Biblio

The Industrial Internet of Things is expected to attract significant investments for Industry 4.0. In this new environment, the blockchain has immediate potential in industrial applications, providing unchanging, traceable and auditable access control. However, recent work and present in blockchain literature are based on a cloud infrastructure that requires significant investments. Furthermore, due to the placement and distance of the cloud infrastructure to industrial control devices, such approaches present a communication latency that can compromise the strict deadlines for accessing and communicating with this device. In this context, this article presents a blockchain-based access control architecture, which is deployed directly to edge devices positioned close to devices that need access control. Performance assessments of the proposed approach were carried out in practice in an industrial mining environment. The results of this assessment demonstrate the feasibility of the proposal and its performance compared to cloud-based approaches.

Biometrics as a means of personal authentication has demonstrated strong viability in the past decade. However, directly deriving a unique cryptographic key from biometric data is a non-trivial task due to the fact that biometric data is usually noisy and presents large intra-class variations. Moreover, biometric data is permanently associated with the user, which leads to security and privacy issues. Cancellable biometrics and bio-cryptosystem are two main branches to address those issues, yet both approaches fall short in terms of accuracy performance, security, and privacy. In this paper, we propose a Bio-Crypto system on fingerprint Cancellable template (Bio-CanCrypto), which bridges cancellable biometrics and bio-cryptosystem to achieve a middle-ground for alleviating the limitations of both. Specifically, a cancellable transformation is applied on a fixed-length fingerprint feature vector to generate cancellable templates. Next, an LDPC coding mechanism is introduced into a reusable fuzzy extractor scheme and used to extract the stable cryptographic key from the generated cancellable templates. The proposed system can achieve both cancellability and reusability in one scheme. Experiments are conducted on a public fingerprint dataset, i.e., FVC2002. The results demonstrate that the proposed LDPC coded reusable fuzzy extractor is effective and promising.

Bitcoin is a virtual encrypted digital currency based on a peer-to-peer network. In recent years, for higher anonymity, more and more Bitcoin users try to use Tor hidden services for identity and location hiding. However, previous studies have shown that Tor are vulnerable to traffic fingerprinting attack, which can identify different websites by identifying traffic patterns using statistical features of traffic. Our work shows that traffic fingerprinting attack is also effective for the Bitcoin hidden nodes detection. In this paper, we proposed a novel lightweight Bitcoin hidden service traffic fingerprinting, using a random decision forest classifier with features from TLS packet size and direction. We test our attack on a novel dataset, including a foreground set of Bitcoin hidden node traffic and a background set of different hidden service websites and various Tor applications traffic. We can detect Bitcoin hidden node from different Tor clients and website hidden services with a precision of 0.989 and a recall of 0.987, which is higher than the previous model.

How to analyze users' data without compromising individual privacy is an important issue in cloud computing. In order to protect privacy and enable the cloud to perform computing, users can apply homomorphic encryption schemes to their data. Most of existing homomorphic encryption-based cloud computing methods require that users' data are encrypted with the same key. While in practice, different users may prefer to use different keys. In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving cloud computing method which adopts a double-trapdoor homomorphic encryption scheme to deal with the multi-key issue. The proposed method uses two cloud servers to analyze users' encrypted data. And we propose to use blockchain to monitor the information exchanged between the servers. Security analysis shows that the introduction of blockchain can help to prevent the two servers from colluding with each other, hence data privacy is further enhanced. And we conduct simulations to demonstrate the feasibility of the propose method.

