Biblio

Direct Anonymous Attestation (DAA) is a cryptographic scheme that provides Trusted Platform Module TPM-backed anonymous credentials. We develop Tamarin modelling of the ECC-based version of the protocol as it is standardised and provide the first mechanised analysis of this standard. Our analysis confirms that the scheme is secure when all TPMs are assumed honest, but reveals a break in the protocol's expected authentication and secrecy properties for all TPMs even if only one is compromised. We propose and formally verify a minimal fix to the standard. In addition to developing the first formal analysis of ECC-DAA, the paper contributes to the growing body of work demonstrating the use of formal tools in supporting standardisation processes for cryptographic protocols.

Authentication is achieved by using different techniques, like using smart-card, identity password and biometric techniques. Some of the proposed schemes use a single factor for authentication while others combine multiple ways to provide multi-factor authentication for better security. lately, a new scheme for multi-factor authentication was presented by Cao and Ge and claimed that their scheme is highly secure and can withstand against all known attacks. In this paper, it is revealed that their scheme is still vulnerable and have some loopholes in term of reflection attack. Therefore, an improved scheme is proposed to overcome the security weaknesses of Cao and Ge's scheme. The proposed scheme resists security attacks and secure. Formal testing is carried out under a broadly-accepted simulated tool ProVerif which demonstrates that the proposed scheme is well secure.

The application of deep recurrent networks to audio transcription has led to impressive gains in automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. Many have demonstrated that small adversarial perturbations can fool deep neural networks into incorrectly predicting a specified target with high confidence. Current work on fooling ASR systems have focused on white-box attacks, in which the model architecture and parameters are known. In this paper, we adopt a black-box approach to adversarial generation, combining the approaches of both genetic algorithms and gradient estimation to solve the task. We achieve a 89.25% targeted attack similarity, with 35% targeted attack success rate, after 3000 generations while maintaining 94.6% audio file similarity.

Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) having focused target along with advanced and persistent attacking skills under great concealment is a new trend followed for cyber-attacks. Threat intelligence helps in detecting and preventing APT by collecting a host of data and analyzing malicious behavior through efficient data sharing and guaranteeing the safety and quality of information exchange. For better protection, controlled access to intelligence information and a grading standard to revise the criteria in diagnosis for a security breach is needed. This paper analyses a threat intelligence sharing community model and proposes an improvement to increase the efficiency of sharing by rethinking the size and composition of a sharing community. Based on various external environment variables, it filters the low-quality shared intelligence by grading the trust level of a community member and the quality of a piece of intelligence. We hope that this research can fill in some security gaps to help organizations make a better decision in handling the ever-increasing and continually changing cyber-attacks.

X-ray baggage security screening is a demanding task for aviation and rail transit security; automatic prohibited item detection in X-ray baggage images can help reduce the work of inspectors. However, as many items are placed too close to each other in the baggages, it is difficult to fully trust the detection results of intelligent prohibited item detection algorithms. In this paper, a human-in-the-loop baggage inspection framework is proposed. The proposed framework utilizes the deep-learning-based algorithm for prohibited item detection to find suspicious items in X-ray baggage images, and select manual examination when the detection algorithm cannot determine whether the baggage is dangerous or safe. The advantages of proposed inspection process include: online to capture new sample images for training incrementally prohibited item detection model, and augmented prohibited item detection intelligence with human-computer collaboration. The preliminary experimental results show, human-in-the-loop process by combining cognitive capabilities of human inspector with the intelligent algorithms capabilities, can greatly improve the efficiency of in-baggage security screening.

Cyber attacks against automobiles have increased over the last decade due to the expansion in attack surfaces. This is the result of modern automobiles having connections such as Bluetooth, WiFi, and other broadband services. While there has been numerous proposed solutions in the literature, none have been widely adopted as maintaining real-time message deliverability in the Controller Area Networks (CAN) outweighs proposed security solutions. Through iterative research, we have developed a solution which mitigates an attacker's impact on the CAN bus by using CAN's inherent features of arbitration, error detection and signaling, and fault confinement mechanism. The solution relies on an access controller and message priority thresholds added to the CAN data-link layer. The results provide no time delay for non-malicious traffic and mitigates bus impact of a subverted node attempting to fabricate messages at an unauthorized priority level.

