Biblio

Data on software vulnerabilities, products and exploits is typically collected from multiple non-structured sources. Valuable information, e.g., on which products are affected by which exploits, is conveyed by matching data from those sources, i.e., through their relations. In this paper, we leverage this simple albeit unexplored observation to introduce a statistical relational learning (SRL) approach for the analysis of vulnerabilities, products and exploits. In particular, we focus on the problem of determining the existence of an exploit for a given product, given information about the relations between products and vulnerabilities, and vulnerabilities and exploits, focusing on Industrial Control Systems (ICS), the National Vulnerability Database and ExploitDB. Using RDN-Boost, we were able to reach an AUC ROC of 0.83 and an AUC PR of 0.69 for the problem at hand. To reach that performance, we indicate that it is instrumental to include textual features, e.g., extracted from the description of vulnerabilities, as well as structured information, e.g., about product categories. In addition, using interpretable relational regression trees we report simple rules that shed insight on factors impacting the weaponization of ICS products.

We address the problem of recovering signals from compressed measurements based on generative priors. Recently, generative-model based compressive sensing (GMCS) methods have shown superior performance over traditional compressive sensing (CS) techniques in recovering signals from fewer measurements. However, it is possible to further improve the performance of GMCS by introducing controlled sparsity in the latent-space. We propose a proximal meta-learning (PML) algorithm to enforce sparsity in the latent-space while training the generator. Enforcing sparsity naturally leads to a union-of-submanifolds model in the solution space. The overall framework is named as sparsity driven latent space sampling (SDLSS). In addition, we derive the sample complexity bounds for the proposed model. Furthermore, we demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed framework over the state-of-the-art techniques with application to CS on standard datasets such as MNIST and CIFAR-10. In particular, we evaluate the performance of the proposed method as a function of the number of measurements and sparsity factor in the latent space using standard objective measures. Our findings show that the sparsity driven latent space sampling approach improves the accuracy and aids in faster recovery of the signal in GMCS.

As a large amount of renewable energy is injected into the power grid, the source side of the power grid becomes extremely uncertain. Traditional static safety analysis methods based on pure physical models can no longer quickly and reliably give analysis results. Therefore, this paper proposes a deep learning-based static security analytical method. First, the static security assessment index of the power grid under the N-1 principle is proposed. Secondly, a neural network model and its input and output data for static safety analysis problems are designed. Finally, the validity of the proposed method was verified by IEEE grid data. Experiments show that the proposed method can quickly and accurately give the static security analysis results of the source-side high uncertainty grid.

In the theoretical part of the paper, the scope of application of pseudorandom numbers and methods of their generation, as well as methods of statistical testing of pseudorandom sequences (PS) are considered. In the practical part of the work, the quality of PS obtained by Mersenne Twister [1] generator and the cryptographic generator of the RNGCryptoServiceProvider class of the. NET platform is evaluated. Based on the conducted research, the results of testing are obtained, which show that the quality of pseudorandom sequences generated by the cryptographic random number generator is higher than PS generated by Mersenne Twister. Additionally, based on statistical analysis by NIST and TestU01, a study is conducted in an attempt to establish the statistical indistinguishability of sets of empty- and stegocontainers created using a two-dimensional associative masking mechanism [2-4] based on a gamma of at least 500 KB in length. Research work was carried out under the guidance of R.F. Gibadullin, Associate Professor of the Department of Computer Systems of Kazan National Research Technical University named after A.N.Tupolev-KAI.

The spatial-temporal random variation characteristics of underwater acoustic channel make the difference among the underwater acoustic communication network link channels, which make network performance difficult to predict. In order to better understand the fluctuation and difference of network link channel, we analyze the measured channel data of five links in the Qiandao Lake underwater acoustic communication network experiment. This paper first estimates impulse response, spread function, power delay profile and Doppler power spectrum of the time-varying channel in a short detection time, and compares the time-frequency energy distribution characteristics of each link channel. Then, we statistically analyze the discreteness of the signal to noise ratio, multipath spread and Doppler spread parameter distributions for a total of145 channels over a long observation period. The results show that energy distribution structure and fading fluctuation scale of each link channel in underwater acoustic communication network are obviously different.

Security plays a paradigmatic role in the area of networking. The main goal of security is to protect these networks which contains confidential data against various kinds of attacks. By changing parameters like key size, increasing the rounds of iteration and finally using confusion box as the S-box, the strength of the cryptographic algorithms can be incremented. By using the Data Encryption Standard (DES), the images can be secured with the help of Dynamic S-boxes. Each of these 8 S-boxes contain 64 elements. Each row contains elements in the range 0–15 and are unique. Our proposed system generates these S-boxes dynamically depending on the key. The evaluation of this Dynamic S-box and DES shows much fruitful results over factors like Non-linearity, Strict Avalanche criterion, Balance, memory and time required for implementation using images.

