Biblio

Microgrids' dependency on communication links exposes the control systems to cyber attack threats. In this work, instead of designing reactive defense approaches, a proacitve moving target defense mechanism is proposed for securing microgrid secondary frequency control from denial of service (DoS) attack. The sensor data is transmitted by following a Markov process, not in a deterministic way. This uncertainty will increase the difficulty for attacker's decision making and thus significantly reduce the attack space. As the system parameters are constantly changing, a gain scheduling based secondary frequency controller is designed to sustain the system performance. Case studies of a microgrid with four inverter-based DGs show the proposed moving target mechanism can enhance the resiliency of the microgrid control systems against DoS attacks.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) also known as drones are being used in many applications where they can record or stream videos. One interesting application is the Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) and public safety applications where drones record videos and send them to a control center for further analysis. These videos are shared by various clients such as law enforcement or emergency personnel. In such cases, the recording might include faces of civilians or other sensitive information that might pose privacy concerns. While the video can be encrypted and stored in the cloud that way, it can still be accessed once the keys are exposed to third parties which is completely insecure. To prevent such insecurity, in this paper, we propose proxy re-encryption based sharing scheme to enable third parties to access only limited videos without having the original encryption key. The costly pairing operations in proxy re-encryption are not used to allow rapid access and delivery of the surveillance videos to third parties. The key management is handled by a trusted control center, which acts as the proxy to re-encrypt the data. We implemented and tested the approach in a realistic simulation environment using different resolutions under ns-3. The implementation results and comparisons indicate that there is an acceptable overhead while it can still preserve the privacy of drivers and passengers.

Modern power systems depend on cyber-physical systems to link physical devices and control technologies. A major concern in the implementation of smart power networks is to minimize the risk of data privacy violation (e.g., by adversaries using data poisoning and inference attacks). In this article, we propose a privacy-preserving framework to achieve both privacy and security in smart power networks. The framework includes two main modules: a two-level privacy module and an anomaly detection module. In the two-level privacy module, an enhanced-proof-of-work-technique-based blockchain is designed to verify data integrity and mitigate data poisoning attacks, and a variational autoencoder is simultaneously applied for transforming data into an encoded format for preventing inference attacks. In the anomaly detection module, a long short-term memory deep learning technique is used for training and validating the outputs of the two-level privacy module using two public datasets. The results highlight that the proposed framework can efficiently protect data of smart power networks and discover abnormal behaviors, in comparison to several state-of-the-art techniques.

Human emotion recognition plays a vital role in interpersonal communication and human-machine interaction domain. Emotions are expressed through speech, hand gestures and by the movements of other body parts and through facial expression. Facial emotions are one of the most important factors in human communication that help us to understand, what the other person is trying to communicate. People understand only one-third of the message verbally, and two-third of it is through non-verbal means. There are many face emotion recognition (FER) systems present right now, but in real-life scenarios, they do not perform efficiently. Though there are many which claim to be a near-perfect system and to achieve the results in favourable and optimal conditions. The wide variety of expressions shown by people and the diversity in facial features of different people will not aid in the process of coming up with a system that is definite in nature. Hence developing a reliable system without any flaws showed by the existing systems is a challenging task. This paper aims to build an enhanced system that can analyse the exact facial expression of a user at that particular time and generate the corresponding emotion. Datasets like JAFFE and FER2013 were used for performance analysis. Pre-processing methods like facial landmark and HOG were incorporated into a convolutional neural network (CNN), and this has achieved good accuracy when compared with the already existing models.

Cost-effective and efficient sequencing technologies have resulted in massive genomic data availability. To compute on a large-scale genomic dataset, it is often required to outsource the dataset to the cloud. To protect data confidentiality, data owners encrypt sensitive data before outsourcing. Outsourcing enhances data owners to eliminate the storage management problem. Since genome data is large in volume, secure execution of researchers query is challenging. In this paper, we propose a method to securely perform count query on datasets containing genotype, phenotype, and numeric data. Our method modifies the prefix-tree proposed by Hasan et al. [1] to incorporate numerical data. The proposed method guarantees data privacy, output privacy, and query privacy. We preserve the security through encryption and garbled circuits. For a query of 100 single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNPs) sequence, we achieve query execution time approximately 3.5 minutes in a database of 1500 records. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first proposed secure framework that addresses heterogeneous biomedical data including numeric attributes.

