Biblio
With the global widespread usage of the Internet, more and more cyber-attacks are being performed. Many of these attacks utilize IP address spoofing. This paper describes IP spoofing attacks and the proposed methods currently available to detect or prevent them. In addition, it presents a statistical analysis of the Hop Count parameter used in our proposed IP spoofing detection algorithm. We propose an algorithm, inspired by the Hop Count Filtering (HCF) technique, that changes the learning phase of HCF to include all the possible available Hop Count values. Compared to the original HCF method and its variants, our proposed method increases the true positive rate by at least 9% and consequently increases the overall accuracy of an intrusion detection system by at least 9%. Our proposed method performs in general better than HCF method and its variants.
Wireless sensor networks offer benefits in several applications but are vulnerable to various security threats, such as eavesdropping and hardware tampering. In order to reach secure communications among nodes, many approaches employ symmetric encryption. Several key management schemes have been proposed in order to establish symmetric keys. The paper presents an innovative key management scheme called random seed distribution with transitory master key, which adopts the random distribution of secret material and a transitory master key used to generate pairwise keys. The proposed approach addresses the main drawbacks of the previous approaches based on these techniques. Moreover, it overperforms the state-of-the-art protocols by providing always a high security level.
This paper discusses strategies for I/O sharing in Multiple Independent Levels of Security (MILS) systems mostly deployed in the special environment of avionic systems. MILS system designs are promising approaches for handling the increasing complexity of functionally integrated systems, where multiple applications run concurrently on the same hardware platform. Such integrated systems, also known as Integrated Modular Avionics (IMA) in the aviation industry, require communication to remote systems located outside of the hosting hardware platform. One possible solution is to provide each partition, the isolated runtime environment of an application, a direct interface to the communication's hardware controller. Nevertheless, this approach requires a special design of the hardware itself. This paper discusses efficient system architectures for I/O sharing in the environment of high-criticality embedded systems and the exemplary analysis of Free scale's proprietary Data Path Acceleration Architecture (DPAA) with respect to generic hardware requirements. Based on this analysis we also discuss the development of possible architectures matching with the MILS approach. Even though the analysis focuses on avionics it is equally applicable to automotive architectures such as Auto SAR.
Data confidentiality can be effectively preserved through encryption. In certain situations, this is inadequate, as users may be coerced into disclosing their decryption keys. Steganographic techniques and deniable encryption algorithms have been devised to hide the very existence of encrypted data. We examine the feasibility and efficacy of deniable encryption for mobile devices. To address obstacles that can compromise plausibly deniable encryption (PDE) in a mobile environment, we design a system called Mobiflage. Mobiflage enables PDE on mobile devices by hiding encrypted volumes within random data in a devices free storage space. We leverage lessons learned from deniable encryption in the desktop environment, and design new countermeasures for threats specific to mobile systems. We provide two implementations for the Android OS, to assess the feasibility and performance of Mobiflage on different hardware profiles. MF-SD is designed for use on devices with FAT32 removable SD cards. Our MF-MTP variant supports devices that instead share a single internal partition for both apps and user accessible data. MF-MTP leverages certain Ext4 file system mechanisms and uses an adjusted data-block allocator. These new techniques for soring hidden volumes in Ext4 file systems can also be applied to other file systems to enable deniable encryption for desktop OSes and other mobile platforms.
The evolution of electrical grids, both in terms of enhanced ICT functionalities to improve efficiency, reliability and economics, as well as the increasing penetration of renewable redistributed energy resources, results in a more sophisticated electrical infrastructure which poses new challenges from several perspectives, including resilience and quality of service analysis. In addition, the presence of interdependencies, which more and more characterize critical infrastructures (including the power sector), exacerbates the need for advanced analysis approaches, to be possibly employed since the early phases of the system design, to identify vulnerabilities and appropriate countermeasures. In this paper, we outline an approach to model and analyze smart grids and discuss the major challenges to be addressed in stochastic model-based analysis to account for the peculiarities of the involved system elements. Representation of dynamic and flexible behavior of generators and loads, as well as representation of the complex ICT control functions required to preserve and/or re-establish electrical equilibrium in presence of changes need to be faced to assess suitable indicators of the resilience and quality of service of the smart grid.
