Biblio

Phishing attacks are the most common form of attacks that can happen over the internet. This method involves attackers attempting to collect data of a user without his/her consent through emails, URLs, and any other link that leads to a deceptive page where a user is persuaded to commit specific actions that can lead to the successful completion of an attack. These attacks can allow an attacker to collect vital information of the user that can often allow the attacker to impersonate the victim and get things done that only the victim should have been able to do, such as carry out transactions, or message someone else, or simply accessing the victim's data. Many studies have been carried out to discuss possible approaches to prevent such attacks. This research work includes three machine learning algorithms to predict any websites' phishing status. In the experimentation these models are trained using URL based features and attempted to prevent Zero-Day attacks by using proposed software proposal that differentiates the legitimate websites and phishing websites by analyzing the website's URL. From observations, the random forest classifier performed with a precision of 97%, a recall 99%, and F1 Score is 97%. Proposed model is fast and efficient as it only works based on the URL and it does not use other resources for analysis, as was the case for past studies.

Physical Unclonable Function is an innovative hardware security primitives that exploit the physical characteristics of a physical object to generate a unique identifier, which play the role of the object's fingerprint. Silicon PUF, a popular type of PUFs, exploits the variation in the manufacturing process of integrated circuits (ICs). It needs an input called challenge to generate the response as an output. In addition, of classical attacks, PUFs are vulnerable to physical and modeling attacks. The performance of the PUFs is measured by several metrics like reliability, uniqueness and uniformity. So as an evidence, the main goal is to provide a complete tool that checks the strength and quantifies the performance of a given physical unconscionable function. This paper provides a tool and develops a set of metrics that can achieve safely the proposed goal.

The rapid growth of power Internet of Things devices has led to traditional data security sharing mechanisms that are no longer suitable for attribute and permission management of massive devices. In response to this problem, this article proposes a blockchain-based data security sharing mechanism for the power Internet of Things, which reduces the risk of data leakage through decentralization in the architecture and promotes the integration of multiple information and methods.

Recent technological advancements have enabled proliferated use of small embedded and IoT devices for collecting, processing, and transferring the security-critical information and user data. This exponential use has acted as a catalyst in the recent growth of sophisticated attacks such as the replay, man-in-the-middle, and malicious code modification to slink, leak, tweak or exploit the security-critical information in malevolent activities. Therefore, secure communication and software state assurance (at run-time and boot-time) of the device has emerged as open security problems. Furthermore, these devices need to have an appropriate recovery mechanism to bring them back to the known-good operational state. Previous researchers have demonstrated independent methods for attack detection and safeguard. However, the majority of them lack in providing onboard system recovery and secure communication techniques. To bridge this gap, this manuscript proposes SRACARE - a framework that utilizes the custom lightweight, secure communication protocol that performs remote/local attestation, and secure boot with an onboard resilience recovery mechanism to protect the devices from the above-mentioned attacks. The prototype employs an efficient lightweight, low-power 32-bit RISC-V processor, secure communication protocol, code authentication, and resilience engine running on the Artix 7 Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) board. This work presents the performance evaluation and state-of-the-art comparison results, which shows promising resilience to attacks and demonstrate the novel protection mechanism with onboard recovery. The framework achieves these with only 8% performance overhead and a very small increase in hardware-software footprint.

Modern Internet TCP uses Secure Sockets Layers (SSL)/Transport Layer Security (TLS) for secure communication, which relies on Public Key Infrastructure (PKIs) to authenticate public keys. Conventional PKI is done by Certification Authorities (CAs), issuing and storing Digital Certificates, which are public keys of users with the users identity. This leads to centralization of authority with the CAs and the storage of CAs being vulnerable and imposes a security concern. There have been instances in the past where CAs have issued rogue certificates or the CAs have been hacked to issue malicious certificates. Motivated from these facts, in this paper, we propose a method (named as Trustful), which aims to build a decentralized PKI using blockchain. Blockchains provide immutable storage in a decentralized manner and allows us to write smart contracts. Ethereum blockchain can be used to build a web of trust model where users can publish attributes, validate attributes about other users by signing them and creating a trust store of users that they trust. Trustful works on the Web-of-Trust (WoT) model and allows for any entity on the network to verify attributes about any other entity through a trusted network. This provides an alternative to the conventional CA-based identity verification model. The proposed model has been implemented and tested for efficacy and known major security attacks.

