to analyse the case where the shuffled signals propagate through different optical routes. From a security point of view, this is an interesting possibility because it obliges eavesdroppers to tap different optical fibres/ cables. On the other hand, each shuffled signal experiences different physical impairments and the deleterious consequences of these effects must be carefully investigated. Our results indicate that, in a metropolitan area network environment, penalties caused by attenuation and dispersion differences may be easily compensated with digital signal processing algorithms that are presently deployed.

Organizations perform security analysis for assessing network health and safe-guarding their growing networks through Vulnerability Assessments (AKA VA Scans). The output of VA scans is reports on individual hosts and its vulnerabilities, which, are of little use as the origin of the attack can't be located from these. Attack Graphs, generated without an in-depth analysis of the VA reports, are used to fill in these gaps, but only provide cursory information. This study presents an effective model of depicting the devices and the data flow that efficiently identifies the weakest nodes along with the concerned vulnerability's origin.The complexity of the attach graph using MulVal has been greatly reduced using the proposed approach of using the risk and CVSS base score as evaluation criteria. This makes it easier for the user to interpret the attack graphs and thus reduce the time taken needed to identify the attack paths and where the attack originates from.

Trust management is a promising alternative solution to different complex security algorithms for Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSN) applications due to its several resource constraint behaviour. In this work, we have proposed a trust management model to improve location privacy of the UWSN. Adaptive Neuro Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) has been exploited to evaluate trustworthiness of a sensor node. Also Markov Decision Process (MDP) has been considered. At each state of the MDP, a sensor node evaluates trust behaviour of forwarding node utilizing the FIS learning rules and selects a trusted node. Simulation has been conducted in MATLAB and simulation results show that the detection accuracy of trustworthiness is 91.2% which is greater than Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD) 99 intrusion detection based dataset. So, in our model 91.2% trustworthiness is necessary to be a trusted node otherwise it will be treated as a malicious or compromised node. Our proposed model can successfully eliminate the possibility of occurring any compromised or malicious node in the network.

Every public or private area today is preferred to be under surveillance to ensure high levels of security. Since the surveillance happens round the clock, data gathered as a result is huge and requires a lot of manual work to go through every second of the recorded videos. This paper presents a system which can detect anomalous behaviors and alarm the user on the type of anomalous behavior. Since there are a myriad of anomalies, the classification of anomalies had to be narrowed down. There are certain anomalies which are generally seen and have a huge impact on public safety, such as explosions, road accidents, assault, shooting, etc. To narrow down the variations, this system can detect explosion, road accidents, shooting, and fighting and even output the frame of their occurrence. The model has been trained with videos belonging to these classes. The dataset used is UCF Crime dataset. Learning patterns from videos requires the learning of both spatial and temporal features. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) extract spatial features and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks learn the sequences. The classification, using an CNN-LSTM model achieves an accuracy of 85%.

Anonymity platforms route the traffic over a network of special routers that are known as mixes and implement various traffic disruption techniques to hide the communicating users' identities. Batch mixes in particular anonymize communicating peers by allowing message exchange to take place only after a sufficient number of messages (a batch) accumulate, thus introducing delay. We introduce a queueing model for batch mix and study its delay properties. Our analysis shows that delay of a batch mix grows quickly as the batch size gets close to the number of senders connected to the mix. We then propose a randomized batch mixing strategy and show that it achieves much better delay scaling in terms of the batch size. However, randomization is shown to reduce the anonymity preserving capabilities of the mix. We also observe that queueing models are particularly useful to study anonymity metrics that are more practically relevant such as the time-to-deanonymize metric.

Occurrence of faults in power systems is unavoidable but their timely recognition and location enhances the reliability and security of supply; thereby resulting in economic gain to consumers and power utility alike. Distribution Network (DN) is made smarter by the introduction of sensors and computers into the system. In this paper, detection and classification of faults in DN using Artificial Neural Network (ANN) is emphasized. This is achieved through the employment of Back Propagation Algorithm (BPA) of the Feed Forward Neural Network (FFNN) using three phase voltages and currents as inputs. The simulations were carried out using the MATLAB® 2017a. ANN with various hidden layers were analyzed and the results authenticate the effectiveness of the method.