In the security protocols of Efficient Mesh Security Association(EMSA), the key updating strategy is an effective method to ensure the security of communication. For the existing strategy of periodic automatic key updating, the PTK(Pairwise Transit Key) is updated through the complex 4-way handshake to produce each time. Once the update frequency of the PTK is faster, it will have a greater impact on throughput and delay of the network. On this basis, we propose a new strategy of dynamic key updating to ensure the safety and performance of wireless mesh networks. In the new strategy, mesh point(MP) and mesh authenticator(MA) negotiate a random function at the initial certification, and use the PTK which is generated by the 4-way handshake as the initial seed. When the PTK updating cycle comes, both sides generate the new keys using the random function, which do not have to generate a new PTK by complex 4-way handshake. The analysis of performance compared with existing strategies showed that the dynamic key updating strategy proposed in this paper have a larger increase in delay and throughput of the network.
Conventional cellular systems are dimensioned according to a worst case scenario, and they are designed to ensure ubiquitous coverage with an always-present wireless channel irrespective of the spatial and temporal demand of service. A more energy conscious approach will require an adaptive system with a minimum amount of overhead that is available at all locations and all times but becomes functional only when needed. This approach suggests a new clean slate system architecture with a logical separation between the ability to establish availability of the network and the ability to provide functionality or service. Focusing on the physical layer frame of such an architecture, this paper discusses and formulates the overhead reduction that can be achieved in next generation cellular systems as compared with the Long Term Evolution (LTE). Considering channel estimation as a performance metric whilst conforming to time and frequency constraints of pilots spacing, we show that the overhead gain does not come at the expense of performance degradation.
As recently shown in 2013, Android-driven smartphones and tablet PCs are vulnerable to so-called cold boot attacks. With physical access to an Android device, forensic memory dumps can be acquired with tools like FROST that exploit the remanence effect of DRAM to read out what is left in memory after a short reboot. While FROST can in some configurations be deployed to break full disk encryption, encrypted user partitions are usually wiped during a cold boot attack, such that a post-mortem analysis of main memory remains the only source of digital evidence. Therefore, we provide an in-depth analysis of Android's memory structures for system and application level memory. To leverage FROST in the digital investigation process of Android cases, we provide open-source Volatility plugins to support an automated analysis and extraction of selected Dalvik VM memory structures.
This paper proposes an analysis method of power grids vulnerability based on complex networks. The method effectively combines the degree and betweenness of nodes or lines into a new index. Through combination of the two indexes, the new index can help to analyze the vulnerability of power grids. Attacking the line of the new index can obtain a smaller size of the largest cluster and global efficiency than that of the pure degree index or betweenness index. Finally, the fault simulation results of IEEE 118 bus system show that the new index can reveal the vulnerability of power grids more effectively.
Secure data communication is the most important and essential issue in the area of message transmission over the networks. Cryptography provides the way of making secure message for confidential message transfer. Cryptography is the process of transforming the sender's message to a secret format called cipher text that only intended receiver will get understand the meaning of the secret message. There are various cryptographic or DNA based encoding algorithms have been proposed in order to make secret message for communication. But all these proposed DNA based encryption algorithms are not secure enough to provide better security as compared with the today's security requirement. In this paper, we have proposed a technique of encryption that will enhance the message security. In this proposed algorithm, a new method of DNA based encryption with a strong key of 256 bit is used. Along with this big size key various other encoding tools are used as key in the encoding process of the message like random series of DNA bases, modified DNA bases coding. Moreover a new method of round key selection is also given in this paper to provide better security in the message. The cipher text contains the extra bit of information as similar with the DNA strands that will provide better and enhanced security against intruder's attack.
Online social networks are attracting billions of nowadays, both on a global scale as well as in social enterprise networks. Using distributed hash tables and peer-to-peer technology allows online social networks to be operated securely and efficiently only by using the resources of the user devices, thus alleviating censorship or data misuse by a single network operator. In this paper, we address the challenges that arise in implementing reliably and conveniently to use distributed data structures, such as lists or sets, in such a distributed hash-table-based online social network. We present a secure, distributed list data structure that manages the list entries in several buckets in the distributed hash table. The list entries are authenticated, integrity is maintained and access control for single users and also groups is integrated. The approach for secure distributed lists is also applied for prefix trees and sets, and implemented and evaluated in a peer-to-peer framework for social networks. Evaluation shows that the distributed data structure is convenient and efficient to use and that the requirements on security hold.