The concept behind the Internet of Things (IoT) is taking everything and connecting to the internet so that all devices would be able to send and receive data online. Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is a key component of smart city which is an outcome of IoT. Nowadays the concept of IoT has plaid an important role in our daily life in different sectors like healthcare, agriculture, smart home, wearable, green computing, smart city applications, etc. The emerging IoV is facing a lack of rigor in data processing, limitation of anonymity, privacy, scalability, security challenges. Due to vulnerability IoV devices must face malicious hackers. Nowadays with the help of blockchain (BC) technology energy system become more intelligent, eco-friendly, transparent, energy efficient. This paper highlights two major challenges i.e. scalability and security issues. The flavor of edge computing (EC) considered here to deal with the scalability issue. A BC is a public, shared database that records transactions between two parties that confirms owners through cryptography. After a transaction is validated and cryptographically verified generates “block” on the BC and transactions are ordered chronologically and cannot be altered. Implementing BC and smart contracts technologies will bring security features for IoV. It plays a role to implement the rules and policies to govern the IoV information and transactions and keep them into the BC to secure the data and for future uses.

In today's world computer communication is used almost everywhere and majority of them are connected to the world's largest network, the Internet. There is danger in using internet due to numerous cyber-attacks which are designed to attack Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability of systems connected to the internet. One of the most prominent threats to computer networking is Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attack. They are designed to attack availability of the systems. Many users and ISPs are targeted and affected regularly by these attacks. Even though new protection technologies are continuously proposed, this immense threat continues to grow rapidly. Most of the DDoS attacks are undetectable because they act as legitimate traffic. This situation can be partially overcome by using Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs). There are advanced attacks where there is no proper documented way to detect. In this paper authors present a Machine Learning (ML) based DDoS detection mechanism with improved accuracy and low false positive rates. The proposed approach gives inductions based on signatures previously extracted from samples of network traffic. Authors perform the experiments using four distinct benchmark datasets, four machine learning algorithms to address four of the most harmful DDoS attack vectors. Authors achieved maximum accuracy and compared the results with other applicable machine learning algorithms.

A successful application of an Internet of Things (IoT) based network depends on the accurate and successful delivery of a large amount of data collected from numerous sources. However, the highly dynamic nature of IoT network prevents the establishment of clear security perimeters and hampers the understanding of security aspects. Risk assessment in such networks requires good situational awareness with respect to security. Therefore, a comprehensive view of data propagation including information on security controls can improve security analysis and risk assessment in each layer of data propagation in an IoT architecture. Documentation of metadata is already used in data provenance to identify who generates which data, how, and when. However, documentation of security information is not seen as relevant for data provenance graphs. In this paper, we discuss the importance of adding security metadata in a data provenance graph. We propose a novel IoT Provenance model, Prov-IoT, which documents the history of data records considering data processing and aggregation along with security metadata to enable a foundation for trust in data. The model portrays a comprehensive framework and outlines the identification of information to be included in designing a security-aware provenance graph. This can be beneficial for uncovering system fault or intrusion. Also, it can be useful for decision-based systems for security analysis and risk estimation. We design an associated class diagram for the Prov-IoT model. Finally, we use an IoT healthcare example scenario to demonstrate the impact of the proposed model.