Symbiotic radio (SR) has recently emerged as a promising technology to boost spectrum efficiency of wireless communications by allowing reflective communications underlying the active RF communications. In this paper, we leverage SR to boost physical layer security by using an array of passive reflecting elements constituting the intelligent reflecting surface (IRS), which is reconfigurable to induce diverse RF radiation patterns. In particular, by switching the IRS's phase shifting matrices, we can proactively create dynamic channel conditions, which can be exploited by the transceivers to extract common channel features and thus used to generate secret keys for encrypted data transmissions. As such, we firstly present the design principles for IRS-assisted key generation and verify a performance improvement in terms of the secret key generation rate (KGR). Our analysis reveals that the IRS's random phase shifting may result in a non-uniform channel distribution that limits the KGR. Therefore, to maximize the KGR, we propose both a heuristic scheme and deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to control the switching of the IRS's phase shifting matrices. Simulation results show that the DRL approach for IRS-assisted key generation can significantly improve the KGR.

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.

We study quantum-secure covert-communication over lossy thermal-noise bosonic channels, the quantum mechanical model for many practical channels. We derive the expressions for the covert capacity of these channels: Lno-EA, when Alice and Bob share only a classical secret, and LEA, when they benefit from entanglement assistance. Entanglement assistance alters the fundamental scaling law for covert communication. Instead of Lno-EA$\surd$n-rno-EA(n), rno-EA(n) = o($\surd$n), entanglement assistance allows LEA$\surd$n log n - rEA(n), rEA(n) = o($\surd$n log n), covert bits to be transmitted reliably over n channel uses. However, noise in entanglement storage erases the log n gain from our achievability; work on the matching converse is ongoing.

In integrated gas and electricity energy systems, a catastrophic outage in one system could propagate to other, resulting in severe service interruption like what happened in 2021 Texas Blackout. To alleviate detrimental effects of these events, a coordinated effort must be adopted between integrated energy systems. In this paper, a central situational awareness system (CSAS) is developed to improve the coordination of operational resiliency measures by facilitating information sharing between power distribution systems (PDSs) and natural gas networks (NGNs) during emergency conditions. The CSAS collects operational data of the PDS and the NGN as well as data of upcoming weather condition, extracts the most vulnerable lines and pipelines, and accordingly obtains emergency actions. The emergency actions, i.e., optimal multi-microgrid formation, scheduling of distribution energy resources (DERs), and optimal electrical and gas load shedding plan, are optimized through a coupled graph-based approach with stochastic mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model. In the proposed model, uncertainties of renewable energy resources (RESs) is also considered. Numerical results on an integrated IEEE 33-bus and 30-node NGNs demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed CSAS.

As Edge deployments move closer towards the end devices, low latency communication among Edge aware applications is one of the key tenants of Edge service offerings. In order to simplify application development, service mesh architectures have emerged as the evolutionary architectural paradigms for taking care of bulk of application communication logic such as health checks, circuit breaking, secure communication, resiliency (among others), thereby decoupling application logic with communication infrastructure. The latency to throughput ratio needs to be measurable for high performant deployments at the Edge. Providing benchmark data for various edge deployments with Bare Metal and virtual machine-based scenarios, this paper digs into architectural complexities of deploying service mesh at edge environment, performance impact across north-south and east-west communications in and out of a service mesh leveraging popular open-source service mesh Istio/Envoy using a simple on-prem Kubernetes cluster. The performance results shared indicate performance impact of Kubernetes network stack with Envoy data plane. Microarchitecture analyses indicate bottlenecks in Linux based stacks from a CPU micro-architecture perspective and quantify the high impact of Linux's Iptables rule matching at scale. We conclude with the challenges in multiple areas of profiling and benchmarking requirement and a call to action for deploying a service mesh, in latency sensitive environments at Edge.

This paper proposes a scheme for secure telecommunication based on synchronizing a chaotic Liu system with a nontrivial Lyapunov candidate, which allows for the control signal to act only on one state of the slave system. The proposal has the advantages of being robust against disturbances (internal and external) and simple, which is essential because it leads to significant cost reductions when implemented using analog electronics. A simulation study, which considers the presence of disturbances, is used to validate the theoretical results and show the easy implementation of the proposed approach.