Over the past few years computer vision has become the essential aspect of modern era of technology. This computer vision is manly based on image processing whereas the image processing includes three important aspects as image filtering, image compression & image security. The image filtering can be achieved by using various filtering techniques but the PSNR & operating frequency are the most challenging aspects of image filtering. This paper mainly focused on overcoming the challenges appears while removing the salt & pepper noise with conventional median filtering by developing improved adaptive moving window architecture median filter & comparing its performance to have improved performance in terms of PSNR & operating frequency.

Cyberattacks have been progressed in the fields of Internet of Things, and artificial intelligence technologies using the advanced persistent threat (APT) method recently. The damage caused by ransomware is rapidly spreading among APT attacks, and the range of the damages of individuals, corporations, public institutions, and even governments are increasing. The seriousness of the problem has increased because ransomware has been evolving into an intelligent ransomware attack that spreads over the network to infect multiple users simultaneously. This study used open source endpoint detection and response tools to build and test a framework environment that enables systematic ransomware detection at the network and system level. Experimental results demonstrate that the use of EDR tools can quickly extract ransomware attack features and respond to attacks.

This paper studies the use of Supervisory Control Theory to design and implement post-fault restoration schemes in a HVDC grid. Our study focuses on the synthesis of discrete controllers and on the management of variable control rules during the execution of the protection strategy. The resulting supervisory control system can be proven "free of deadlocks" in the sense that designated tasks are always completed.

Vehicular Ad-Hoc Network (VANET) is a subcategory of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) that allows vehicles to communicate with other vehicles and static roadside infrastructure. However, the integration of cyber and physical systems introduce many possible points of attack that make VANET vulnerable to cyber attacks. In this paper, we implemented a machine learning-based intrusion detection system that identifies False Data Injection (FDI) attacks on a vehicular network. A co-simulation framework between MATLAB and NS-3 is used to simulate the system. The intrusion detection system is installed in every vehicle and processes the information obtained from the packets sent by other vehicles. The packet is classified into either trusted or malicious using Support Vector Machines (SVM). The comparison of the performance of the system is evaluated in different scenarios using the following metrics: classification rate, attack detection rate, false positive rate, and detection speed. Simulation results show that the SVM-based IDS is able to provide high accuracy detection, low false positive rate, consequently improving the traffic congestion in the simulated highway.

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are widely used by malicious actors to disrupt network infrastructures/services. A common attack is TCP SYN Flood that attempts to exhaust memory and processing resources. Typical mitigation mechanisms, i.e. SYN cookies require significant processing resources and generate large rates of backscatter traffic to block them. In this paper, we propose a detection and mitigation schema that focuses on generating and optimizing signature-based rules. To that end, network traffic is monitored and appropriate packet-level data are processed to form signatures i.e. unique combinations of packet field values. These are fed to machine learning models that classify them to malicious/benign. Malicious signatures corresponding to specific destinations identify potential victims. TCP traffic to victims is redirected to high-performance programmable XDPenabled firewalls that filter off ending traffic according to signatures classified as malicious. To enhance mitigation performance malicious signatures are subjected to a reduction process, formulated as a multi-objective optimization problem. Minimization objectives are (i) the number of malicious signatures and (ii) collateral damage on benign traffic. We evaluate our approach in terms of detection accuracy and packet filtering performance employing traces from production environments and high rate generated attack traffic. We showcase that our approach achieves high detection accuracy, significantly reduces the number of filtering rules and outperforms the SYN cookies mechanism in high-speed traffic scenarios.

The test of security primitives is particularly strategic as any bias coming from the implementation or environment can wreck havoc on the security it is intended to provide. This paper presents how some security properties are tested on leading primitives: True Random Number Generation (TRNG), Physically Unclonable Function (PUF), cryptographic primitives and Digital Sensor (DS). The test of TRNG and PUF to ensure a high level of security is mainly about the entropy assessment, which requires specific statistical tests. The security against side-channel analysis (SCA) of cryptographic primitives, like the substitution box in symmetric cryptography, is generally ensured by masking. But the hardware implementation of masking can be damaged by glitches, which create leakages on sensitive variables. A test method is to search for nets of the cryptographic netlist, which are vulnerable to glitches. The DS is an efficient primitive to detect disturbances and rise alarms in case of fault injection attack (FIA). The dimensioning of this primitive requires a precise test to take into account the environment variations including the aging.