We are answering the question whenever systems with convolutional neural network classifier trained over plain and encrypted data keep the ordering according to accuracy. Our motivation is need for designing convolutional neural network classifiers when data in their plain form are not accessible because of private company policy or sensitive data gathered by police. We propose to use a combination of fully connected autoencoder together with a convolutional neural network classifier. The autoencoder transforms the data info form that allows the convolutional classifier to be trained. We present three experiments that show the ordering of systems over plain and encrypted data. The results show that the systems indeed keep the ordering, and thus a NN designer can select appropriate architecture over encrypted data and later let data owner train or fine-tune the system/CNN classifier on the plain data.

Emerging device-to-device (D2D) communication in 5th generation (5G) mobile communication networks and internet of things (loTs) provides many benefits in improving network capabilities such as energy consumption, communication delay and spectrum efficiency. D2D group communication has the potential for improving group-based services including group games and group discussions. Providing security in D2D group communication is the main challenge to make their wide usage possible. Nevertheless, the issue of security and privacy of D2D group communication has been less addressed in recent research work. In this paper, we propose an authentication and key agreement tree group-based (AKATGB) protocol to realize a secure and anonymous D2D group communication. In our protocol, a group of D2D users are first organized in a tree structure, authenticating each other without disclosing their identities and without any privacy violation. Then, D2D users negotiate to set a common group key for establishing a secure communication among themselves. Security analysis and performance evaluation of the proposed protocol show that it is effective and secure.

Cloud forensics investigates the crime committed over cloud infrastructures like SLA-violations and storage privacy. Cloud storage forensics is the process of recording the history of the creation and operations performed on a cloud data object and investing it. Secure data provenance in the Cloud is crucial for data accountability, forensics, and privacy. Towards this, we present a Cloud-based data provenance framework using Blockchain, which traces data record operations and generates provenance data. Initially, we design a dropbox like application using AWS S3 storage. The application creates a cloud storage application for the students and faculty of the university, thereby making the storage and sharing of work and resources efficient. Later, we design a data provenance mechanism for confidential files of users using Ethereum blockchain. We also evaluate the proposed system using performance parameters like query and transaction latency by varying the load and number of nodes of the blockchain network.

Nowadays, Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) are popularly known as they can reduce traffic and road accidents. These networks need several security requirements, such as anonymity, data authentication, confidentiality, traceability and cancellation of offending users, unlinkability, integrity, undeniability and access control. Authentication of the data and sender are most important security requirements in these networks. So many authentication schemes have been proposed up to now. One of the well-known techniques to provide users authentication in these networks is the authentication based on the smartcard (ASC). In this paper, we propose an ASC scheme that not only provides necessary security requirements such as anonymity, traceability and unlinkability in the VANETs but also is more efficient than the other schemes in the literatures.

This paper describes a novel distributed mobility management (DMM) scheme for the "named-object" information centric network (ICN) architecture in which the routers forward data based on unique identifiers which are dynamically mapped to the current network addresses of a device. The work proposes and evaluates two specific handover schemes namely, hard handoff with rebinding and soft handoff with multihoming intended to provide seamless data transfer with improved throughput during handovers. The evaluation of the proposed handover schemes using system simulation along with proof-of-concept implementation in ORBIT testbed is described. The proposed handoff and scheduling throughput gains are 12.5% and 44% respectively over multiple interfaces when compared to traditional IP network with equal share split scheme. The handover performance with respect to RTT and throughput demonstrate the benefits of clean slate network architecture for beyond 5G networks.

A critical need exists for collaboration and action by government, industry, and academia to address cyber weaknesses or vulnerabilities inherent to embedded or cyber physical systems (CPS). These vulnerabilities are introduced as we leverage technologies, methods, products, and services from the global supply chain throughout a system's lifecycle. As adversaries are exploiting these weaknesses as access points for malicious purposes, solutions for system security and resilience become a priority call for action. The SAE G-32 Cyber Physical Systems Security Committee has been convened to address this complex challenge. The SAE G-32 will take a holistic systems engineering approach to integrate system security considerations to develop a Cyber Physical System Security Framework. This framework is intended to bring together multiple industries and develop a method and common language which will enable us to more effectively, efficiently, and consistently communicate a risk, cost, and performance trade space. The standard will allow System Integrators to make decisions utilizing a common framework and language to develop affordable, trustworthy, resilient, and secure systems.