In recent years, there has been a huge trend towards running network intensive applications, such as Internet servers and Cloud-based service in virtual environment, where multiple virtual machines (VMs) running on the same machine share the machine's physical and network resources. In such environment, the virtual machine monitor (VMM) virtualizes the machine's resources in terms of CPU, memory, storage, network and I/O devices to allow multiple operating systems running in different VMs to operate and access the network concurrently. A key feature of virtualization is live migration (LM) that allows transfer of virtual machine from one physical server to another without interrupting the services running in virtual machine. Live migration facilitates workload balancing, fault tolerance, online system maintenance, consolidation of virtual machines etc. However, live migration is still in an early stage of implementation and its security is yet to be evaluated. The security concern of live migration is a major factor for its adoption by the IT industry. Therefore, this paper uses the X.805 security standard to investigate attacks on live virtual machine migration. The analysis highlights the main source of threats and suggests approaches to tackle them. The paper also surveys and compares different proposals in the literature to secure the live migration.
A routing protocol in a mobile ad hoc network (MANET) should be secure against both the outside attackers which do not hold valid security credentials and the inside attackers which are the compromised nodes in the network. The outside attackers can be prevented with the help of an efficient key management protocol and cryptography. However, to prevent inside attackers, it should be accompanied with an intrusion detection system (IDS). In this paper, we propose a novel secure routing with an integrated localized key management (SR-LKM) protocol, which is aimed to prevent both inside and outside attackers. The localized key management mechanism is not dependent on any routing protocol. Thus, unlike many other existing schemes, the protocol does not suffer from the key management - secure routing interdependency problem. The key management mechanism is lightweight as it optimizes the use of public key cryptography with the help of a novel neighbor based handshaking and Least Common Multiple (LCM) based broadcast key distribution mechanism. The protocol is storage scalable and its efficiency is confirmed by the results obtained from simulation experiments.
A system implementing real-time situational awareness through discovery, prevention, detection, response, audit, and management capabilities is seen as central to facilitating the protection of critical infrastructure systems. The effectiveness of providing such awareness technologies for electrical distribution companies is being evaluated in a series of field trials: (i) Substation Intrusion Detection / Prevention System (IDPS) and (ii) Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) System. These trials will help create a realistic case study on the effectiveness of such technologies with the view of forming a framework for critical infrastructure cyber security defense systems of the future.
Today, cloud networking which is the ability to connect the user with his cloud services and to interconnect these services within an inter-cloud approach, is one of the recent research areas in the cloud computing research communities. The main drawback of cloud networking consists in the lack of Quality of Service (QoS) guarantee and management in conformance with a corresponding Service Level Agreement (SLA). Several research works have been proposed for the SLA establishing in cloud computing, but not in cloud networking. In this paper, we propose an architecture for self-establishing an end-to-end service level agreement between a Cloud Service User (CSU) and a Cloud Service Provider (CSP) in a cloud networking environment. We focus on QoS parameters for NaaS and IaaS services. The architecture ensures a self-establishing of the proposed SLA using autonomic cloud managers.
Due to the development of cloud computing and NoSQL database, more and more sensitive information are stored in NoSQL databases, which exposes quite a lot security vulnerabilities. This paper discusses security features of MongoDB database and proposes a transparent middleware implementation. The analysis of experiment results show that this transparent middleware can efficiently encrypt sensitive data specified by users on a dataset level. Existing application systems do not need too many modifications in order to apply this middleware.
Anonymous communications are important for many of the applications of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) deployed in adversary environments. A major requirement on the network is the ability to provide unidentifiability and unlinkability for mobile nodes and their traffic. Although a number of anonymous secure routing protocols have been proposed, the requirement is not fully satisfied. The existing protocols are vulnerable to the attacks of fake routing packets or denial-of-service broadcasting, even the node identities are protected by pseudonyms. In this paper, we propose a new routing protocol, i.e., authenticated anonymous secure routing (AASR), to satisfy the requirement and defend against the attacks. More specifically, the route request packets are authenticated by a group signature, to defend against potential active attacks without unveiling the node identities. The key-encrypted onion routing with a route secret verification message is designed to prevent intermediate nodes from inferring a real destination. Simulation results have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed AASR protocol with improved performance as compared with the existing protocols.