Most serious occurrence of modern malware is Botnet. Botnet is a rapidly evolving problem that is still not well understood and studied. One of the main goals for modern network security is to create adequate techniques for the detection and eventual termination of Botnet threats. The article presents an approach for implementing a host-based Intrusion Detection System for Botnet attack detection. The approach is based on a variation of a genetic algorithm to detect anomalies in a case of attacks. An implementation of the approach and experimental results are presented.

Recommended systems are very popular nowadays. They are used online to help a user get the desired product quickly. Recommended Systems are found on almost every website, especially big companies such as Facebook, eBay, Amazon, NetFlix, and others. In specific cases, these systems help the user find a book, movie, article, product of his or her preference, and are also used on social networks to meet friends who share similar interests in different fields. These companies use referral systems because they bring amazing benefits in a very fast time. To generate more accurate recommendations, recommended systems are based on the user's personal information, eg: different ratings, history observation, personal profiles, etc. Use of these systems is very necessary but the way this information is received, and the privacy of this information is almost constantly ignored. Many users are unaware of how their information is received and how it is used. This paper will discuss how recommended systems work in different online companies and how safe they are to use without compromising their privacy. Given the widespread use of these systems, an important issue has arisen regarding user privacy and security. Collecting personal information from recommended systems increases the risk of unwanted exposure to that information. As a result of this paper, the reader will be aware of the functioning of Recommended systems, the way they receive and use their information, and will also discuss privacy protection techniques against Recommended systems.

In recent years, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have become increasingly accessible to the public due to their high availability with affordable prices while being equipped with better technology. However, this raises a great concern from both the cyber and physical security perspectives since UAVs can be utilized for malicious activities in order to exploit vulnerabilities by spying on private properties, critical areas or to carry dangerous objects such as explosives which makes them a great threat to the society. Drone identification is considered the first step in a multi-procedural process in securing physical infrastructure against this threat. In this paper, we present drone detection and identification methods using deep learning techniques such as Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) and Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network (CRNN). These algorithms will be utilized to exploit the unique acoustic fingerprints of the flying drones in order to detect and identify them. We propose a comparison between the performance of different neural networks based on our dataset which features audio recorded samples of drone activities. The major contribution of our work is to validate the usage of these methodologies of drone detection and identification in real life scenarios and to provide a robust comparison of the performance between different deep neural network algorithms for this application. In addition, we are releasing the dataset of drone audio clips for the research community for further analysis.

Introduction of IoT is a big step towards the convergence of physical and virtual world as everyday objects are connected to the internet nowadays. But due to its diversity and resource constraint nature, the security of these devices in the real world has become a major challenge. Although a number of security frameworks have been suggested to ensure the security of IoT devices, frameworks for auditing this security are rare. We propose an open-source framework to audit the security of IoT devices covering hardware, firmware and communication vulnerabilities. Using existing open-source tools, we formulate a modular approach towards the implementation of the proposed framework. Standout features in the suggested framework are its modular design, extensibility, scalability, tools integration and primarily autonomous nature. The principal focus of the framework is to automate the process of auditing. The paper further mentions some tools that can be incorporated in different modules of the framework. Finally, we validate the feasibility of our framework by auditing an IoT device using proposed toolchain.

Many technological cases exploiting data science have been realized in recent years; machine learning, Internet of Things, and stream data processing are examples of this trend. Other advanced applications have focused on capturing the value from streaming data of different objects of transport and traffic management in an Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). In this context, security control and trust level play a decisive role in the sustainable adoption of this trend. However, conceptual work integrating the security approaches of different disciplines into one coherent reference architecture is limited. The contribution of this paper is a reference architecture for ITS security (called SITS). In addition, a classification of Big Data technologies, products, and services to address the ITS trust challenges is presented. We also proposed a novel multi-tier ITS security framework for validating the usability of SITS with business intelligence development in the enterprise domain.

Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency which acts as an application protocol that works on top of the IP protocol. This paper focuses on distinct Bitcoin security features, including security services, mechanisms, and algorithms. Further, we propose a well-defined security functional architecture to minimize security risks. The security features and requirements of Bitcoin have been structured in layers.