Based on the third generation neural network spiking neural network, this paper optimizes and improves a classification and coding method, and proposes an image recognition method. Firstly, the read image is converted into a spike sequence, and then the spike sequence is encoded in groups and sent to the neurons in the spike neural network. After learning and training for many times, the quantization standard code is obtained. In this process, the spike sequence transformation matrix and dynamic weight matrix are obtained, and the unclassified data are output through the same matrix for image recognition and classification. Simulation results show that the above methods can get correct coding and preliminary recognition classification, and the spiking neural network can be applied.

Cross-Site scripting (XSS) is a common class of vulnerabilities in the domain of web applications. As it re-mains prevalent despite continued efforts by practitioners and researchers, site operators often seek to protect their assets using web application firewalls (WAFs). These systems employ filtering mechanisms to intercept and reject requests that may be suitable to exploit XSS flaws and related vulnerabilities such as SQL injections. However, they generally do not offer complete protection and can often be bypassed using specifically crafted exploits. In this work, we evaluate the effectiveness of WAFs to detect XSS exploits. We develop an attack grammar and use a combinatorial testing approach to generate attack vectors. We compare our vectors with conventional counterparts and their ability to bypass different WAFs. Our results show that the vectors generated with combinatorial testing perform equal or better in almost all cases. They further confirm that most of the rule sets evaluated in this work can be bypassed by at least one of these crafted inputs.

The core looseness fault is an important part of transformer fault. The state of the core can be obtained by analyzing the vibration signal. Vibration analysis method has been used in transformer condition monitoring and fault diagnosis for many years, while different methods produce different results. In order to select the correct method in engineering application, five kinds of joint time-frequency analysis methods, such as short-time Fourier transform, Wigner-Ville distribution, S transform, wavelet transform and empirical mode decomposition are compared, and the advantages and disadvantages of these methods for dealing with the vibration signal of transformer core are analyzed in this paper. It indicates that wavelet transform and empirical mode decomposition have more advantages in the diagnosis of core looseness fault. The conclusions have referential significance for the diagnosis of transformer faults in engineering.

The concepts of information flow security and refinement are known to have had a troubled relationship ever since the seminal work of McLean. In this work we study refinements that support changes in data representation and semantics, including the addition of state variables that may induce new observational power or side channels. We propose a new epistemic approach to ignorance-preserving refinement where an abstract model is used as a specification of a system's permitted information flows, that may include the declassification of secret information. The core idea is to require that refinement steps must not induce observer knowledge that is not already available in the abstract model. Our study is set in the context of a class of shared variable multiagent models similar to interpreted systems in epistemic logic. We demonstrate the expressiveness of our framework through a series of small examples and compare our approach to existing, stricter notions of information-flow secure refinement based on bisimulations and noninterference preservation. Interestingly, noninterference preservation is not supported “out of the box” in our setting, because refinement steps may introduce new secrets that are independent of secrets already present at abstract level. To support verification, we first introduce a “cube-shaped” unwinding condition related to conditions recently studied in the context of value-dependent noninterference, kernel verification, and secure compilation. A fundamental problem with ignorance-preserving refinement, caused by the support for general data and observation refinement, is that sequential composability is lost. We propose a solution based on relational pre-and postconditions and illustrate its use together with unwinding on the oblivious RAM construction of Chung and Pass.

In this paper, we discuss the methodology of generalizing the optimal control law from learned component tasks to unlearned composite tasks on Multi-Agent Systems (MASs), by using the linearity composition principle of linearly solvable optimal control (LSOC) problems. The proposed approach achieves both the compositionality and optimality of control actions simultaneously within the cooperative MAS framework in both discrete and continuous-time in a sample-efficient manner, which reduces the burden of re-computation of the optimal control solutions for the new task on the MASs. We investigate the application of the proposed approach on the MAS with coordination between agents. The experiments show feasible results in investigated scenarios, including both discrete and continuous dynamical systems for task generalization without resampling.

