Biblio

While cloud-based deep learning benefits for high-accuracy inference, it leads to potential privacy risks when exposing sensitive data to untrusted servers. In this paper, we work on exploring the feasibility of steganography in preserving inference privacy. Specifically, we devise GHOST and GHOST+, two private inference solutions employing steganography to make sensitive images invisible in the inference phase. Motivated by the fact that deep neural networks (DNNs) are inherently vulnerable to adversarial attacks, our main idea is turning this vulnerability into the weapon for data privacy, enabling the DNN to misclassify a stego image into the class of the sensitive image hidden in it. The main difference is that GHOST retrains the DNN into a poisoned network to learn the hidden features of sensitive images, but GHOST+ leverages a generative adversarial network (GAN) to produce adversarial perturbations without altering the DNN. For enhanced privacy and a better computation-communication trade-off, both solutions adopt the edge-cloud collaborative framework. Compared with the previous solutions, this is the first work that successfully integrates steganography and the nature of DNNs to achieve private inference while ensuring high accuracy. Extensive experiments validate that steganography has excellent ability in accuracy-aware privacy protection of deep learning.

Named Data Networking (NDN) has been viewed as a promising future Internet architecture. It requires a new access control scheme to prevent the injection of unauthorized data request. In this paper, an access control supported by information service entity (ACISE) is proposed for NDN networks. A trust entity, named the information service entity (ISE), is deployed in each domain for the registration of the consumer and the edge router. The identity-based cryptography (IBC) is used to generate a private key for the authorized consumer at the ISE and to calculate a signature encapsulated in the Interest packet at the consumer. Therefore, the edge router could support the access control by the signature verification of the Interest packets so that no Interest packet from unauthorized consumer could be forwarded or replied. Moreover, shared keys are negotiated between authorized consumers and their edge routers. The subsequent Interest packets would be verified by the message authentication code (MAC) instead of the signature. The simulation results have shown that the ACISE scheme would achieve a similar response delay to the original NDN scheme when the NDN is under no attacks. However, the ACISE scheme is immune to the cache pollution attacks so that it could maintain a much smaller response delay compared to the other schemes when the NDN network is under the attacks.

On the Internet of Battlefield Things (IoBT), unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) provide significant operational advantages. However, the exploitation of the UAV by an untrustworthy entity might lead to security violations or possibly the destruction of crucial IoBT network functionality. The IoBT system has substantial issues related to data tampering and fabrication through illegal access. This paper proposes the use of an intelligent architecture called IoBT-Net, which is built on a convolution neural network (CNN) and connected with blockchain technology, to identify and trace illicit UAV in the IoBT system. Data storage on the blockchain ledger is protected from unauthorized access, data tampering, and invasions. Conveniently, this paper presents a low complexity and robustly performed CNN called LRCANet to estimate AOA for object localization. The proposed LRCANet is efficiently designed with two core modules, called GFPU and stacks, which are cleverly organized with regular and point convolution layers, a max pool layer, and a ReLU layer associated with residual connectivity. Furthermore, the effectiveness of LRCANET is evaluated by various network and array configurations, RMSE, and compared with the accuracy and complexity of the existing state-of-the-art. Additionally, the implementation of tailored drone-based consensus is evaluated in terms of three major classes and compared with the other existing consensus.

Cooperative Intelligent Transportation System (CITS) has been introduced recently to increase road safety, traffic efficiency, and to enable various infotainment and comfort applications and services. To this end, a bunch technologies have been deployed to maintain and promote ITS. In essence, ITS is composed of vehicles, roadside infrastructure, and the environment that includes pedestrians, and other entities. Recently, several solutions were suggested to handle with the challenges faced by the vehicular networks (VN) using future internet architectures. One of the promising solutions proposed recently is Vehicular Fog computing (VFC), an attractive solution that supports sensitive service requests considering factors such as latency, mobility, localization, and scalability. VFC also provides a virtual platform for real-time big data analytic using servers or vehicles as a fog infrastructure. This paper surveys the general fog computing (FC) concept, the VFC architectures, and the key characteristics of several intelligent computing applications. We mainly focus on trust and security challenges in VFC deployment and real-time BD analytic in vehicular environment. We identify the faced challenges and future research directions in VFC and we highlight the research gap that can be exploited by researchers and vehicular manufactures while designing a new secure VFC architecture.

