Biblio
Hardware Trojan (HT) is one of the well known hardware security issue in research community in last one decade. HT research is mainly focused on HT detection, HT defense and designing novel HT's. HT's are inserted by an adversary for leaking secret data, denial of service attacks etc. Trojan benchmark circuits for processors, cryptography and communication protocols from Trust-hub are widely used in HT research. And power analysis based side channel attacks and designing countermeasures against side channel attacks is a well established research area. Trust-Hub provides a power based side-channel attack promoting Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) HT benchmarks for research. In this work, we analyze the strength of AES HT benchmarks in the presence well known side-channel attack countermeasures. Masking, Random delay insertion and tweaking the operating frequency of clock used in sensitive operations are applied on AES benchmarks. Simulation and power profiling studies confirm that side-channel promoting HT benchmarks are resilient against these selected countermeasures and even in the presence of these countermeasures; an adversary can get the sensitive data by triggering the HT.
Language vector space models (VSMs) have recently proven to be effective across a variety of tasks. In VSMs, each word in a corpus is represented as a real-valued vector. These vectors can be used as features in many applications in machine learning and natural language processing. In this paper, we study the effect of vector space representations in cyber security. In particular, we consider a passive traffic analysis attack (Website Fingerprinting) that threatens users' navigation privacy on the web. By using anonymous communication, Internet users (such as online activists) may wish to hide the destination of web pages they access for different reasons such as avoiding tyrant governments. Traditional website fingerprinting studies collect packets from the users' network and extract features that are used by machine learning techniques to reveal the destination of certain web pages. In this work, we propose the packet to vector (P2V) approach where we model website fingerprinting attack using word vector representations. We show how the suggested model outperforms previous website fingerprinting works.
Drinking water availability is a crucial problem that must be addressed in order to improve the quality of life of individuals living developing nations. Improving water supply availability is important for public health, as it is the third highest risk factor for poor health in developing nations with high mortality rates. This project researched drinking water filtration for areas of Sub-Saharan Africa near existing bodies of water, where the populations are completely reliant on collecting from surface water sources: the most contaminated water source type. Water filtration methods that can be completely created by the consumer would alleviate aid organization dependence in developing nations, put the consumers in control, and improve public health. Filtration processes pass water through a medium that will catch contaminants through physical entrapment or absorption and thus yield a cleaner effluent. When exploring different materials for filtration, removal of contaminants and hydraulic conductivity are the two most important components. Not only does the method have to treat the water, but also it has to do so in a timeframe that is quick enough to produce potable water at a rate that keeps up with everyday needs. Cement is easily accessible in Sub- Saharan regions. Most concrete mixtures are not meant to be pervious, as it is a construction material used for its compressive strength, however, reduced water content in a cement mixture gives it higher permeability. Several different concrete samples of varying thicknesses and water concentrations were created. Bacterial count tests were performed on both pre-filtered and filtered water samples. Concrete filtration does remove bacteria from drinking water, however, the method can still be improved upon.
On-going effective control of insect-scale Flapping-Wing Micro Air Vehicles could be significantly advantaged by active in-flight control adaptation. Previous work demonstrated that in simulated vehicles with wing membrane damage, in-flight recovery of effective vehicle attitude and vehicle position control precision via use of an in-flight adaptive learning oscillator was possible. A significant portion of the most recent approaches to this problem employed an island-of-fitness compact genetic algorithm (ICGA) for oscillator learning. The work presented in this paper provides the details of a domain specific search space reduction approach implemented with existing ICGA and its effect on the in-flight learning time. Further, it will be demonstrated that the proposed search space reduction methodology is effective in producing an error correcting oscillator configuration rapidly, online, while the vehicle is in normal service. The paper will present specific simulation results demonstrating the value of the search space reduction and discussion of future applications of the technique to this problem domain.
During an advanced persistent threat (APT), an attacker group usually establish more than one C&C server and these C&C servers will change their domain names and corresponding IP addresses over time to be unseen by anti-virus software or intrusion prevention systems. For this reason, discovering and catching C&C sites becomes a big challenge in information security. Based on our observations and deductions, a malware tends to contain a fixed user agent string, and the connection behaviors generated by a malware is different from that by a benign service or a normal user. This paper proposed a new method comprising filtering and clustering methods to detect C&C servers with a relatively higher coverage rate. The experiments revealed that the proposed method can successfully detect C&C Servers, and the can provide an important clue for detecting APT.
Advanced Persistent Threat (APT), unlike traditional hacking attempts, carries out specific attacks on a specific target to illegally collect information and data from it. These targeted attacks use special-crafted malware and infrequent activity to avoid detection, so that hackers can retain control over target systems unnoticed for long periods of time. In order to detect these stealthy activities, a large-volume of traffic data generated in a period of time has to be analyzed. We proposed a scalable solution, Ctracer to detect stealthy command and control channel in a large-volume of traffic data. APT uses multiple command and control (C&C) channel and change them frequently to avoid detection, but there are common signatures in those C&C sessions. By identifying common network signature, Ctracer is able to group the C&C sessions. Therefore, we can detect an APT and all the C&C session used in an APT attack. The Ctracer is evaluated in a large enterprise for four months, twenty C&C servers, three APT attacks are reported. After investigated by the enterprise's Security Operations Center (SOC), the forensic report shows that there is specific enterprise targeted APT cases and not ever discovered for over 120 days.
