Biblio

The article describes an analytical model of the actions of an information security violator for the secret extraction of confidential information processed on the protected object in terms of the theory of Markov random processes. The characteristics of the existing models are given, as well as the requirements that are imposed on the model for simulating the process. All model states are described in detail, as well as the data flow that is used in the process simulation. The model is represented as a directed state graph. It also describes the option for evaluating the data obtained during modeling. In the modern world, with the developing methods and means of covert extraction of information, the problem of assessing the damage that can be caused by the theft of the organization's data is acute. This model can be used to build a model of information security threats.

The popularity of cryptocurrencies has garnered interest from cybercriminals, spurring an onslaught of cryptojacking campaigns that aim to hijack computational resources for the purpose of mining cryptocurrencies. In this paper, we present a cross-stack cryptojacking defense system that spans the hardware and OS layers. Unlike prior work that is confined to detecting cryptojacking behavior within web browsers, our solution is application agnostic. We show that tracking instructions that are frequently used in cryptographic hash functions serve as reliable signatures for fingerprinting cryptojacking activity. We demonstrate that our solution is resilient to multi-threaded and throttling evasion techniques that are commonly employed by cryptojacking malware. We characterize the robustness of our solution by extensively testing a diverse set of workloads that include real consumer applications. Finally, an evaluation of our proof-of-concept implementation shows minimal performance impact while running a mix of benchmark applications.

Unforeseen situations on the shopfloor cause the assembly process to divert from its expected progress. To be able to overcome these deviations in a timely manner, assembly process monitoring and early deviation detection are necessary. However, legal regulations and union policies often limit the direct monitoring of human-intensive assembly processes. Grounded in an industry use case, this paper outlines a novel approach that, based on indirect privacy-respecting monitored data from the shopfloor, enables the near real-time detection of multiple types of process deviations. In doing so, this paper specifically addresses uncertainties stemming from indirect shopfloor observations and how to reason in their presence.

Capability machines such as CHERI provide memory capabilities that can be used by compilers to provide security benefits for compiled code (e.g., memory safety). The existing C to CHERI compiler, for example, achieves memory safety by following a principle called “pointers as capabilities” (PAC). Informally, PAC says that a compiler should represent a source language pointer as a machine code capability. But the security properties of PAC compilers are not yet well understood. We show that memory safety is only one aspect, and that PAC compilers can provide significant additional security guarantees for partial programs: the compiler can provide security guarantees for a compilation unit, even if that compilation unit is later linked to attacker-provided machine code.As such, this paper is the first to study the security of PAC compilers for partial programs formally. We prove for a model of such a compiler that it is fully abstract. The proof uses a novel proof technique (dubbed TrICL, read trickle), which should be of broad interest because it reuses the whole-program compiler correctness relation for full abstraction, thus saving work. We also implement our scheme for C on CHERI, show that we can compile legacy C code with minimal changes, and show that the performance overhead of compiled code is roughly proportional to the number of cross-compilation-unit function calls.

A text is a meaningful source of information. Capturing the right patterns in written text gives metrics to measure and infer to what extent this text belongs or is relevant to a specific author. This research aims to introduce a new feature that goes more in deep in the language structure. The feature introduced is based on an attempt to differentiate stylistic changes among authors according to the different sentence structure each author uses. The study showed the effect of introducing this new feature to machine learning models to enhance their performance. It was found that the prediction of authors was enhanced by adding sentence structure as an additional feature as the f1\_scores increased by 0.3% and when normalizing the data and adding the feature it increased by 5%.

Vulnerability analysis is an integral part of an overall security program. Through identifying known security flaws and weaknesses, vulnerability identification tools help security practitioners to remediate the existing vulnerabilities on the networks. Thus, it is crucial that the results of such tools are complete, accurate, timely and they produce vulnerability results with minimum or no side-effects on the networks. To achieve these goals, Active Vulnerability Scanning (AVS) or Passive Vulnerability Detection (PVD) approaches can be used by network-based vulnerability scanners. In this work, we evaluate these two approaches with respect to efficiency and effectiveness. For the effectiveness analysis, we compare these two approaches empirically on a test environment and evaluate their outcomes. According to total amount of accuracy and precision, the PVD results are higher than AVS. As a result of our analysis, we conclude that PVD returns more complete and accurate results with considerably shorter scanning periods and with no side-effects on networks, compared to the AVS.