Physical layer secret key exploits the random but reciprocal channel features between legitimate users to encrypt their data against fiber-tapping. We propose a novel tapping-based eavesdropper scheme, leveraging its tapped signals from legitimate users to reconstruct their common features and the secret key.

With the increasing awareness of privacy protection and data security, people’s concerns over the confidentiality of sensitive data still limit the application of distributed artificial intelligence. In fact, a new encryption form, called homomorphic encryption(HE), has achieved a balance between security and operability. In particular, one of the HE schemes named Paillier has been adopted to protect data privacy in distributed artificial intelligence. However, the massive computation of modular multiplication in Paillier greatly affects the speed of encryption and decryption. In this paper, we propose a fast CRT-Paillier scheme to accelerate its decryption process. We first introduce the Montgomery algorithm to the CRT-Paillier to improve the process of the modular exponentiation, and then compute the modular exponentiation in parallel by using OpenMP. The experimental results show that our proposed scheme has greatly heightened its decryption speed while preserving the same security level. Especially, when the key length is 4096-bit, its speed of decryption is about 148 times faster than CRT-Paillier.

Social networks are considered to be heterogeneous graph neural networks (HGNNs) with deep learning technological advances. HGNNs, compared to homogeneous data, absorb various aspects of information about individuals in the training stage. That means more information has been covered in the learning result, especially sensitive information. However, the privacy-preserving methods on homogeneous graphs only preserve the same type of node attributes or relationships, which cannot effectively work on heterogeneous graphs due to the complexity. To address this issue, we propose a novel heterogeneous graph neural network privacy-preserving method based on a differential privacy mechanism named HeteDP, which provides a double guarantee on graph features and topology. In particular, we first define a new attack scheme to reveal privacy leakage in the heterogeneous graphs. Specifically, we design a two-stage pipeline framework, which includes the privacy-preserving feature encoder and the heterogeneous link reconstructor with gradients perturbation based on differential privacy to tolerate data diversity and against the attack. To better control the noise and promote model performance, we utilize a bi-level optimization pattern to allocate a suitable privacy budget for the above two modules. Our experiments on four public benchmarks show that the HeteDP method is equipped to resist heterogeneous graph privacy leakage with admirable model generalization.

The humidity in the air parameters has an impact on the characteristics of corona discharge, and the magnetic field also affects the electron movement of corona discharge. We build a constant humidity chamber and use a wire-mesh electrode device to study the effects of humidity and magnetic field on the discharge. The enhancement of the discharge by humidity is caused by the combination of water vapor molecules and ions generated by the discharge into hydrated ions. By building a “water flow channel” between the high voltage wire electrode and the ground mesh electrode, the ions can pass more smoothly, thereby enhanced discharge. The ions are subjected to the Lorentz force in the electromagnetic field environment, the motion state of the ions changes, and the larmor motion in the electromagnetic field increases the movement path, the collision between the gas molecules increases, and more charged particles are generated, which increases the discharge current. During the period, the electrons and ions generated by the ionization of the wire electrode leave the ionization zone faster, which reduces the inhibitory effect of the ion aggregation on the discharge and promotes the discharge.

Named in-network computing is an emerging technology of Named Data Networking (NDN). Through deploying the named computing services/functions on NDN router, the router can utilize its free resources to provide nearby computation for users while relieving the pressure of cloud and network edge. Benefitted from the characteristic of named addressing, named computing services/functions can be easily discovered and migrated in the network. To implement named in-network computing, integrating the computing services as Virtual Machines (VMs) into the software router is a feasible way, but how to effectively deploy the service VMs to optimize the local processing capability is still a challenge. Focusing on this problem, we first give the design of NDN-enabled software router in this paper, then propose a service earning based named service deployment scheme (SE-NSD). For available service VMs, SE-NSD not only considers their popularities but further evaluates their service earnings (processed data amount per CPU cycle). Through modelling the deployment problem as the knapsack problem, SE-NSD determines the optimal service VMs deployment scheme. The simulation results show that, comparing with the popularity-based deployment scheme, SE-NSD can promote about 30% in-network computing capability while slightly reducing the service invoking RTT of user.