Software Defined Networking (SDN) has emerged as a revolutionary paradigm to manage cloud infrastructure. SDN lacks scalable trust setup and verification mechanism between Data Plane-Control Plane elements, Control Plane elements, and Control Plane-Application Plane. Trust management schemes like Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) used currently in SDN are slow for trust establishment in a larger cloud environment. We propose a distributed trust mechanism - TRUFL to establish and verify trust in SDN. The distributed framework utilizes parallelism in trust management, in effect faster transfer rates and reduced latency compared to centralized trust management. The TRUFL framework scales well with the number of OpenFlow rules when compared to existing research works.

Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) has been popularized in many scenarios such as e-government applications, enterprises, etc. Due to the construction of PKI system of various regions and departments, there formed a lot of isolated PKI management domains, cross-domain authentication has become a problem that cannot ignored, which also has some traditional solutions such as cross-authentication, trust list, etc. However, some issues still exist, which hinder the popularity of unified trust services. For example, lack of unified cross domain standard, the update period of Certificate Revocation List (CRL) is too long, which affects the security of cross-domain authentication. In this paper, we proposed a trust transferring model by using blockchain consensus instead of traditional trusted third party for e-government applications. We exploit how to solve the unified trust service problem of PKI at the national level through consensus and transfer some CA management functions to the blockchain. And we prove the scheme's feasibility from engineering perspective. Besides, the scheme has enough scalability to satisfy trust transfer requirements of multiple PKI systems. Meanwhile, the security and efficiency are also guaranteed compared with traditional solutions.

Mobile cloud computing has the features of resource constraints, openness, and uncertainty which leads to the high uncertainty on its quality of service (QoS) provision and serious security risks. Therefore, when faced with complex service requirements, an efficient and reliable service composition approach is extremely important. In addition, preference learning is also a key factor to improve user experiences. In order to address them, this paper introduces a three-layered trust-enabled service composition model for the mobile cloud computing systems. Based on the fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method, we design a novel and integrated trust management model. Service brokers are equipped with a learning module enabling them to better analyze customers' service preferences, especially in cases when the details of a service request are not totally disclosed. Because traditional methods cannot totally reflect the autonomous collaboration between the mobile cloud entities, a prototype system based on the multi-agent platform JADE is implemented to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed strategies. The experimental results show that our approach improves the transaction success rate and user satisfaction.

The concept of social networking is integrated into Internet of things (IoT) to socialize smart objects by mimicking human behaviors, leading to a new paradigm of Social Internet of Things (SIoT). A crucial problem that needs to be solved is how to establish reliable relationships autonomously among objects, i.e., building trust. This paper focuses on exploring an efficient context-aware trustworthiness inference framework to address this issue. Based on the sociological and psychological principles of trust generation between human beings, the proposed framework divides trust into two types: familiarity trust and similarity trust. The familiarity trust can be calculated by direct trust and recommendation trust, while the similarity trust can be calculated based on external similarity trust and internal similarity trust. We subsequently present concrete methods for the calculation of different trust elements. In particular, we design a kernel-based nonlinear multivariate grey prediction model to predict the direct trust of a specific object, which acts as the core module of the entire framework. Besides, considering the fuzziness and uncertainty in the concept of trust, we introduce the fuzzy logic method to synthesize these trust elements. The experimental results verify the validity of the core module and the resistance to attacks of this framework.

From financial services platforms to social networks to vehicle control, software has come to mediate many activities of daily life. Governing bodies and standards organizations have responded to this trend by creating regulations and standards to address issues such as safety, security and privacy. In this environment, the compliance of software development to standards and regulations has emerged as a key requirement. Compliance claims and arguments are often captured in assurance cases, with linked evidence of compliance. Evidence can come from testcases, verification proofs, human judgement, or a combination of these. That is, we try to build (safety-critical) systems carefully according to well justified methods and articulate these justifications in an assurance case that is ultimately judged by a human. Yet software is deeply rooted in uncertainty making pragmatic assurance more inductive than deductive: most of complex open-world functionality is either not completely specifiable (due to uncertainty) or it is not cost-effective to do so, and deductive verification cannot happen without specification. Inductive assurance, achieved by sampling or testing, is easier but generalization from finite set of examples cannot be formally justified. And of course the recent popularity of constructing software via machine learning only worsens the problem - rather than being specified by predefined requirements, machine-learned components learn existing patterns from the available training data, and make predictions for unseen data when deployed. On the surface, this ability is extremely useful for hard-to specify concepts, e.g., the definition of a pedestrian in a pedestrian detection component of a vehicle. On the other, safety assessment and assurance of such components becomes very challenging. In this talk, I focus on two specific approaches to arguing about safety and security of software under uncertainty. The first one is a framework for managing uncertainty in assurance cases (for "conventional" and "machine-learned" systems) by systematically identifying, assessing and addressing it. The second is recent work on supporting development of requirements for machine-learned components in safety-critical domains.