Testing or defending the security of a large network can be challenging because of the sheer number of potential ingress points that need to be investigated and evaluated for vulnerabilities. In short, manual security testing and analysis do not easily scale to large networks. While it has been shown that clustering can simplify the problem somewhat, the data structures and formats returned by the latest network mapping tools are not conducive to clustering algorithms. In this paper we introduce a hybrid similarity algorithm to compute the distance between two network services and then use those calculations to support a clustering algorithm designed to compress a large network attack surface by orders of magnitude. Doing so allows for new testing strategies that incorporate outlier detection and smart consolidation of test cases to improve accuracy and timeliness of testing. We conclude by presenting two case studies using an organization's network attack surface data to demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach.

Cloud computing is attracting a lot of attention in the past few years. Although, even with its wide acceptance, cloud security is still one of the most essential concerns of cloud computing. Many systems have been proposed to protect the cloud from attacks using attack signatures. Most of them may seem effective and efficient; however, there are many drawbacks such as the attack detection performance and the system maintenance. Recently, learning-based methods for security applications have been proposed for cloud anomaly detection especially with the advents of machine learning techniques. However, most researchers do not consider the attack classification which is an important parameter for proposing an appropriate countermeasure for each attack type. In this paper, we propose a new firewall model called Secure Packet Classifier (SPC) for cloud anomalies detection and classification. The proposed model is constructed based on collaborative filtering using two machine learning algorithms to gain the advantages of both learning schemes. This strategy increases the learning performance and the system's accuracy. To generate our results, a publicly available dataset is used for training and testing the performance of the proposed SPC. Our results show that the accuracy of the SPC model increases the detection accuracy by 20% compared to the existing machine learning algorithms while keeping a high attack detection rate.

In this paper, we propose a functional model for the implementation of devices that use the Internet of Things (IoT). In recent years, the number of devices connected to the internet per person has increased from 0.08 in 2003 to a total of 6.58 in 2020, suggesting an increase of 8,225% in 7 years. The proposal includes a functional IoT model of a cybersecurity architecture by including components to ensure compliance with the proposed controls within a cybersecurity framework to detect cyber threats in IoT-based wearable devices. The proposal focuses on reducing the number of vulnerabilities present in IoT devices since, on average, 57% of these devices are vulnerable to attacks. The model has a 3-layer structure: business, applications, and technology, where components such as policies, services and nodes are described accordingly. The validation was done through a simulated environment of a system for the control and monitoring of pregnant women using wearable devices. The results show reductions of the probability index and the impact of risks by 14.95% and 6.81% respectively.

Cyber-attacks toward cyber-physical systems are one of the main concerns of smart grid's operators. However, many of these cyber-attacks, are toward unmanned substations where the cyber-attackers needs to be close enough to substation to malfunction protection and control systems in substations, using Electromagnetic signals. Therefore, in this paper, a new threat detection algorithm is proposed to prevent possible cyber-attacks toward unmanned substations. Using surveillance camera's streams and based on You Only Look Once (YOLO) V3, suspicious objects in the image are detected. Then, using Intersection over Union (IOU) and Generalized Intersection Over Union (GIOU), threat distance is estimated. Finally, the estimated threats are categorized into three categories using color codes red, orange and green. The deep network used for detection consists of 106 convolutional layers and three output prediction with different resolutions for different distances. The pre-trained network is transferred from Darknet-53 weights trained on 80 classes.