Childcare, a critical infrastructure, played an important role to create community resiliency during the COVID-19 pandemic. By finding pathways to remain open, or rapidly return to operations, the adaptive capacity of childcare providers to offer care in the face of unprecedented challenges functioned to promote societal level mitigation of the COVID-19 pandemic impacts, to assist families in their personal financial recoveries, and to provide consistent, caring, and meaningful educational experiences for society's youngest members. This paper assesses the operational adaptations of childcare centers as a key resource and critical infrastructure during the COVID-19 pandemic in the Greater Rochester, NY metropolitan region. Our findings evaluate the policy, provider mitigation, and response actions documenting the challenges they faced and the solutions they innovated. Implications for this research extend to climate-induced disruptions, including fires, water shortages, electric grid cyberattacks, and other disruptions where extended stay-at-home orders or service critical interventions are implemented.

Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) is a rapidly growing branch of IoT (Internet of Things), which requires special treatment to cyber security due to confidentiality of healthcare data and patient health threat. Healthcare data and automated medical devices might become vulnerable targets of malicious cyber-attacks. While a large number of robotic applications, including medical and healthcare, employ robot operating system (ROS) as their backbone, not enough attention is paid for ROS security. The paper discusses a security of ROS-based swing doors automation in the context of a robotic hospital framework, which should be protected from cyber-attacks.

This paper presents secure MatDot codes, a family of evaluation codes that support secure distributed matrix multiplication via a careful selection of evaluation points that exploit the properties of the dual code. We show that the secure MatDot codes provide security against the user by using locally recoverable codes. These new codes complement the recently studied discrete Fourier transform codes for distributed matrix multiplication schemes that also provide security against the user. There are scenarios where the associated costs are the same for both families and instances where the secure MatDot codes offer a lower cost. In addition, the secure MatDot code provides an alternative way to handle the matrix multiplication by identifying the fastest servers in advance. In this way, it can determine a product using fewer servers, specified in advance, than the MatDot codes which achieve the optimal recovery threshold for distributed matrix multiplication schemes.

Public key cryptography plays an important role in secure communications over insecure channels. Elliptic curve cryptography, as a variant of public key cryptography, has been extensively used in the last decades for such purposes. In this paper, we present a software tool for parallel generation of cryptographic keys based on elliptic curves. Binary method for point multiplication and C++ threads were used in parallel implementation, while secp256k1 elliptic curve was used for testing. Obtained results show speedup of 30% over the sequential solution for 8 threads. The results are briefly discussed in the paper.

Mid-infrared spectroscopic imaging (MIRSI) is an emerging class of label-free, biochemically quantitative technologies targeting digital histopathology. Conventional histopathology relies on chemical stains that alter tissue color. This approach is qualitative, often making histopathologic examination subjective and difficult to quantify. MIRSI addresses these challenges through quantitative and repeatable imaging that leverages native molecular contrast. Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) imaging, the best-known MIRSI technology, has two challenges that have hindered its widespread adoption: data collection speed and spatial resolution. Recent technological breakthroughs, such as photothermal MIRSI, provide an order of magnitude improvement in spatial resolution. However, this comes at the cost of acquisition speed, which is impractical for clinical tissue samples. This paper introduces an adaptive compressive sampling technique to reduce hyperspectral data acquisition time by an order of magnitude by leveraging spectral and spatial sparsity. This method identifies the most informative spatial and spectral features, integrates a fast tensor completion algorithm to reconstruct megapixel-scale images, and demonstrates speed advantages over FTIR imaging while providing spatial resolutions comparable to new photothermal approaches.

Connected Autonomous Vehicle (CAV) applications have shown the promise of transformative impact on road safety, transportation experience, and sustainability. However, they open large and complex attack surfaces: an adversary can corrupt sensory and communication inputs with catastrophic results. A key challenge in development of security solutions for CAV applications is the lack of effective infrastructure for evaluating such solutions. In this paper, we address the problem by designing an automated, flexible evaluation infrastructure for CAV security solutions. Our tool, CAVELIER, provides an extensible evaluation architecture for CAV security solutions against compromised communication and sensor channels. The tool can be customized for a variety of CAV applications and to target diverse usage models. We illustrate the framework with a number of case studies for security resiliency evaluation in Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC).