On the basis of analyzing the development and application of virtual reality (VR) technology at home and abroad, and combining with the specific situation of the exhibition hall, this paper establishes an immersive scene roaming system of the exhibition hall. The system is completed by virtual scene modeling technology and virtual roaming interactive technology. The former uses modeling software to establish the basic model in the virtual scene, while the latter uses VR software to enable users to control their own roles to run smoothly in the roaming scene. In interactive roaming, this paper optimizes the A* pathfinding algorithm, uses binary heap to process data, and on this basis, further optimizes the pathfinding algorithm, so that when the pathfinding target is an obstacle, the pathfinder can reach the nearest place to the obstacle. Texture mapping technology, LOD technology and other related technologies are adopted in the modeling, thus finally realizing the immersive scene roaming system of the exhibition hall.

In a cloud data center, the client requests are catered by placing the services in its servers. Such services are deployed through a sandboxing platform to ensure proper isolation among services from different users. Due to the lightweight nature, containers have become increasingly popular to support such sandboxing. However, for supporting effective and efficient data center resource usage with minimum resource footprints, improving the containers' consolidation ratio is significant for the cloud service providers. Towards this end, in this paper, we propose an exciting direction to significantly boost up the consolidation ratio of a data-center environment by effectively managing the containers' states. We observe that many cloud-based application services are event-triggered, so they remain inactive unless some external service request comes. We exploit the fact that the containers remain in an idle state when the underlying service is not active, and thus such idle containers can be checkpointed unless an external service request comes. However, the challenge here is to design an efficient mechanism such that an idle container can be resumed quickly to prevent the loss of the application's quality of service (QoS). We have implemented the system, and the evaluation is performed in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. The experimental results have shown that the proposed algorithm can manage the containers' states, ensuring the increase of consolidation ratio.

Cloud computing is a modern type of service that provides each consumer with a large-scale computing tool. Different cyber-attacks can potentially target cloud computing systems, as most cloud computing systems offer services to so many people who are not known to be trustworthy. Therefore, to protect that Virtual Machine from threats, a cloud computing system must incorporate some security monitoring framework. There is a tradeoff between the security level of the security system and the performance of the system in this scenario. If a strong security is required then a stronger security service using more rules or patterns should be incorporated and then in proportion to the strength of security, it needs much more computing resources. So the amount of resources allocated to customers is decreasing so this research work will introduce a new way of security system in cloud environments to the VM in this research. The main point of Fog computing is to part of the cloud server's work in the ongoing study tells the step-by-step cloud server to change gigantic information measurement because the endeavor apps are relocated to the cloud to keep the framework cost. So the cloud server is devouring and changing huge measures of information step by step so it is rented to keep up the problem and additionally get terrible reactions in a horrible device environment. Cloud computing and Fog computing approaches were combined in this paper to review data movement and safe information about MDHC.

Spin-transfer torque magnetoresistive random-access memories (STT-MRAMs) are gradually superseding conventional SRAMs as last-level cache in System-on-Chip designs. Their manufacturing process includes trimming a reference resistance in STT-MRAM modules to reliably determine the logic values of 0 and 1 during read operations. Typically, an on-chip trimming routine consists of multiple runs of a test algorithm with different settings of a trimming port. It may inherently produce a large number of mismatches. Diagnosis of such a sizeable volume of errors by means of existing memory built-in self-test (MBIST) schemes is either infeasible or a time-consuming and expensive process. In this paper, we propose a new memory fault diagnosis scheme capable of handling STT-MRAM-specific error rates in an efficient manner. It relies on a convolutional reduction of memory outputs and continuous shifting of the resultant data to a tester through a few output channels that are typically available in designs using an on-chip test compression technology, such as the embedded deterministic test. It is shown that processing the STT-MRAM output by using a convolutional compactor is a preferable solution for this type of applications, as it provides a high diagnostic resolution while incurring a low hardware overhead over traditional MBIST logic.