We initiate an effort to provide a rigorous, holistic and modular security analysis of OpenStack. OpenStack is the prevalent open-source, non-proprietary package for managing cloud services and data centers. It is highly complex and consists of multiple inter-related components which are developed by separate, loosely coordinated groups. All of these properties make the security analysis of OpenStack both a worthy mission and a challenging one. We base our modeling and security analysis in the universally composable (UC) security framework. This allows specifying and proving security in a modular way – a crucial feature when analyzing systems of such magnitude. Our analysis has the following key features: 1) It is user-centric: It stresses the security guarantees given to users of the system in terms of privacy, correctness, and timeliness of the services. 2) It considers the security of OpenStack even when some of the components are compromised. This departs from the traditional design approach of OpenStack, which assumes that all services are fully trusted. 3) It is modular: It formulates security properties for individual components and uses them to prove security properties of the overall system. Specifically, this work concentrates on the high-level structure of OpenStack, leaving the further formalization and more detailed analysis of specific OpenStack services to future work. Specifically, we formulate ideal functionalities that correspond to some of the core OpenStack modules, and then proves security of the overall OpenStack protocol given the ideal components. As demonstrated within, the main challenge in the high-level design is to provide adequately fine-grained scoping of permissions to access dynamically changing system resources. We demonstrate security issues with current mechanisms in case of failure of some components, propose alternative mechanisms, and rigorously prove adequacy of then new mechanisms within our modeling.

Although transport agency has employed desensitization techniques to deal with the privacy information when publicizing vehicle license plate recognition (VLPR) data, the adversaries can still eavesdrop on vehicle trajectories by certain means and further acquire the associated person and vehicle information through background knowledge. In this work, a privacy attacking method by using the desensitized VLPR data is proposed to link the vehicle trajectory. First the road average speed is evaluated by analyzing the changes of traffic flow, which is used to estimate the vehicle's travel time to the next VLPR system. Then the vehicle suspicion list is constructed through the time relevance of neighboring VLPR systems. Finally, since vehicles may have the same features like color, type, etc, the target trajectory will be located by filtering the suspected list by the rule of qualified identifier (QI) attributes and closest time method. Based on the Foshan City's VLPR data, the method is tested and results show that correct vehicle trajectory can be linked, which proves that the current VLPR data publication way has the risk of privacy disclosure. At last, the effects of related parameters on the proposed method are discussed and effective suggestions are made for publicizing VLPR date in the future.

Searchable encryption is a cryptographic primitive that allows users to search for keywords on encrypted data. It allows users to search in archives stored on cloud servers. Among searchable encryption schemes, those supporting multiuser settings are more suitable for daily application scenarios and more practical. However, since the cloud server is semi-trusted, the result set returned by the server is undefined, and most existing multi-user searchable encryption schemes rely heavily on trusted third parties to manage user permission. To address these problems, verifiable multi-user searchable encryption schemes with dynamic management of user search permissions, weak trust on trusted third parties and are desirable. In this paper, we propose such a scheme. Our scheme manages user permission and key distribution without a trusted third party. User search permission and user access permission matrices are generated separately to manage user permissions dynamically. In addition, our scheme can verify the result set returned by the cloud server. We also show that our scheme is index and trapdoor indistinguishable under chosen keyword attacks in the random oracle model. Finally, a detailed comparison experiment is made by using the actual document data set, and the results show that our scheme is efficient and practical.

As a modern power transmission network, smart grid connects abundant terminal devices and plays an important role in our daily life. However, along with its growth are the security threats. Different from the separated environment previously, an adversary nowadays can destroy the power system by attacking its terminal devices. As a result, it's critical to ensure the security and safety of terminal devices. To achieve it, detecting the pre-existing vulnerabilities in the terminal program and enhancing its security, are of great importance and necessity. In this paper, we introduce Cker, a novel vulnerability detection tool for smart grid devices, which generates an program model based on device sources and sets rules to perform model checking. We utilize the static analysis to extract necessary information and build corresponding program models. By further checking the model with pre-defined vulnerability patterns, we achieve security detection and error reporting. The evaluation results demonstrate that our method can effectively detect vulnerabilities in smart devices with an acceptable accuracy and false positive rate. In addition, as Cker is realized by pure python, it can be easily scaled to other platforms.