Multi-active bridge (MAB) converter has played an important role in the power conversion of renewable-based smart grids, electrical vehicles, and more/all electrical aircraft. However, the increase of MAB submodules greatly complicates the control architecture. In this regard, the conventional centralized control strategies, which rely on a single controller to process all the information, will be limited by the computation burden. To overcome this issue, this paper proposes a decentralized power management strategy for MAB converter. The switching frequencies of MAB submodules are adaptively regulated based on the submodule local information. Through this effort, flexible electrical power routing can be realized without communications among submodules. The proposed methodology not only relieves the computation burden of MAB control system, but also improves its modularity, flexibility, and expandability. Finally, the experiment results of a three-module MAB converter are presented for verification.

Benchmark datasets are heavily depended upon by the research community to validate theoretical findings and track progression in the state-of-the-art. NIDS dataset creation presents numerous challenges on account of the volume, heterogeneity, and complexity of network traffic, making the process labor intensive, and thus, prone to error. This paper provides a critical review of CIC-IDS-2017 and CIC-CSE-IDS-2018, datasets which have seen extensive usage in the NIDS literature, and are currently considered primary benchmarking datasets for NIDS. We report a large number of previously undocumented errors throughout the dataset creation lifecycle, including in attack orchestration, feature generation, documentation, and labeling. The errors destabilize the results and challenge the findings of numerous publications that have relied on it as a benchmark. We demonstrate the implications of these errors through several experiments. We provide comprehensive documentation to summarize the discovery of these issues, as well as a fully-recreated dataset, with labeling logic that has been reverse-engineered, corrected, and made publicly available for the first time. We demonstrate the implications of dataset errors through a series of experiments. The findings serve to remind the research community of common pitfalls with dataset creation processes, and of the need to be vigilant when adopting new datasets. Lastly, we strongly recommend the release of labeling logic for any dataset released, to ensure full transparency.

The development of science and technology has led to the construction of smart cities, and in this scenario, there are many applications that need to provide their real-time location information, which is very likely to cause the leakage of personal location privacy. To address this situation, this paper designs a location privacy protection scheme based on graph anonymity, which is based on the privacy protection idea of K-anonymity, and represents the spatial distribution among APs in the form of a graph model, using the method of finding clustered noisy fingerprint information in the graph model to ensure a similar performance to the real location fingerprint in the localization process, and thus will not be distinguished by the location providers. Experiments show that this scheme can improve the effectiveness of virtual locations and reduce the time cost using greedy strategy, which can effectively protect location privacy.

In this paper, two lightweight cryptography methods were introduced and developed on hardware. The PRESENT lightweight block cipher, and the DM-PRESENT lightweight hash function were implemented on Intel FPGA. The PRESENT core with 64-bit block data and 80-bit data key consumes 2,945 logic element, 1,824 registers, and 273,408 memory bits. Meanwhile, the DM-PRESENT core with 64-bit input and 80-bit key consumes 2,336 logic element, 1,380 registers, and 273,408 memory bits. The PRESENT core with 128-bit key and DM-PRESENT based on this core were also implemented. These cores were simulated for functional verification and embedded in NIOS II for implementation possibility on hardware. They consumed less logic resources and power consumption compared with conventional cryptography methods.

With the development of urbanization, the number of vehicles is gradually increasing, and vehicles are gradually developing in the direction of intelligence. How to ensure that the data of intelligent vehicles is not tampered in the process of transmission to the cloud is the key problem of current research. Therefore, we have established a data security transmission system based on blockchain. First, we collect and filter vehicle data locally, and then use blockchain technology to transmit key data. Through the smart contract, the key data is automatically and accurately transmitted to the surrounding node vehicles, and the vehicles transmit data to each other to form a transaction and spread to the whole network. The node data is verified through the node data consensus protocol of intelligent vehicle data security transmission system, and written into the block to form a blockchain. Finally, the vehicle user can query the transaction record through the vehicle address. The results show that we can safely and accurately transmit and query vehicle data in the blockchain database.

In 2020, Omar and abed proposed a new noise-free fully homomorphic encryption scheme that allows arbitrary computations on encrypted data without decryption. However, they did not provide a sufficient security analysis of the proposed scheme and just stated that it is secure under the integer factorization assumption. In this paper, we present known plaintext attacks on their scheme and illustrate them with toy examples. Our attack algorithms are quite simple: They require several times of greatest common divisor (GCD) computations using only a few pair of message and ciphertext.