This demo presents a new approach to detecting and countering the aLTEr attack by proactively searching for the threat and automatically remediating it. These processes leverage AI/ML techniques and the automation framework offered by the MonB5G architecture.

The fifth-generation (5G) mobile telecom network has been garnering interest in both academia and industry, with better flexibility and higher performance compared to previous generations. Along with functionality improvements, new attack vectors also made way. Network operators and regulatory organizations wish to have a more precise idea about the security posture of 5G environments. Meanwhile, various security metrics for IT environments have been around and attracted the community’s attention. However, 5G-specific factors are less taken into consideration.This paper considers such 5G-specific factors to identify potential gaps if existing security metrics are to be applied to the 5G environments. In light of the layered nature and multi-ownership, the paper proposes a new approach to the modular computation of security metrics based on cross-layer projection as a means of information sharing between layers. Finally, the proposed approach is evaluated through simulation.

Wireless embedded devices are key elements of Internet-of-Things (IoT) and industrial IoT (IIoT) applications. The complexity of these devices as well as the number of connected devices to networks increase steadily. The high intricacy of the overall system makes it error-prone and vulnerable to attacks and leads to the need to test individual parts or even the whole system. Therefore, this paper presents the concept of a flexible and distributed testbed to evaluate correct behavior in various operation or attack scenarios. It is based on the Robot Operating System (ROS) as communication framework to ensure modularity and expandability. The testbed integrates RF-jamming and measurement devices to evaluate remote attack scenarios and interference issues. An energy harvesting emulation cell is used to evaluate different real-world energy harvesting scenarios. A climatic test chamber allows to investigate the influence of temperature and humidity conditions on the system-under-test. As a testbed application scenario, the automated evaluation of an energy harvesting wireless sensor network designed to instrument automotive engine test benches is presented.

Modern Intrusion Detection Systems are able to identify and check all traffic crossing the network segments that they are only set to monitor. Traditional network infrastructures use static detection mechanisms that check and monitor specific types of malicious traffic. To mitigate this potential waste of resources and improve scalability across an entire network, we propose a methodology which deploys distributed IDS in a Software Defined Network allowing them to be used for specific types of traffic as and when it appears on a network. The core of our work is the creation of an SDN application that takes input from a Snort IDS instances, thus working as a classifier for incoming network traffic with a static ruleset for those classifications. Our application has been tested on a virtualised platform where it performed as planned holding its position for limited use on static and controlled test environments.

Data provenance (keeping track of who did what, where, when and how) boasts of various attractive use cases for distributed systems, such as intrusion detection, forensic analysis and secure information dependability. This potential, however, can only be realized if provenance is accessible by its primary stakeholders: the end-users. Existing provenance systems are designed in a `all-or-nothing' fashion, making provenance inaccessible, difficult to extract and crucially, not controlled by its key stakeholders. To mitigate this, we propose that provenance be separated into system, data-specific and file-metadata provenance. Furthermore, we expand data-specific provenance as changes at a fine-grain level, or provenance-per-change, that is recorded alongside its source. We show that with the use of delta-encoding, provenance-per-change is viable, asserting our proposed architecture to be effectively realizable.

We consider the physical layer security (PLS) of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) enabled multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) visible light communication systems in the presence of a passive eavesdropper (Eve). In order to disrupt the decoding process at Eve, we propose a novel precoding scheme reinforced with random constellation coding. Multiple legitimate users (Bobs) will be served simultaneously using NOMA. For the proposed precoder design, we exploit the slow-fading characteristics of the visible light channel so that the transmitted symbols are successfully decoded at Bob, while Eve suffers from very high bit error ratios (BERs) due to precoding-induced jamming. Via computer simulations, we show that Bob can successfully decode their own information in various user configurations and receiver diversities. It is also shown that the BER at Eve's side is increased to the 0.5-level for similar and the asymmetrical positioning of Bob with respect to the transmitter, thus PLS is ensured by the proposed preceding technique.

Existing digital identity management systems fail to deliver the desirable properties of control by the users of their own identity data, credibility of disclosed identity data, and network-level anonymity. The recently proposed Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) approach promises to give users these properties. However, we argue that without addressing privacy at the network level, SSI systems cannot deliver on this promise. In this paper we present the design and analysis of our solution TCID, created in collaboration with the Dutch government. TCID is a system consisting of a set of components that together satisfy seven functional requirements to guarantee the desirable system properties. We show that the latency incurred by network-level anonymization in TCID is significantly larger than that of identity data disclosure protocols but is still low enough for practical situations. We conclude that current research on SSI is too narrowly focused on these data disclosure protocols.