In the era of Cloud and Social Networks, mobile devices exhibit much more powerful abilities for big media data storage and sharing. However, many users are still reluctant to share/store their data via clouds due to the potential leakage of confidential or private information. Although some cloud services provide storage encryption and access protection, privacy risks are still high since the protection is not always adequately conducted from end-to-end. Most customers are aware of the danger of letting data control out of their hands, e.g., Storing them to YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, Google+. Because of substantial practical and business needs, existing cloud services are restricted to the desired formats, e.g., Video and photo, without allowing arbitrary encrypted data. In this paper, we propose a format-compliant end-to-end privacy-preserving scheme for media sharing/storage issues with considerations for big data, clouds, and mobility. To realize efficient encryption for big media data, we jointly achieve format-compliant, compression-independent and correlation-preserving via multi-channel chained solutions under the guideline of Markov cipher. The encryption and decryption process is integrated into an image/video filter via GPU Shader for display-to-display full encryption. The proposed scheme makes big media data sharing/storage safer and easier in the clouds.
Small embedded devices such as microcontrollers have been widely used for identification, authentication, securing and storing confidential information. In all these applications, the security and privacy of the microcontrollers are of crucial importance. To provide strong security to protect data, these devices depend on cryptographic algorithms to ensure confidentiality and integrity of data. Moreover, many algorithms have been proposed, with each one having its strength and weaknesses. This paper presents a Differential Power Analysis(DPA) attack on hardware implementations of Advanced Encryption Standard(AES) running inside a PIC18F2420 microcontroller.
This paper reviews some existing Speech Enhancement techniques and also proposes a new method for enhancing the speech by combining Compressed Sensing and Kalman filter approaches. This approach is based on reconstruction of noisy speech signal using Compressive Sampling Matching Pursuit (CoSaMP) algorithm and further enhanced by Kalman filter. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated and compared with that of the existing techniques in terms of intelligibility and quality measure parameters of speech. The proposed algorithm shows an improved performance compared to Spectral Subtraction, MMSE, Wiener filter, Signal Subspace, Kalman filter in terms of WSS, LLR, SegSNR, SNRloss, PESQ and overall quality.
Security analysts implement various security mechanisms to protect systems from attackers. Even though these mechanisms try to secure systems, a talented attacker may use these same techniques to launch a sophisticated attack. This paper discuss about such an attack called as user account Denial of Service (DoS) where an attacker uses user account lockout features of the application to lockout all user accounts causing an enterprise wide DoS. The attack has being simulated usingastealthy attack mechanism called as Advanced Persistent Threats (APT) using a XMPP based botnet. Through the simulation, researchers discuss about the patterns associated with the attack which can be used to detect the attack in real time and how the attack can be prevented from the perspective of developers, system engineers and security analysts.
Spam Filtering is an adversary application in which data can be purposely employed by humans to attenuate their operation. Statistical spam filters are manifest to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks. To evaluate security issues related to spam filtering numerous machine learning systems are used. For adversary applications some Pattern classification systems are ordinarily used, since these systems are based on classical theory and design approaches do not take into account adversarial settings. Pattern classification system display vulnerabilities (i.e. a weakness that grants an attacker to reduce assurance on system's information) to several potential attacks, allowing adversaries to attenuate their effectiveness. In this paper, security evaluation of spam email using pattern classifier during an attack is addressed which degrade the performance of the system. Additionally a model of the adversary is used that allows defining spam attack scenario.
This paper reports a research work on how to transmit a secured image data using Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) in combination of Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) with low power and high speed. This can have better quality secured image with reduced latency and improved throughput. A combined model of DWT and AES technique help in achieving higher compression ratio and simultaneously it provides high security while transmitting an image over the channels. The lifting scheme algorithm is realized using a single and serialized DT processor to compute up to 3-levels of decomposition for improving speed and security. An ASIC circuit is designed using RTL-GDSII to simulate proposed technique using 65 nm CMOS Technology. The ASIC circuit is implemented on an average area of about 0.76 mm2 and the power consumption is estimated in the range of 10.7-19.7 mW at a frequency of 333 MHz which is faster compared to other similar research work reported.
In this paper, we investigate the performance of multiple-input multiple-output aided coded interleave division multiple access (IDMA) system for secured medical image transmission through wireless communication. We realize the MIMO profile using four transmit antennas at the base station and three receive antennas at the mobile station. We achieve bandwidth efficiency using discrete wavelet transform (DWT). Further we implement Arnold's Cat Map (ACM) encryption algorithm for secured medical transmission. We consider celulas as medical image which is used to differentiate between normal cell and carcinogenic cell. In order to accommodate more users' image, we consider IDMA as accessing scheme. At the mobile station (MS), we employ non-linear minimum mean square error (MMSE) detection algorithm to alleviate the effects of unwanted multiple users image information and multi-stream interference (MSI) in the context of downlink transmission. In particular, we investigate the effects of three types of delay-spread distributions pertaining to Stanford university interim (SUI) channel models for encrypted image transmission of MIMO-IDMA system. From our computer simulation, we reveal that DWT based coded MIMO- IDMA system with ACM provides superior picture quality in the context of DL communication while offering higher spectral efficiency and security.