Over the last few years, there has been an increasing number of studies about facial emotion recognition because of the importance and the impact that it has in the interaction of humans with computers. With the growing number of challenging datasets, the application of deep learning techniques have all become necessary. In this paper, we study the challenges of Emotion Recognition Datasets and we also try different parameters and architectures of the Conventional Neural Networks (CNNs) in order to detect the seven emotions in human faces, such as: anger, fear, disgust, contempt, happiness, sadness and surprise. We have chosen iCV MEFED (Multi-Emotion Facial Expression Dataset) as the main dataset for our study, which is relatively new, interesting and very challenging.

This paper presents a new algorithm for image encryption by extending the Knight's Tour Problem (KTP). The idea behind the proposed algorithm is to generate a Knight Tour (KT) matrix (m,n) and then divide the image according to the size of knight tour matrix into several sub matrices. Finally, apply n-neighborhood addition modulo encryption algorithm according to the solution of KT matrix over each m × n partition of the image. The proposed algorithm provides image encryption without using the cover images. Results obtained from experiments have shown that the proposed algorithm is efficient, simple and does not disclose any information from encrypted image.

With the introduction of Cloud computing, a new era of computing has begun. Cloud has the ability to provide flexible, cost effective pay-as-you-go service. In the modern day computing, outsourcing of data/multimedia into the cloud has become an effective trend as cloud provides storage as a service, platform/software as a service, infrastructure as a service etc. Seamless exchange of data /multimedia is made possible ensuring the data available anytime, anywhere. Even though cloud based services offer many advantages, data owners are still hesitant to keep their data with the third party. Confidentiality, Integrity, Privacy and Non-repudiation are the major concerns of the outsourced data. To secure the data exchange between users and the cloud, many traditional security approaches are proposed. In this paper, a hybrid encryption technique to secure the images is proposed. The scheme uses Elliptic Curve Cryptography to generate the secret key, which in turn used for DES and AES algorithms.

In the past few years, the malware industry has been thriving. Malware variants among the same malware family shared similar behavioural patterns or signatures reflecting their purpose. We propose an approach that combines support vector machine (SVM) classifiers and active learning by learning (ALBL) techniques to deal with insufficient labeled data in terms of the malware classification tasks. The proposed approach is evaluated with the malware family dataset from Microsoft Malware Classification Challenge (BIG 2015) on Kaggle. The results show that ALBL techniques can effectively boost the performance of our machine learning models and improve the quality of labeled samples.

Science DMZs are specialized networks that enable large-scale distributed scientific research, providing efficient and guaranteed performance while transferring large amounts of data at high rates. The high-speed performance of a Science DMZ is made viable via data transfer nodes (DTNs), therefore they are a critical point of failure. DTNs are usually monitored with network intrusion detection systems (NIDS). However, NIDS do not consider system performance data, such as network I/O interrupts and context switches, which can also be useful in revealing anomalous system performance potentially arising due to external network based attacks or insider attacks. In this paper, we demonstrate how system performance metrics can be applied towards securing a DTN in a Science DMZ network. Specifically, we evaluate the effectiveness of system performance data in detecting TCP-SYN flood attacks on a DTN using DBSCAN (a density-based clustering algorithm) for anomaly detection. Our results demonstrate that system interrupts and context switches can be used to successfully detect TCP-SYN floods, suggesting that system performance data could be effective in detecting a variety of attacks not easily detected through network monitoring alone.

In Named Data Networking (NDN) architectures, a content object is located according to the content's identifier and can be retrieved from all nodes that hold a replica of the content. The default forwarding strategy of NDN is to forward an Interest packet along the default path from the requester to the server to find a content object according to its name prefix. However, the best path may not be the default path, since content might also be located nearby. Hence, the default strategy could result in a sub-optimal delivery efficiency. To address this issue we introduce a vicinity-based replica finding scheme. This is based on the observation that content objects might be requested several times. Therefore, replicas can be often cached within a particular neighbourhood and thus it might be efficient to specifically look for them in order to improve the content delivery performance. Within this paper, we evaluate the optimal size of the vicinity within which content should be located (i.e. the distance between the requester and its neighbours that are considered within the content search). We also compare the proposed scheme with the default NDN forwarding strategy with respect to replica finding efficiency and network overhead. Using the proposed scheme, we demonstrate that the replica finding mechanism reduces the delivery time effectively with acceptable overhead costs.