WebAssembly is an Increasingly popular lightweight binary instruction format, which can be efficiently embedded and sandboxed. Languages like C, C++, Rust, Go, and many others can be compiled into WebAssembly. This paper describes Twine, a WebAssembly trusted runtime designed to execute unmodified, language-independent applications. We leverage Intel SGX to build the runtime environment without dealing with language-specific, complex APIs. While SGX hardware provides secure execution within the processor, Twine provides a secure, sandboxed software runtime nested within an SGX enclave, featuring a WebAssembly system interface (WASI) for compatibility with unmodified WebAssembly applications. We evaluate Twine with a large set of general-purpose benchmarks and real-world applications. In particular, we used Twine to implement a secure, trusted version of SQLite, a well-known full-fledged embeddable database. We believe that such a trusted database would be a reasonable component to build many larger application services. Our evaluation shows that SQLite can be fully executed inside an SGX enclave via WebAssembly and existing system interface, with similar average performance overheads. We estimate that the performance penalties measured are largely compensated by the additional security guarantees and its full compatibility with standard WebAssembly. An indepth analysis of our results indicates that performance can be greatly improved by modifying some of the underlying libraries. We describe and implement one such modification in the paper, showing up to 4.1 × speedup. Twine is open-source, available at GitHub along with instructions to reproduce our experiments.

Learning movement control is a fundamental process integral to infant development. However, it is still unclear how infants learn to control leg movement. This work explores the potential of using socially assistive robots to provide real-time adaptive reinforcement learning for infants. Ten 6 to 8-month old typically-developing infants participated in a study where a robot provided reinforcement when the infant’s right leg acceleration fell within the range of 9 to 20 m/s2. If infants increased the proportion of leg accelerations in this band, they were categorized as "performers". Six of the ten participating infants were categorized as performers; the performer subgroup increased the magnitude of acceleration, proportion of target acceleration for right leg, and ratio of right/left leg acceleration peaks within the target acceleration band and their right legs increased movement intensity from the baseline to the contingency session. The results showed infants specifically adjusted their right leg acceleration in response to a robot- provided reward. Further study is needed to understand how to improve human-robot interaction policies for personalized interventions for young infants.

Web caching is a strategy that can be used to speed up website access on the client-side. This strategy is implemented by storing as many popular web objects as possible on the cache server. All web objects stored on a cache server are called cached data. Requests for cached web data on the cache server are much faster than requests directly to the origin server. Not all web objects can fit on the cache server due to their limited capacity. Therefore, optimizing cached data in a web caching strategy will determine which web objects can enter the cache server to have maximum profit. This paper simulates a web caching strategy optimization with a knapsack problem approach using the Ant Colony optimization (ACO), Genetic Algorithm (GA), and a combination of the two. Knapsack profit is seen from the number of web objects that can be entered into the cache server but with the minimum objective function value. The simulation results show that the combination of ACO and GA is faster to produce an optimal solution and is not easily trapped by the local optimum.

This paper presents the synthesis and circuit transformations of acoustic wave filters based on a transversal arrangement of the individual resonators. This configuration allows for the synthesis of any filter response without detrimental of the limited value of the electro-acoustic coupling coefficient. The synthesis can be performed in the low-pass domain to be latter transformed into the band-pass domain. This latter step results in significant differences between the low-pass and the band-pass responses in wideband stringent filters. This work, after an initial synthesis in the low-pass domain, directly applies the pass-band circuit transformation achieving a more accurate synthesized network even for wideband filters.

The total number of photovoltaic power producing facilities whose FIT-based ten-year contract expires by 2023 is expected to reach approximately 1.65 million in Japan. If the number of renewable electricity-producing/consuming facilities reached two million, an enormous number of transactions would be invoked beyond blockchain's scalability.We propose mutually cooperative two novel methods to simultaneously solve scalability, data size, and privacy problems in blockchain-based trading platforms for renewable energy environmental value. One is a management scheme of electricity production resources (EPRs) using an extended UTXO token. The other is a data aggregation scheme that aggregates a significant number of smart meter records with evidentiality using zero-knowledge proof (ZKP).

One of the most innovative directions in the Internet is Information Centric Networks, in particular the Named Data Network. This approach should make it easier to find and retrieve the desired information on the network through name-based addressing, intranet caching and other schemes. This article presents Named Data Network modeling, results and performance evaluation of proposed caching policies for Named Data Network research, taking into account the influence of external factors on base of Zipf's law and uniform distribution.