Industrial control systems (ICSs) are used in various infrastructures and industrial plants for realizing their control operation and ensuring their safety. Concerns about the cybersecurity of industrial control systems have raised due to the increased number of cyber-attack incidents on critical infrastructures in the light of the advancement in the cyber activity of ICSs. Nevertheless, the operation of the industrial control systems is bind to vital aspects in life, which are safety, economy, and security. This paper presents a semi-supervised, hybrid attack detection approach for industrial control systems by combining Isolation Forest and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models. The proposed framework is developed using the normal operational data, and it is composed of a feature extraction model implemented using a One-Dimensional Convolutional Neural Network (1D-CNN) and an isolation forest model for the detection. The two models are trained independently such that the feature extraction model aims to extract useful features from the continuous-time signals that are then used along with the binary actuator signals to train the isolation forest-based detection model. The proposed approach is applied to a down-scaled industrial control system, which is a water treatment plant known as the Secure Water Treatment (SWaT) testbed. The performance of the proposed method is compared with the other works using the same testbed, and it shows an improvement in terms of the detection capability.

This paper deals with novel group-based Authentication and Key Agreement protocol for Internet of Things(IoT) enabled LTE/LTE-A network to overcome the problems of computational overhead, complexity and problem of heterogeneous devices, where other existing methods are lagging behind in attaining security requirements and computational overhead. In this work, two Groups are created among Machine Type Communication Devices (MTCDs) on the basis of device type to reduce complexity and problems of heterogeneous devices. This paper fulfills all the security requirements such as preservation, mutual authentication, confidentiality. Bio-metric authentication has been used to enhance security level of the network. The security and performance analysis have been verified through simulation results. Moreover, the performance of the proposed Novel Group-Based Authentication and key Agreement(AKA) Protocol is analyzed with other existing IoT enabled LTE/LTE-A protocol.

Security preservation is considered as one of the major concerns in this digital world, mainly for performing any online transactions. As the time progress, it witnesses an enormous amount of security threats and stealing different kind of digital information over the online network. In this regard, lots of cryptographic algorithms based on secret key generation techniques have been implemented to boost up the security aspect of network systems that preserve the confidentiality of digital information. Despite this, intelligent intruders are still able to crack the key generation technique, thus stealing the data. In this research article, we propose an innovative approach for generating a pseudo-pseudo-random key sequence that serves as a base for the encryption/decryption process. The key generation process is carried out by extracting the essential features from a facial image and based on the extracted features; a pseudo-random key sequence that acts as a primary entity for the efficient encryption/decryption process is generated. Experimental findings related to the pseudo-random key is validated through chi-square, runs up-down and performs a period of subsequence test. Outcomes of these have subsequently passed in achieving an ideal key.

Development of quality object-oriented software contains security as an integral aspect of that process. During that process, a ceaseless burden on the developers was posed in order to maximize the development and at the same time to reduce the expense and time invested in security. In this paper, the authors analyzed metrics for object-oriented software in order to evaluate and identify the relation between metric value and security of the software. Identification of these relations was achieved by study of software vulnerabilities with code level metrics. By using OWASP classification of vulnerabilities and experimental results, we proved that there was relation between metric values and possible security issues in software. For experimental code analysis, we have developed special software called SOFTMET.

At present, the on-site safety problems of substations and critical power equipment are mainly through inspection methods. Still, manual inspection is difficult, time-consuming, and uninterrupted inspection is not possible. The current safety management is mainly guaranteed by rules and regulations and standardized operating procedures. In the on-site environment, it is very dependent on manual execution and confirmation, and the requirements for safety supervision and operating personnel are relatively high. However, the reliability, the continuity of control and patrol cannot be fully guaranteed, and it is easy to cause security vulnerabilities and cause security accidents due to personnel slackness. In response to this shortcoming, this paper uses edge computing and image processing techniques to discover security risks in time and designs a deep convolution attention mechanism network to perform image processing. Then the network is cropped and compressed so that it can be processed at the edge, and the results are aggregated to the cloud for unified management. A comprehensive security assessment module is designed in the cloud to conduct an overall risk assessment of the results reported by all edges, and give an alarm prompt. The experimental results in the real environment show the effectiveness of this method.