Expressing Keystroke Dynamics (KD) in form of sound opens new avenues to apply sound analysis techniques on KD. However this mapping is not straight-forward as varied feature space, differences in magnitudes of features and human interpretability of the music bring in complexities. We present a musical interface to KD by mapping keystroke features to music features. Music elements like melody, harmony, rhythm, pitch and tempo are varied with respect to the magnitude of their corresponding keystroke features. A pitch embedding technique makes the music discernible among users. Using the data from 30 users, who typed fixed strings multiple times on a desktop, shows that these auditory signals are distinguishable between users by both standard classifiers (SVM, Random Forests and Naive Bayes) and humans alike.

Safety and security of complex critical infrastructures is very important for economic, environmental and social reasons. The interdisciplinary and inter-system dependencies within these infrastructures introduce difficulties in the safety and security design. Late discovery of safety and security design weaknesses can lead to increased costs, additional system complexity, ineffective mitigation measures and delays to the deployment of the systems. Traditionally, safety and security assessments are handled using different methods and tools, although some concepts are very similar, by specialized experts in different disciplines and are performed at different system design life-cycle phases.The methodology proposed in this paper supports a concurrent safety and security Defense in Depth (DiD) assessment at an early design phase and it is designed to handle safety and security at a high level and not focus on specific practical technologies. It is assumed that regardless of the perceived level of security defenses in place, a determined (motivated, capable and/or well-funded) attacker can find a way to penetrate a layer of defense. While traditional security research focuses on removing vulnerabilities and increasing the difficulty to exploit weaknesses, our higher-level approach focuses on how the attacker's reach can be limited and to increase the system's capability for detection, identification, mitigation and tracking. The proposed method can assess basic safety and security DiD design principles like Redundancy, Physical separation, Functional isolation, Facility functions, Diversity, Defense lines/Facility and Computer Security zones, Safety classes/Security Levels, Safety divisions and physical gates/conduits (as defined by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and international standards) concurrently and provide early feedback to the system engineer. A prototype tool is developed that can parse the exported project file of the interdisciplinary model. Based on a set of safety and security attributes, the tool is able to assess aspects of the safety and security DiD capabilities of the design. Its results can be used to identify errors, improve the design and cut costs before a formal human expert inspection. The tool is demonstrated on a case study of an early conceptual design of a complex system of a nuclear power plant.

The development of control systems of increased reliability is highly relevant due to their widespread introduction in various sectors of human activity, including those where failure of the control system can lead to serious or catastrophic consequences. The increase of the reliability of control systems is directly related with the reliability of control computers (so called intellectual centers) since the computer technology is the basis of modern control systems. One of the possible solutions to the development of highly reliable control computers is the practical implementation of the provisions of the theory of structural stability, which involves the practical solution of two main tasks - this is the task of functional adaptation and the preceding task of functional diagnostics. This article deals with the issues on the assessment of computational complexity of the implementation of the adaptation process of structural and sustainable control computer. The criteria of computational complexity are the characteristics of additionally attracted resources, such as the temporal characteristics of the adaptation process and the characteristics of the involved amount of memory resources of the control computer involved in the implementation of the adaptation process algorithms.

In this article, the writers suggested a scheme for analyzing the optimum crop cultivation based on Fuzzy Logic Network (Implementation of Fuzzy Logic Control in Predictive Analysis and Real Time Monitoring of Optimum Crop Cultivation) knowledge. The Fuzzy system is Fuzzy Logic's set. By using the soil, temperature, sunshine, precipitation and altitude value, the scheme can calculate the output of a certain crop. By using this scheme, the writers hope farmers can boost f arm output. This, thus will have an enormous effect on alleviating economical deficiency, strengthening rate of employment, the improvement of human resources and food security.