With the emergence of biometric technology in various applications, such as access control (e.g. mobile lock/unlock), financial transaction (e.g. Alibaba smile-to-pay) and time attendance, the development of biometric system attracts increasingly interest to the developers. Despite a sound biometric system gains the security assurance and great usability, it is a rather challenging task to develop an effective biometric system. For instance, many public available biometric APIs do not provide sufficient instructions / precise documentations on the usage of biometric APIs. Many developers are struggling in implementing these APIs in various tasks. Moreover, quick update on biometric-based algorithms (e.g. feature extraction and matching) may propagate to APIs, which leads to potential confusion to the system developers. Hence, we conduct an empirical study to the problems that the developers currently encountered while implementing the biometric APIs as well as the issues that need to be addressed when developing biometric systems using these APIs. We manually analyzed a total of 500 biometric API-related posts from various online media such as Stack Overflow and Neurotechnology. We reveal that 1) most of the problems encountered are related to the lack of precise documentation on the biometric APIs; 2) the incompatibility of biometric APIs cross multiple implementation environments.

Data dropouts in communication network can have a significant impact on wide-area oscillation damping control of a smart power grid with large-scale deployment of distributed and networked phasor measurement units and wind energy resources. Remote feedback signals sent through communication channels encounter data dropout, which is represented by the Gilbert-Elliott model. An observer-driven reduced copy (ORC) approach is presented, which uses the knowledge of the nominal system dynamics during data dropouts to improve the damping performance where conventional feedback would suffer. An expression for the expectation of the bound on the error norm between the actual and the estimated states relating uncertainties in the cyber system due to data dropout and physical system due to change in operating conditions is also derived. The key contribution comes from the analytical derivation of the impact of coupling between the cyber and the physical layer on ORC performance. Monte Carlo simulation is performed to calculate the dispersion of the error bound. Nonlinear time-domain simulations demonstrate that the ORC produces significantly better performance compared to conventional feedback under higher data drop situations.

The mobile ad-hoc networks comprised of nodes that are communicated through dynamic request and also by static table driven technique. The dynamic route discovery in AODV routing creates an unsecure transmission as well as reception. The reason for insecurity is the route request is given to all the nodes in the network communication. The possibility of the intruder nodes are more in the case of dynamic route request. Wormhole attacks in MANETs are creating challenges in the field of network analysis. In this paper the wormhole scenario is realized using high power transmission. This is implemented using energy model of ns2 simulator. The Apptool simulator identifies the energy level of each node and track the node of high transmission power. The performance curves for throughput, node energy for different encrypted values, packet drop ratio, and end to end delay are plotted.

Mobile payment has drawn considerable attention due to its convenience of paying via personal mobile devices at anytime and anywhere, and passcodes (i.e., PINs or patterns) are the first choice of most consumers to authorize the payment. This paper demonstrates a serious security breach and aims to raise the awareness of the public that the passcodes for authorizing transactions in mobile payments can be leaked by exploiting the embedded sensors in wearable devices (e.g., smartwatches). We present a passcode inference system, WristSpy, which examines to what extent the user's PIN/pattern during the mobile payment could be revealed from a single wrist-worn wearable device under different passcode input scenarios involving either two hands or a single hand. In particular, WristSpy has the capability to accurately reconstruct fine-grained hand movement trajectories and infer PINs/patterns when mobile and wearable devices are on two hands through building a Euclidean distance-based model and developing a training-free parallel PIN/pattern inference algorithm. When both devices are on the same single hand, a highly challenging case, WristSpy extracts multi-dimensional features by capturing the dynamics of minute hand vibrations and performs machine-learning based classification to identify PIN entries. Extensive experiments with 15 volunteers and 1600 passcode inputs demonstrate that an adversary is able to recover a user's PIN/pattern with up to 92% success rate within 5 tries under various input scenarios.

The burgeoning Internet of Things (IoT) has offered unprecedented opportunities for innovations and applications that are continuously changing our life. At the same time, the large amount of pervasive IoT applications have posed paramount threats to the user's security and privacy. While a lot of efforts have been dedicated to deal with such threats from the hardware, the software, and the applications, in this paper, we argue and envision that more effective and comprehensive protection for IoT systems can only be achieved via a cross-layer approach. As such, we present our initial design of XLF, a cross-layer framework towards this goal. XLF can secure the IoT systems not only from each individual layer of device, network, and service, but also through the information aggregation and correlation of different layers.