Attack surface detection for the complex software is needed to find targets for the fuzzing, because testing the whole system with many inputs is not realistic. Researchers that previously applied taint analysis for dealing with different security tasks in the virtual machines did not examined how to apply it for attack surface detection. I.e., getting the program modules and functions, that may be affected by input data. We propose using taint tracking within a virtual machine and virtual machine introspection to create a new approach that can detect the internal module interfaces that can be fuzz tested to assure that software is safe or find the vulnerabilities.

The rapid progress experienced in the Internet of Things (IoT) space is one that has introduced new and unique challenges for cybersecurity and IoT-Forensics. One of these problems is how digital forensics and incident response (DFIR) are handled in IoT. Since enormous users use IoT platforms to accomplish their day to day task, massive amounts of data streams are transferred with limited hardware resources; conducting DFIR needs a new approach to mitigate digital evidence and incident response challenges owing to the facts that there are no unified standard or classified principles for IoT forensics. Today's IoT DFIR relies on self-defined best practices and experiences. Given these challenges, IoT-related incidents need a more structured approach in identifying problems of DFIR. In this paper, we examined the major DFIR challenges in IoT by exploring the different phases involved in a DFIR when responding to IoT-related incidents. This study aims to provide researchers and practitioners a road-map that will help improve the standards of IoT security and DFIR.

Trust is vital to promoting human and robot collaboration, but like human teammates, robots make mistakes that undermine trust. As a result, a human’s perception of his or her robot teammate’s trustworthiness can dramatically decrease [1], [2], [3], [4]. Trustworthiness consists of three distinct dimensions: ability (i.e. competency), benevolence (i.e. concern for the trustor) and integrity (i.e. honesty) [5], [6]. Taken together, decreases in trustworthiness decreases trust in the robot [7]. To address this, we conducted a 2 (high vs. low anthropomorphism) x 4 (trust repair strategies) between-subjects experiment. Preliminary results of the first 164 participants (between 19 and 24 per cell) highlight which repair strategies are effective relative to ability, integrity and benevolence and the robot’s anthropomorphism. Overall, this paper contributes to the HRI trust repair literature.

Federated Identity Management (FIM) is a model of identity management in which different trusted organizations can provide secure online services to their uses. Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) is one of the widely-used technologies for FIM. However, a SAML-based FIM has two significant issues: the metadata (a crucial component in SAML) has security issues, and federation management is hard to scale. The concept of dynamic identity federation has been introduced, enabling previously unknown entities to join in a new federation facilitating inter-organization service provisioning to address federation management's scalability issue. However, the existing dynamic federation approaches have security issues concerning confidentiality, integrity, authenticity, and transparency. In this paper, we present the idea of facilitating dynamic identity federations utilizing blockchain technology to improve the existing approaches' security issues. We demonstrate its architecture based on a rigorous threat model and requirement analysis. We also discuss its implementation details, current protocol flows and analyze its performance to underline its applicability.

The increasing penetration of cyber systems into smart grids has resulted in these grids being more vulnerable to cyber physical attacks. The central challenge of higher order cyber-physical contingency analysis is the exponential blow-up of the attack surface due to a large number of attack vectors. This gives rise to computational challenges in devising efficient attack mitigation strategies. However, a system operator can leverage private information about the underlying network to maintain a strategic advantage over an adversary equipped with superior computational capability and situational awareness. In this work, we examine the following scenario: A malicious entity intrudes the cyber-layer of a power network and trips the transmission lines. The objective of the system operator is to deploy security measures in the cyber-layer to minimize the impact of such attacks. Due to budget constraints, the attacker and the system operator have limits on the maximum number of transmission lines they can attack or defend. We model this adversarial interaction as a resource-constrained attacker-defender game. The computational intractability of solving large security games is well known. However, we exploit the approximately modular behaviour of an impact metric known as the disturbance value to arrive at a linear-time algorithm for computing an optimal defense strategy. We validate the efficacy of the proposed strategy against attackers of various capabilities and provide an algorithm for a real-time implementation.