In a previous article [1] we proposed a layered framework to support the assessment of the security risks associated with the use of autonomous vehicles in military operations and determine how to manage these risks appropriately. We established consistent terminology and defined the problem space, while exploring the first layer of the framework, namely risks from the mission assurance perspective. In this paper, we develop the second layer of the framework. This layer focuses on the risk assessment of the vehicles themselves and on producing a highlevel security design adequate for the mission defined in the first layer. To support this process, we also define a reference model for autonomous vehicles to use as a common basis for the assessment of risks and the design of the security controls.

Attack graphs are commonly used to analyse the security of medium-sized to large networks. Based on a scan of the network and likelihood information of vulnerabilities, attack graphs can be transformed into Bayesian Attack Graphs (BAGs). These BAGs are used to evaluate how security controls affect a network and how changes in topology affect security. A challenge with these automatically generated BAGs is that cycles arise naturally, which make it impossible to use Bayesian network theory to calculate state probabilities. In this paper we provide a systematic approach to analyse and perform computations over cyclic Bayesian attack graphs. We present an interpretation of Bayesian attack graphs based on combinational logic circuits, which facilitates an intuitively attractive systematic treatment of cycles. We prove properties of the associated logic circuit and present an algorithm that computes state probabilities without altering the attack graphs (e.g., remove an arc to remove a cycle). Moreover, our algorithm deals seamlessly with any cycle without the need to identify their type. A set of experiments demonstrates the scalability of the algorithm on computer networks with hundreds of machines, each with multiple vulnerabilities.

Insider threat is one of the most pernicious threat vectors to information and communication technologies (ICT) across the world due to the elevated level of trust and access that an insider is afforded. This type of threat can stem from both malicious users with a motive as well as negligent users who inadvertently reveal details about trade secrets, company information, or even access information to malignant players. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that uses system logs to detect insider behavior using a special recurrent neural network (RNN) model. Ground truth is established using DANTE and used as baseline for identifying anomalous behavior. For this, system logs are modeled as a natural language sequence and patterns are extracted from these sequences. We create workflows of sequences of actions that follow a natural language logic and control flow. These flows are assigned various categories of behaviors - malignant or benign. Any deviation from these sequences indicates the presence of a threat. We further classify threats into one of the five categories provided in the CERT insider threat dataset. Through experimental evaluation, we show that the proposed model can achieve 93% prediction accuracy.

With the widespread of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled security applications, there is a need for collecting heterogeneous and scalable data sources for effectively evaluating the performances of security applications. This paper presents the description of new datasets, named ToNİoT datasets that include distributed data sources collected from Telemetry datasets of Internet of Things (IoT) services, Operating systems datasets of Windows and Linux, and datasets of Network traffic. The paper aims to describe the new testbed architecture used to collect Linux datasets from audit traces of hard disk, memory and process. The architecture was designed in three distributed layers of edge, fog, and cloud. The edge layer comprises IoT and network systems, the fog layer includes virtual machines and gateways, and the cloud layer includes data analytics and visualization tools connected with the other two layers. The layers were programmatically controlled using Software-Defined Network (SDN) and Network-Function Virtualization (NFV) using the VMware NSX and vCloud NFV platform. The Linux ToNİoT datasets would be used to train and validate various new federated and distributed AI-enabled security solutions such as intrusion detection, threat intelligence, privacy preservation and digital forensics. Various Data analytical and machine learning methods are employed to determine the fidelity of the datasets in terms of examining feature engineering, statistics of legitimate and security events, and reliability of security events. The datasets can be publicly accessed from [1].