A key challenge of the embedded era is to ensure trust in reuse of intellectual properties (IPs), which facilitates reduction of design cost and meeting of stringent marketing deadlines. Determining source of the IPs or their authenticity is a key metric to facilitate safe reuse of IPs. Though physical unclonable functions solves this problem for application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) IPs, authentication strategies for reconfigurable IPs (RIPs) or IPs of reconfigurable hardware platforms like field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are still in their infancy. Existing authentication techniques for RIPs that relies on verification of proof of authentication (PoA) mark embedded in the RIP by the RIP producers, leak useful clues about the PoA mark. This results in replication and implantation of the PoA mark in fake RIPs. This not only causes loss to authorized second hand RIP users, but also poses risk to the reputation of the RIP producers. We propose a zero knowledge authentication strategy for safe reusing of RIPs. The PoA of an RIP producer is kept secret and verification is carried out based on traversal times from the initial point to several intermediate points of the embedded PoA when the RIPs configure an FPGA. Such delays are user specific and cannot be replicated as these depend on intrinsic properties of the base semiconductor material of the FPGA, which is unique and never same as that of another FPGA. Experimental results validate our proposed mechanism. High strength even for low overhead ISCAS benchmarks, considered as PoA for experimentation depict the prospects of our proposed methodology.

The growing complexity and diversification of cyber-attacks are largely reflected in the increasing sophistication of security appliances, which are often too cumbersome to be run in virtual services and IoT devices. Hence, the design of cyber-security frameworks is today looking at more cooperative models, which collect security-related data from a large set of heterogeneous sources for centralized analysis and correlation.In this paper, we outline a flexible abstraction layer for access to security context. It is conceived to program and gather data from lightweight inspection and enforcement hooks deployed in cloud applications and IoT devices. We also provide a preliminary description of its implementation, by reviewing the main software components and their role.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze all Cloud based Service Models, Continuous Integration, Deployment and Delivery process and propose an Automated Continuous Testing and testing as a service based TestBot and metrics dashboard which will be integrated with all existing automation, bug logging, build management, configuration and test management tools. Recently cloud is being used by organizations to save time, money and efforts required to setup and maintain infrastructure and platform. Continuous Integration and Delivery is in practice nowadays within Agile methodology to give capability of multiple software releases on daily basis and ensuring all the development, test and Production environments could be synched up quickly. In such an agile environment there is need to ramp up testing tools and processes so that overall regression testing including functional, performance and security testing could be done along with build deployments at real time. To support this phenomenon, we researched on Continuous Testing and worked with industry professionals who are involved in architecting, developing and testing the software products. A lot of research has been done towards automating software testing so that testing of software product could be done quickly and overall testing process could be optimized. As part of this paper we have proposed ACT TestBot tool, metrics dashboard and coined 4S quality metrics term to quantify quality of the software product. ACT testbot and metrics dashboard will be integrated with Continuous Integration tools, Bug reporting tools, test management tools and Data Analytics tools to trigger automation scripts, continuously analyze application logs, open defects automatically and generate metrics reports. Defect pattern report will be created to support root cause analysis and to take preventive action.

This paper presents an analytical method for predicting the electromagnetic performance in permanent magnet (PM) machine with the spoke-type rotor (STR) and a proposed hybrid rotor structure (HRS), respectively. The key of this method is to combine magnetic field analysis model (MFAM) with the magnetic equivalent circuit model. The influence of the irregular PM shape is considered by the segmentation calculation. To obtain the boundary condition in the MFAM, respectively, two equivalent methods on the rotor side are proposed. In the STR, the average flux density of the rotor core outer-surface is calculated to solve the Laplace's equation with considering for the rotor core outer-surface eccentric. In the HRS, based on the Thevenin's theorem, the equivalent parameters of PM remanence BreB and thickness hpme are obtained as a given condition, which can be utilized to compute the air-gap flux density by conventional classic magnetic field analysis model of surface-mounted PMs with air-gap region. Finally, the proposed analytical models are verified by the finite element analysis (FEA) with comparisons of the air-gap flux density, flux linkage, back-EMF and electromagnetic torque, respectively. Furthermore, the performance that the machine with the proposed hybrid structure rotor can improve the torque density as explained.

Wireless sensor networks consist of various sensors that are deployed to monitor the physical world. And many existing security schemes use traditional cryptography theory to protect message content and contextual information. However, we are concerned about location security of nodes. In this paper, we propose an anonymous routing strategy for preserving location privacy (ARPLP), which sets a proxy source node to hide the location of real source node. And the real source node randomly selects several neighbors as receivers until the packets are transmitted to the proxy source. And the proxy source is randomly selected so that the adversary finds it difficult to obtain the location information of the real source node. Meanwhile, our scheme sets a branch area around the sink, which can disturb the adversary by increasing the routing branch. According to the analysis and simulation experiments, our scheme can reduce traffic consumption and communication delay, and improve the security of source node and base station.