With the rapid development of Ethernet, RS (544, 514) (KP4-forward error correction), which was widely used in high-speed Ethernet standards for its good performance-complexity trade-off, may not meet the demands of next-generation Ethernet for higher data transmission speed and better decoding performance. A concatenated code based on KP4-FEC has become a good solution because of its low complexity and excellent compatibility. For concatenated codes, aside from the selection of outer and inner codes, an efficient interleaving scheme is also very critical to deal with different channel conditions. Aiming at burst errors in wired communication, we propose a novel matrix interleaving scheme for concatenated codes which set the outer code as KP4-FEC and the inner code as Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocquenghem (BCH) code. In the proposed scheme, burst errors are evenly distributed to each BCH code as much as possible to improve their overall decoding efficiency. Meanwhile, the bit continuity in each symbol of the RS codeword is guaranteed during transmission, so the number of symbols affected by burst errors is minimized. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed interleaving scheme can achieve a better decoding performance on burst-error channels than the original scheme. In some cases, the extra coding gain at the bit-error-rate (BER) of 1 × 10−15 can even reach 1 dB.

With the rapid development of multimedia and short video, there is a growing concern for video copyright protection. Some work has been proposed to add some copyright or fingerprint information to the video to trace the source of the video when it is stolen and protect video copyright. This paper proposes a video watermarking method based on a deep neural network and curriculum learning for watermarking of sliced videos. The first frame of the segmented video is perturbed by an encoder network, which is invisible and can be distinguished by the decoder network. Our model is trained and tested on an online educational video dataset consisting of 2000 different video clips. Experimental results show that our method can successfully discriminate most watermarked and non-watermarked videos with low visual disturbance, which can be achieved even under a relatively high video compression rate(H.264 video compress with CRF 32).

Using multi-UAV systems to accomplish both civil and military missions is becoming a popular trend. With the development of software and hardware technologies, Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are now able to operate autonomously at edge. However, the remote control of manned systems, e.g., ground control station (GCS), remains essential to mission success, and the system's control and non-payload communication (CNPC) are facing severe cyber threats caused by smart attacks. To avoid hijacking, in this paper, we propose a secure mechanism that reduces such security risks for multi-UAV systems. We introduce friendly jamming from UAVs to block eavesdropping on the remote control channel. The trade-off between security and energy consumption is optimized by three approaches designed for UAV and GCS under algorithms of different complexities. Numerical results show the approach efficiency under different mission conditions and security demands, and demonstrate the features of the proposed mechanism for various scenarios.

The digital transformation brought on by 5G is redefining current models of end-to-end (E2E) connectivity and service reliability to include security-by-design principles necessary to enable 5G to achieve its promise. 5G trustworthiness highlights the importance of embedding security capabilities from the very beginning while the 5G architecture is being defined and standardized. Security requirements need to overlay and permeate through the different layers of 5G systems (physical, network, and application) as well as different parts of an E2E 5G architecture within a risk-management framework that takes into account the evolving security-threats landscape. 5G presents a typical use-case of wireless communication and computer networking convergence, where 5G fundamental building blocks include components such as Software Defined Networks (SDN), Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and the edge cloud. This convergence extends many of the security challenges and opportunities applicable to SDN/NFV and cloud to 5G networks. Thus, 5G security needs to consider additional security requirements (compared to previous generations) such as SDN controller security, hypervisor security, orchestrator security, cloud security, edge security, etc. At the same time, 5G networks offer security improvement opportunities that should be considered. Here, 5G architectural flexibility, programmability and complexity can be harnessed to improve resilience and reliability. The working group scope fundamentally addresses the following: •5G security considerations need to overlay and permeate through the different layers of the 5G systems (physical, network, and application) as well as different parts of an E2E 5G architecture including a risk management framework that takes into account the evolving security threats landscape. •5G exemplifies a use-case of heterogeneous access and computer networking convergence, which extends a unique set of security challenges and opportunities (e.g., related to SDN/NFV and edge cloud, etc.) to 5G networks. Similarly, 5G networks by design offer potential security benefits and opportunities through harnessing the architecture flexibility, programmability and complexity to improve its resilience and reliability. •The IEEE FNI security WG's roadmap framework follows a taxonomic structure, differentiating the 5G functional pillars and corresponding cybersecurity risks. As part of cross collaboration, the security working group will also look into the security issues associated with other roadmap working groups within the IEEE Future Network Initiative.