Development in the area of quantum technologies led to the appearance of first quantum computers. The threat of using a quantum computer for cryptanalysis requires wide implementing post-quantum security in computing algorithms and communication protocols. We evaluate the computational power of some existing quantum computers to illustrate the relevance of research in post-quantum security. One of the best ways to test post-quantum protocols is to embed them into some non-critical but widely-used sphere. Secure messaging is an excellent example of such an application. In the paper, we analyze the post-quantum security of well-known messaging specification Signal, which is considered to have high-security properties. The core of Signal specification is the Double Ratchet protocol. We notice and explain why it is not a post-quantum secure scheme. After that, we suggest some possible ways to improve the security features of Signal specification.

In this paper, Reversible data hiding using difference statistics technique incorporating QR codes was proposed. Here, Quick Response (QR) codes were employed as an additional feature and were hidden in the corners of the original image to direct to the hyperlink after authentication and then embedding the secret data bits was carried out. At the receiver side, when the QR codes were scanned by the user, the link to the webpage was accessed, and then the original image and the secret data bits were recovered by using the proposed reversible data hiding scheme. In the proposed scheme, the pixels of the cover image were scanned in row-major order fashion, and the differences between the adjacent pixels were computed, keeping the first pixel unaltered to maintain the size of the host and the difference image same. Now, the histogram was shifted towards the right or left to reduce the redundancy and then to embed the secret data bits were done. Due to the similarity exists between the pixel values, the difference between the host and the secret image reconstructs the marked image. The proposed scheme was carried out using MATLAB 2013. PSNR (Peak Signal to Noise Ratio) and payload have been computed for various test images to validate the proposed scheme and found to be better than the available literature.

Summary & Conclusions: The work described addresses assurance of a planning and execution software system being added to an in-orbit CubeSat to demonstrate autonomous control of that spacecraft. Our focus was on how to develop assurance of the correct operation of the added software in its operational context, our approach to which was to use an assurance case to guide and organize the information involved. The relatively manageable magnitude of the CubeSat and its autonomy demonstration experiment made it plausible to try out our assurance approach in a relatively short timeframe. Additionally, the time was ripe to inject useful assurance results into the ongoing development and testing of the autonomy demonstration. In conducting this, we sought to answer several questions about our assurance approach. The questions, and the conclusions we reached, are as follows: 1. Question: Would our approach to assurance apply to the introduction of a planning and execution software into an existing system? Conclusion: Yes. The use of an assurance case helped focus our attention on the more challenging aspects, notably the interactions between the added software and the existing software system into which it was being introduced. This guided us to choose a hazard analysis method specifically for software interactions. In addition, we were able to automate generation of assurance case elements from the hazard analysis' tabular representation. 2. Question: Would our methods prove understandable to the software engineers tasked with integrating the software into the CubeSat's existing system? Conclusion: Somewhat. In interim discussions with the software engineers we found the assurance case style, of decomposing an argument into smaller pieces, to be useful and understandable to organize discussion. Ultimately however we did not persuade them to adopt assurance cases as the means to present review information. We attribute this to reluctance to deviate from JPL's tried and true style of holding reviews. For the CubeSat project as a whole, hosting an autonomy demonstration was already a novelty. Combining this with presentation of review information via an assurance case, with which our reviewers would be unaccustomed, would have exacerbated the unfamiliarity. 3. Question: Would conducting our methods prove to be compatible with the (limited) time available of the software engineers? Conclusion: Yes. We used a series of six brief meetings (approximately one hour each) with the development team to first identify the interactions as the area on which to focus, and to then perform the hazard analysis on those interactions. We used the meetings to confirm, or correct as necessary, our understanding of the software system and the spacecraft context. Between meetings we studied the existing software documentation, did preliminary analyses by ourselves, and documented the results in a concise form suitable for discussion with the team. 4. Question: Would our methods yield useful results to the software engineers? Conclusion: Yes. The hazard analysis systematically confirmed existing hazards' mitigations, and drew attention to a mitigation whose implementation needed particular care. In some cases, the analysis identified potential hazards - and what to do about them - should some of the more sophisticated capabilities of the planning and execution software be used. These capabilities, not exercised in the initial experiments on the CubeSat, may be used in future experiments. We remain involved with the developers as they prepare for these future experiments, so our analysis results will be of benefit as these proceed.