Malicious software (malware) creators are constantly mutating malware files in order to avoid detection, resulting in hundreds of millions of new malware every year. Therefore, most malware files are unlabeled due to the time and cost needed to label them manually. This makes it very challenging to perform malware detection, i.e., deciding whether a file is malware or not, and malware classification, i.e., determining the family of the malware. Most solutions use supervised learning (e.g., ResNet and VGG) whose accuracy degrades significantly with the lack of abundance of labeled data. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a semi-supervised learning model for image-based malware classification. In this model, malware files are represented as grayscale images, and semi-supervised learning is carefully selected to handle the plethora of unlabeled data. Our proposed model is an enhanced version of the ∏-model, which makes it more accurate and consistent. Experiments show that our proposed model outperforms the original ∏-model by 4% in accuracy and three other supervised models by 6% in accuracy especially when the ratio of labeled samples is as low as 20%.

Cloud based cyber physical system (CPS) enables individuals to store and share data collected from both cyberspace and the physical world. This leads to the proliferation of massive data at a user's local site. Since local storage systems can't store and maintain huge data, it is a wise and practical way to outsource such huge data to the cloud. Cloud storage provides scalable storage space to manage data economically and flexibly. However, the integrity of outsourced data is a critical challenge because user's lose control of their data once it's transferred to cloud servers. Several auditing schemes have been put forward based on public key infrastructure (PKI) or identity-based cryptography to verify data integrity. However, “the PKI-based schemes suffer from certificate management problem and identity-based schemes face the key escrow” problem. Therefore, to address these problems, certificateless public auditing schemes have been introduced on the basis of bilinear pairing, which incur high computation overhead, and thus it is not suitable for CPS. To reduce the computation overhead, in this paper, Using elliptic curve cryptography, we propose an efficient pairing-free certificateless public auditing scheme for cloud-based CPS. The proposed scheme is more secure against type I/II/III adversaries and efficient compared to other certificateless based schemes.

Efficient low-power accelerators for Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) largely benefit from quantization and approximation, which are typically applied layer-wise for efficient hardware implementation. In this work, we present a novel strategy for efficient combination of these concepts at a deeper level, which is at each channel or kernel. We first apply layer-wise, low bit-width, linear quantization and truncation-based approximate multipliers to the CNN computation. Then, based on a state-of-the-art resiliency analysis, we are able to apply a kernel-wise approximation and quantization scheme with negligible accuracy losses, without further retraining. Our proposed strategy is implemented in a specialized framework for fast design space exploration. This optimization leads to a boost in estimated power savings of up to 34% in residual CNN architectures for image classification, compared to the base quantized architecture.

Network intrusion detection systems (NIDS) are widely used solutions targeting the security of any network device connected to the Internet and are taking the lead in the battle against intruders. This paper addresses the network security issues by implementing a hardware-based NIDS solution with a Naïve Bayes machine learning (ML) algorithm for classification using NSL Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) dataset. The proposed FPGA implementation of the Naive Bayes classifier focuses on low latency and provides intrusion detection in just 240ns, with accuracy/precision of 70/97%, occupying 1 % of the Virtex7 VC709 FPGA chip area.

In this paper, we propose a novel protocol to represent the human factor on a blockchain environment. Our approach allows single or groups of humans to propose data in blocks which cannot be validated automatically but need human knowledge and collaboration to be validated. Only if human-based consensus on the correctness and trustworthiness of the data is reached, the new block is appended to the blockchain. This human approach significantly extends the possibilities of blockchain applications on data types apart from financial transaction data.

Network Address Translation (NAT) is an address remapping technique placed at the borders of stub domains. It is present in almost all routers and CPEs. Most NAT devices implement Port Address Translation (PAT), which allows the mapping of multiple private IP addresses to one public IP address. Based on port number information, PAT matches the incoming traffic to the corresponding "hidden" client. In an enterprise context, and with the proliferation of unauthorized wired and wireless NAT routers, NAT can be used for re-distributing an Intranet or Internet connection or for deploying hidden devices that are not visible to the enterprise IT or under its oversight, thus causing a problem known as shadow IT. Thus, it is important to detect NAT devices in an intranet to prevent this particular problem. Previous methods in identifying NAT behavior were based on features extracted from traffic traces per flow. In this paper, we propose a method to identify NAT devices using a machine learning approach from aggregated flow features. The approach uses multiple statistical features in addition to source and destination IPs and port numbers, extracted from passively collected traffic data. We also use aggregated features extracted within multiple window sizes and feed them to a machine learning classifier to study the effect of timing on NAT detection. Our approach works completely passively and achieves an accuracy of 96.9% when all features are utilized.