Mobile social networks (MSNs) facilitate connections between mobile users and allow them to find other potential users who have similar interests through mobile devices, communicate with them, and benefit from their information. As MSNs are distributed public virtual social spaces, the available information may not be trustworthy to all. Therefore, mobile users are often at risk since they may not have any prior knowledge about others who are socially connected. To address this problem, trust inference plays a critical role for establishing social links between mobile users in MSNs. Taking into account the nonsemantical representation of trust between users of the existing trust models in social networks, this paper proposes a new fuzzy inference mechanism, namely MobiFuzzyTrust, for inferring trust semantically from one mobile user to another that may not be directly connected in the trust graph of MSNs. First, a mobile context including an intersection of prestige of users, location, time, and social context is constructed. Second, a mobile context aware trust model is devised to evaluate the trust value between two mobile users efficiently. Finally, the fuzzy linguistic technique is used to express the trust between two mobile users and enhance the human's understanding of trust. Real-world mobile dataset is adopted to evaluate the performance of the MobiFuzzyTrust inference mechanism. The experimental results demonstrate that MobiFuzzyTrust can efficiently infer trust with a high precision.
The traditional Kerberos protocol exists some limitations in achieving clock synchronization and storing key, meanwhile, it is vulnerable from password guessing attack and attacks caused by malicious software. In this paper, a new authentication scheme is proposed for wireless mesh network. By utilizing public key encryption techniques, the security of the proposed scheme is enhanced. Besides, timestamp in the traditional protocol is replaced by random numbers to implementation cost. The analysis shows that the improved authentication protocol is fit for wireless Mesh network, which can make identity authentication more secure and efficient.
The distinctive features of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), including dynamic topology and open wireless medium, may lead to MANETs suffering from many security vulnerabilities. In this paper, using recent advances in uncertain reasoning that originated from the artificial intelligence community, we propose a unified trust management scheme that enhances the security in MANETs. In the proposed trust management scheme, the trust model has two components: trust from direct observation and trust from indirect observation. With direct observation from an observer node, the trust value is derived using Bayesian inference, which is a type of uncertain reasoning when the full probability model can be defined. On the other hand, with indirect observation, which is also called secondhand information that is obtained from neighbor nodes of the observer node, the trust value is derived using the Dempster-Shafer theory (DST), which is another type of uncertain reasoning when the proposition of interest can be derived by an indirect method. By combining these two components in the trust model, we can obtain more accurate trust values of the observed nodes in MANETs. We then evaluate our scheme under the scenario of MANET routing. Extensive simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. Specifically, throughput and packet delivery ratio (PDR) can be improved significantly with slightly increased average end-to-end delay and overhead of messages.
Electric vehicle is the automobile that powered by electrical energy stored in batteries. Due to the frequent recharging, vehicles need to be connected to the recharging infrastructure while they are parked. This may disclose drivers' privacy, such as their location that drivers may want to keep secret. In this paper, we propose a scheme to enhance the privacy of the drivers using anonymous credential technique and Trusted Platform Module(TPM). We use anonymous credential technique to achieve the anonymity of vehicles such that drivers can anonymously and unlinkably recharge their vehicles. We add some attributes to the credential such as the type of the battery in the vehicle in case that the prices of different batteries are different. We use TPM to omit a blacklist such that the company that offer the recharging service(Energy Provider Company, EPC) does not need to conduct a double spending detection.
Security is a major challenge preventing wide deployment of the smart grid technology. Typically, the classical power grid is protected with a set of isolated security tools applied to individual grid components and layers ignoring their cross-layer interaction. Such an approach does not address the smart grid security requirements because usually intricate attacks are cross-layer exploiting multiple vulnerabilities at various grid layers and domains. We advance a conceptual layering model of the smart grid and a high-level overview of a security framework, termed CyNetPhy, towards enabling cross-layer security of the smart grid. CyNetPhy tightly integrates and coordinates between three interrelated, and highly cooperative real-time security systems crossing section various layers of the grid cyber and physical domains to simultaneously address the grid's operational and security requirements. In this article, we present in detail the physical security layer (PSL) in CyNetPhy. We describe an attack scenario raising the emerging hardware Trojan threat in process control systems (PCSes) and its novel PSL resolution leveraging the model predictive control principles. Initial simulation results illustrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the PSL.
Random numbers represent one of the most sensible part of a cryptographic system, since the cryptographic keys must be entirely based on them. The security of a communication relies on the key that had been established between two users. If an attacker is able to deduce that key, the communication is compromised. This is why key generation must completely rely on random number generators, so that nobody can deduce the. This paper will describe a set of public and free Random Number Generators (RNG) within Android-based Smartphones by exploiting different sensors, along with the way of achieving this scope. Moreover, this paper will present some conclusive tests and results over them.