We focus on resilience towards covert attacks on Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). We define the new k-steerability and l-monitorability control-theoretic concepts. k-steerability reflects the ability to act on every individual plant state variable with at least k different groups of functionally diverse input signals. l-monitorability indicates the ability to monitor every individual plant state variable with £ different groups of functionally diverse output signals. A CPS with k-steerability and l-monitorability is said to be (k, l)-resilient. k and l, when both greater than one, provide the capability to mitigate the impact of covert attacks when some signals, but not all, are compromised. We analyze the influence of k and l on the resilience of a system and the ability to recover its state when attacks are perpetrated. We argue that the values of k and l can be augmented by combining redundancy and diversity in hardware and software techniques that apply the moving target paradigm.

Due to environmental influence and technology limitation, a wireless sensor/sensors module can neither store or process all raw data locally nor reliably forward it to a destination in heterogeneous IoT environment. As a result, the data collected by the IoT's sensors are inherently noisy, unreliable, and may trigger many false alarms. These false or misleading data can lead to wrong decisions once the data reaches end entities. Therefore, it is highly recommended and desirable to acquire trustworthy data before data transmission, aggregation, and data storing at the end entities/cloud. In this paper, we propose an In-network Generalized Trustworthy Data Collection (IGTDC) framework for trustworthy data acquisition and faulty sensor detection in the IoT environment. The key idea of IGTDC is to allow a sensor's module to examine locally whether the raw data is trustworthy before transmitting towards upstream nodes. It further distinguishes whether the acquired data can be trusted or not before data aggregation at the sink/edge node. Besides, IGTDC helps to recognize a faulty or compromised sensor. For a reliable data collection, we use collaborative IoT technique, gate-level modeling, and programmable logic device (PLD) to ensure that the acquired data is reliable before transmitting towards upstream nodes/cloud. We use a hardware-based technique called “Gray Code” to detect a faulty sensor. Through simulations we reveal that the acquired data in IGTDC framework is reliable that can make a trustworthy data collection for event detection, and assist to distinguish a faulty sensor.

The resilient output feedback control of linear networked control (NCS) system with uncertain dynamics in the presence of Gaussian noise is presented under the denial of service (DoS) attacks on communication networks. The DoS attacks on the sensor-to-controller (S-C) and controller- to-actuator (C-A) networks induce random packet losses. The NCS is viewed as a jump linear system, where the linear NCS matrices are a function of induced losses that are considered unknown. A set of novel correlation detectors is introduced to detect packet drops in the network channels using the property of Gaussian noise. By using an augmented system representation, the output feedback Q-learning based control scheme is designed for the jump linear NCS with uncertain dynamics to cope with the changing values of the mean packet losses. Simulation results are included to support the theoretical claims.

With the rapid growth in diversity of PoE-IoT devices and concept of "Edge intelligence", PoE-IoT security and behavior analysis is the major concern. These PoE-IoT devices lack visibility when the entire network infrastructure is taken into account. The IoT devices are prone to have design faults in their security capabilities. The entire network may be put to risk by attacks on vulnerable IoT devices or malware might get introduced into IoT devices even by routine operations such as firmware upgrade. There have been various approaches based on machine learning(ML) to classify PoE-IoT devices based on network traffic characteristics such as Deep Packet Inspection(DPI). In this paper, we propose a novel method for PoE-IoT classification where ML algorithm, Decision Tree is used. In addition to classification, this method provides useful insights to the network deployment, based on the deviations detected. These insights can further be used for shaping policies, troubleshooting and behavior analysis of PoE-IoT devices.