Interconnection networks for multi/many-core processors or server systems are the backbone of the system as they enable data communication among the processing cores, caches, memory and other peripherals. Given the criticality of the interconnects, the system can be severely subverted if the interconnection is compromised. The threat of Hardware Trojans (HTs) penetrating complex hardware systems such as multi/many-core processors are increasing due to the increasing presence of third party players in a System-on-chip (SoC) design. Even by deploying naïve HTs, an adversary can exploit the Network-on-Chip (NoC) backbone of the processor and get access to communication patterns in the system. This information, if leaked to an attacker, can reveal important insights regarding the application suites running on the system; thereby compromising the user privacy and paving the way for more severe attacks on the entire system. In this paper, we demonstrate that one or more HTs embedded in the NoC of a multi/many-core processor is capable of leaking sensitive information regarding traffic patterns to an external malicious attacker; who, in turn, can analyze the HT payload data with machine learning techniques to infer the applications running on the processor. Furthermore, to protect against such attacks, we propose a Simulated Annealing-based randomized routing algorithm in the system. The proposed defense is capable of obfuscating the attacker's data processing capabilities to infer the user profiles successfully. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed randomized routing algorithm could reduce the accuracy of identifying user profiles by the attacker from \textbackslashtextgreater98% to \textbackslashtextless; 15% in multi/many-core systems.

The present study proposes a method for detecting objects with a high recall rate for human-supported video annotation. In recent years, automatic annotation techniques such as object detection and tracking have become more powerful; however, detection and tracking of occluded objects, small objects, and blurred objects are still difficult. In order to annotate such objects, manual annotation is inevitably required. For this reason, we envision a human-supported video annotation framework in which over-detected objects (i.e., false positives) are allowed to minimize oversight (i.e., false negatives) in automatic annotation and then the over-detected objects are removed manually. This study attempts to achieve human-in-the-loop object detection with an emphasis on suppressing the oversight for the former stage of processing in the aforementioned annotation framework: bi-directional deep SORT is proposed to reliably capture missed objects and annotation-free segment identification (AFSID) is proposed to identify video frames in which manual annotation is not required. These methods are reinforced each other, yielding an increase in the detection rate while reducing the burden of human intervention. Experimental comparisons using a pedestrian video dataset demonstrated that bi-directional deep SORT with AFSID was successful in capturing object candidates with a higher recall rate over the existing deep SORT while reducing the cost of manpower compared to manual annotation at regular intervals.

How to develop AI systems that can explain how they made decisions is one of the important and hot topics today. Inspired by the dual-process theory in psychology, this paper proposes a human-in-the-loop approach to develop System-2 AI that makes an inference logically and outputs interpretable explanation. Our proposed method first asks crowd workers to raise understandable features of objects of multiple classes and collect training data from the Internet to generate classifiers for the features. Logical decision rules with the set of generated classifiers can explain why each object is of a particular class. In our preliminary experiment, we applied our method to an image classification of Asian national flags and examined the effectiveness and issues of our method. In our future studies, we plan to combine the System-2 AI with System-1 AI (e.g., neural networks) to efficiently output decisions.

A new Domain Name System (DNS) cache poisoning attack aiming at clients has emerged recently. It induced cloud users to visit fake web sites and thus reveal information such as account passwords. However, the design of current DNS defense architecture does not formally consider the protection of clients. Although the DNS traffic encryption technology can alleviate this new attack, its deployment is as slow as the new DNS architecture. Thus we propose a lightweight adaptive intelligent defense strategy, which only needs to be deployed on the client without any configuration support of DNS. Firstly, we model the attack and defense process as a static stochastic game with incomplete information under bounded rationality conditions. Secondly, to solve the problem caused by uncertain attack strategies and large quantities of game states, we adopt a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) with guaranteed monotonic improvement. Finally, through the prototype system experiment in Alibaba Cloud, the effectiveness of our method is proved against multiple attack modes with a success rate of 97.5% approximately.

In this paper, we consider a sequential stochastic Stackelberg game with two players, a leader, and a follower. The follower observes the state of the system privately while the leader does not. Players play Stackelberg equilibrium where the follower plays best response to the leader's strategy. In such a scenario, the leader has the advantage of committing to a policy that maximizes its returns given the knowledge that the follower is going to play the best response to its policy. Such a pair of strategies of both the players is defined as Stackelberg equilibrium of the game. Recently, [1] provided a sequential decomposition algorithm to compute the Stackelberg equilibrium for such games which allow for the computation of Markovian equilibrium policies in linear time as opposed to double exponential, as before. In this paper, we extend that idea to the case when the state update dynamics are not known to the players, to propose an reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm based on Expected Sarsa that learns the Stackelberg equilibrium policy by simulating a model of the underlying Markov decision process (MDP). We use particle filters to estimate the belief update for a common agent that computes the optimal policy based on the information which is common to both the players. We present a security game example to illustrate the policy learned by our algorithm.