A malware detection model based on semi-supervised learning is proposed in the paper. Our model includes mainly three parts: malware visualization, feature extraction, and classification. Firstly, the malware visualization converts malware into grayscale images; then the features of the images are extracted to reflect the coding patterns of malware; finally, a collaborative learning model is applied to malware detections using both labeled and unlabeled software samples. The proposed model was evaluated based on two commonly used benchmark datasets. The results demonstrated that compared with traditional methods, our model not only reduced the cost of sample labeling but also improved the detection accuracy through incorporating unlabeled samples into the collaborative learning process, thereby achieved higher classification performance.

Mathematical model of web server protection is being proposed based on filtering HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) packets that do not match the semantic parameters of the request standards of this protocol. The model is defined as a graph, and the relationship between the parameters - the sets of vulnerabilities of the corporate network, the methods of attacks and their consequences-is described by the Cartesian product, which provides the correct interpretation of a corporate network cyber attack. To represent the individual stages of simulated attacks, it is possible to separate graph models in order to model more complex attacks based on the existing simplest ones. The unity of the model proposed representation of cyber attack in three variants is shown, namely: graphic, text and formula.

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) also referred as Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) as critical elements, expected to play a key role in Industry 4.0 and always been vulnerable to cyber-attacks and vulnerabilities. Terrorists use cyber vulnerability as weapons for mass destruction. The dark web's strong transparency and hard-to-track systems offer a safe haven for criminal activity. On the dark web (DW), there is a wide variety of illicit material that is posted regularly. For supervised training, large-scale web pages are used in traditional DW categorization. However, new study is being hampered by the impossibility of gathering sufficiently illicit DW material and the time spent manually tagging web pages. We suggest a system for accurately classifying criminal activity on the DW in this article. Rather than depending on the vast DW training package, we used authorized regulatory to various types of illicit activity for training Machine Learning (ML) classifiers and get appreciable categorization results. Espionage, Sabotage, Electrical power grid, Propaganda and Economic disruption are the cyber warfare motivations and We choose appropriate data from the open source links for supervised Learning and run a categorization experiment on the illicit material obtained from the actual DW. The results shows that in the experimental setting, using TF-IDF function extraction and a AdaBoost classifier, we were able to achieve an accuracy of 0.942. Our method enables the researchers and System authoritarian agency to verify if their DW corpus includes such illicit activity depending on the applicable rules of the illicit categories they are interested in, allowing them to identify and track possible illicit websites in real time. Because broad training set and expert-supplied seed keywords are not required, this categorization approach offers another option for defining illicit activities on the DW.

With over 80% of goods transportation in volume carried by sea, ports are key infrastructures within the logistics value chain. To address the challenges of the globalized and competitive economy, ports are digitizing at a fast pace, evolving into smart ports. Consequently, the cyber-resilience of ports is essential to prevent possible disruptions to the economic supply chain. Over the last few years, there has been a significant increase in the number of disclosed cyber-attacks on ports. In this paper, we present the capabilities of a high-end hybrid cyber range for port cyber risks awareness and training. By describing a specific port use-case and the first results achieved, we draw perspectives for the use of cyber ranges for the training of port actors in cyber crisis management.

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.

Nowadays, Denial of Service (DOS) is a significant cyberattack that can happen on the Internet. This attack can be taken place with more than one attacker that in this case called Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS). The attackers endeavour to make the resources (server & bandwidth) unavailable to legitimate traffic by overwhelming resources with malicious traffic. An appropriate security module is needed to discriminate the malicious flows with high accuracy to prevent the failure resulting from a DDOS attack. In this paper, a DDoS attack discriminator will be designed for Software Defined Network (SDN) architecture so that it can be deployed in the POX controller. The simulation results present that the proposed model can achieve an accuracy of about 99.4%which shows an outstanding percentage of improvement compared with Decision Tree (DT), K-Nearest Neighbour (KNN), Support Vector Machine (SVM) approaches.