This research presented a digital watermarking scheme using multi-level authentication for protecting QR code images in order to provide security and authenticity. This research focuses on the improved digital watermarking scheme for QR code security that can protect the confidentiality of the information stored in QR code images from the public. Information modification, malicious attack, and copyright violation may occur due to weak security and disclosure pattern of QR code. Digital watermarking can be a solution to reduce QR code imitation and increase QR code security and authenticity. The objectives of this research are to provide QR code image authentication and security, tamper localization, and recovery scheme on QR code images. This research proposed digital watermarking for QR code images based on multi-level authentication with Least Significant Bit (LSB) and SHA-256 hash function. The embedding and extracting watermark utilized region of Interest (ROI) and Region of Non-Interest (RONI) in the spatial domain for improving the depth and width of QR code application in the anti-counterfeiting field. The experiments tested the reversibility and robustness of the proposed scheme after a tempered watermarked QR code image. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme provides multi-level security, withstands tampered attacks and it provided high imperceptibility of QR code image.

The Internet obviously has a major impact on the global economy and human life every day. This boundless use pushes the attack programmers to attack the data frameworks on the Internet. Web attacks influence the reliability of the Internet and its administrations. These attacks are classified as User-to-Root (U2R), Remote-to-Local (R2L), Denial-of-Service (DoS) and Probing (Probe). Subsequently, making sure about web framework security and protecting data are pivotal. The conventional layers of safeguards like antivirus scanners, firewalls and proxies, which are applied to treat the security weaknesses are insufficient. So, Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) are utilized to screen PC and data frameworks for security shortcomings. IDS adds more effectiveness in securing networks against attacks. This paper presents an IDS model based on Deep Learning (DL) with Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) hypothesis. The model has been evaluated on the NSLKDD dataset. It has been trained by Kddtrain+ and tested twice, once using kddtrain+ and the other using kddtest+. The achieved test accuracies are 99.7% and 98.43% with 0.002 and 0.02 wrong alert rates for the two test scenarios, respectively.

The digitalization of safety-critical railroad infrastructure enables new types of attacks. This increases the need to integrate Information Technology (IT) security measures into railroad systems. For that purpose, we rely on a security architecture for a railway object controller which controls field elements that we developed in previous work. Our architecture enables the integration of security mechanisms into a safety-certified railway system. In this paper, we demonstrate the practical feasibility of our architecture by using a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0 and a Multiple Independent Levels of Safety and Security (MILS) Separation Kernel (SK) for our implementation. Our evaluation includes a test bed and shows how certification and homologation can be achieved.

The utilization of Third-party modules is very common nowadays. Hence, combating Hardware Trojans affecting the applications' functionality and data security becomes inevitably essential. This paper focuses on the detection/masking of Hardware Trojans' undesirable effects concerned with spying and information leakage due to the growing care about applications' data confidentiality. It is assumed here that the Trojan-infected system consists mainly of a Microprocessor module (MP) followed by an encryption module and then a Medium Access Control (MAC) module. Also, the system can be application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) based or Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) based. A general solution, including encryption, CRC encoder/decoder, and zero padding modules, is presented to handle such Trojans. Special cases are then discussed carefully to prove that Trojans will be detected/masked with a corresponding overhead that depends on the Trojan's location, and the system's need for encryption. An implementation of the CRC encoder along with the zero padding module is carried out on an Altera Cyclone IV E FPGA to illustrate the extra resource utilization required by such a system, given that it is already using encryption.