We explore how to build a blind certificate authority (CA). Unlike conventional CAs, which learn the exact identity of those registering a public key, a blind CA can simultaneously validate an identity and provide a certificate binding a public key to it, without ever learning the identity. Blind CAs would therefore allow bootstrapping truly anonymous systems in which no party ever learns who participates. In this work we focus on constructing blind CAs that can bind an email address to a public key. To do so, we first introduce secure channel injection (SCI) protocols. These allow one party (in our setting, the blind CA) to insert a private message into another party's encrypted communications. We construct an efficient SCI protocol for communications delivered over TLS, and use it to realize anonymous proofs of account ownership for SMTP servers. Combined with a zero-knowledge certificate signing protocol, we build the first blind CA that allows Alice to obtain a X.509 certificate binding her email address alice@domain.com to a public key of her choosing without ever revealing “alice” to the CA. We show experimentally that our system works with standard email server implementations as well as Gmail.

In recent years, the application of Bluetooth has always been the highly debated topic among the researches. Through the Bluetooth protocol, Bluetooth can implement the data switching in short distance between various devices. Nevertheless, BlueBorne Attack makes the seemingly stable Bluetooth protocols full of vulnerabilities. Our research will concentrate on predicting the BlueBorne Attack with the following directions: the working mechanism, the working methods and effective range of BlueBorne. Based on the comprehensive review of recent peer-reviewed researches, this project provides a new model based on application layer to solve the security problem of BlueBorne. The paper asserts that compared with the previous research, the unique model has better consequence with highly stability.

Network services are among the riskiest programs executed by production systems. Such services execute large quantities of complex code and process data from arbitrary — and untrusted — network sources, often with high levels of system privilege. It is desirable to confine system services to a least-privileged environment so that the potential damage from a malicious attacker can be limited, but existing mechanisms for sandboxing services require invasive and system-specific code changes and are insufficient to confine broad classes of network services. Rather than sandboxing one service at a time, we propose that the best place to add sandboxing to network services is in the service manager that starts those services. As a first step towards this vision, we propose CapExec, a process supervisor that can execute a single service within a sandbox based on a service declaration file in which, required resources whose limited access to are supported by Caper services, are specified. Using the Capsicum compartmentalization framework and its Casper service framework, CapExec provides robust application sandboxing without requiring any modifications to the application itself. We believe that this is the first step towards ubiquitous sandboxing of network services without the costs of virtualization.

In VANET, vehicles periodically transmit beacon messages to the neighboring vehicles and the RSU. To establish the authenticity of these messages, a number of digital signature schemes have been proposed in literature. Many of these schemes enable an RSU to perform aggregate verification of the signatures to deal with high vehicle density scenarios. These schemes are either based on traditional PKC concept involving certificate management overhead or identity based cryptography having key escrow problem. Further, these schemes require the existence of OBU device which is resistant to side channel attacks. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical trusted authority privacy preserving certificateless aggregate signature scheme for VANET. In addition to providing message authentication, integrity and non-repudiation, our scheme is resistant to message forgeability attack. The proposed scheme assumes hierarchical organization of network such that vehicles operate under multiple trusted authorities (TA) which in turn are controlled by single root TA. Using our scheme, the entity could verify messages received from vehicles which operate under multiple TAs. The proposed scheme is free from key escrow problem and resistant to side channel attacks on OBU. It also possesses conditional linkability such that originator of a message could be revealed whenever required. Simulations confirm the efficient nature in terms of verification delay as compared to other well known schemes proposed in literature.

Adversarial examples that fool machine learning models, particularly deep neural networks, have been a topic of intense research interest, with attacks and defenses being developed in a tight back-and-forth. Most past defenses are best effort and have been shown to be vulnerable to sophisticated attacks. Recently a set of certified defenses have been introduced, which provide guarantees of robustness to norm-bounded attacks. However these defenses either do not scale to large datasets or are limited in the types of models they can support. This paper presents the first certified defense that both scales to large networks and datasets (such as Google's Inception network for ImageNet) and applies broadly to arbitrary model types. Our defense, called PixelDP, is based on a novel connection between robustness against adversarial examples and differential privacy, a cryptographically-inspired privacy formalism, that provides a rigorous, generic, and flexible foundation for defense.

Cross site scripting (XSS) attack is one of the attacks on the web. It brings session hijack with HTTP cookies, information collection with fake HTML input form and phishing with dummy sites. As a countermeasure of XSS attack, machine learning has attracted a lot of attention. There are existing researches in which SVM, Random Forest and SCW are used for the detection of the attack. However, in the researches, there are problems that the size of data set is too small or unbalanced, and that preprocessing method for vectorization of strings causes misclassification. The highest accuracy of the classification was 98% in existing researches. Therefore, in this paper, we improved the preprocessing method for vectorization by using word2vec to find the frequency of appearance and co-occurrence of the words in XSS attack scripts. Moreover, we also used a large data set to decrease the deviation of the data. Furthermore, we evaluated the classification results with two procedures. One is an inappropriate procedure which some researchers tend to select by mistake. The other is an appropriate procedure which can be applied to an attack detection filter in the real environment.

Insider threats are one of the most challenging issues in the world of computer networks. Now a day, most of the companies are relying on cloud services to get scalable data services and to reduce cost. The inclusion of cloud environment has spread the canvas for insider threats because cloud service providers are also there in addition to the organization that outsourced for cloud services. In this paper, multiple existing approaches to handle the insider threats in cloud environment have been investigated and analyzed thoroughly. The comparison of these techniques depicts which better approaches in the paradigm of cloud computing exist.

Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming increasingly important to intelligent transportation system stakeholders, including cloud-based vehicular cloud (VC) and internet of vehicles (IoV) paradigms. This new trend involves communication and data exchange between several objects within different layers of control. Security in such a deployment is pivotal to realize the general IoT-based smart city. However, the evaluation of the degree of security regarding these paradigms remains a challenge. This study aims to discover and identify common security criteria (CSC) from a context-based analysis pattern and later to discuss, compare, and aggregate a conceptual model of CSC impartially. A privacy granularity classification that maintains data confidentiality is proposed alongside the security selection criteria.

In this advanced era, it is important to keep up an abnormal state of security for online exchanges. Public Key cryptography assumes an indispensable job in the field of security. Rivest, Shamir and Adleman (RSA) algorithm is being utilized for quite a long time to give online security. RSA is considered as one of the famous Public Key cryptographic algorithm. Nevertheless, a few fruitful assaults are created to break this algorithm because of specific confinements accepted in its derivation. The algorithm's security is principally founded on the issue of factoring large number. If the process factorization is done then, at that point the entire algorithm can end up fragile. This paper presents a methodology which is more secure than RSA algorithm by doing some modifications in it. Public Key exponent n, which is termed as common modulus replaced by phony modulus to avoid the factorization attack and it is constructed by Mersenne prime numbers to provide more efficiency and security. Paper presents a comparative analysis of the proposed algorithm with the conventional RSA algorithm and Dual RSA.

Vehicular Ad-hoc NETwork (VANET) is a vital transportation technology that facilitates the vehicles to share sensitive information (such as steep-curve warnings and black ice on the road) with each other and with the surrounding infrastructure in real-time to avoid accidents and enable comfortable driving experience.To achieve these goals, VANET requires a secure environment for authentic, reliable and trusted information dissemination among the network entities. However, VANET is prone to different attacks resulting in the dissemination of compromised/false information among network nodes. One way to manage a secure and trusted network is to introduce trust among the vehicular nodes. To this end, various Trust Models (TMs) are developed for VANET and can be broadly categorized into three classes, Entity-oriented Trust Models (ETM), Data oriented Trust Models (DTM) and Hybrid Trust Models (HTM). These TMs evaluate trust based on the received information (data), the vehicle (entity) or both through different mechanisms. In this paper, we present a comparative study of the three TMs. Furthermore, we evaluate these TMs against the different trust, security and quality-of-service related benchmarks. Simulation results revealed that all these TMs have deficiencies in terms of end-to-end delays, event detection probabilities and false positive rates. This study can be used as a guideline for researchers to design new efficient and effective TMs for VANET.

We propose a construction of an attribute-based authentication scheme (ABAuth). Our ABAuth is a challenge-and-response protocol which uses an attribute-based key-encapsulation mechanisum (ABKEM). The ABKEM is basically the one proposed by Ostrovsky-Sahai-Waters (ACM-CCS 2007), but in contrast to the original ABKEM our ABKEM is based on an asymmetric bilinear map for better computational efficiency. We also give a proof of one-way-CCA security of ABKEM in the asymmetric case, which leads to concurrent man-in-the-middle security of ABAuth. We note that the selective security is often enough for the case of authentication in contrast to the case of encryption. Then we evaluate our ABAuth by implementation as well as by discussion. We use the TEPLA library TEPLA for the asymmetric bilinear map that is Type-3 pairing on the BN curve.