Biblio

In this work, we discuss data breaches based on the “2012 SocialArks data breach” case study. Data leakage refers to the security violations of unauthorized individuals copying, transmitting, viewing, stealing, or using sensitive, protected, or confidential data. Data leakage is becoming more and more serious, for those traditional information security protection methods like anti-virus software, intrusion detection, and firewalls have been becoming more and more challenging to deal with independently. Nevertheless, fortunately, new IT technologies are rapidly changing and challenging traditional security laws and provide new opportunities to develop the information security market. The SocialArks data breach was caused by a misconfiguration of ElasticSearch Database owned by SocialArks, owned by “Tencent.” The attack methodology is classic, and five common Elasticsearch mistakes discussed the possibilities of those leakages. The defense solution focuses on how to optimize the Elasticsearch server. Furthermore, the ElasticSearch database’s open-source identity also causes many ethical problems, which means that anyone can download and install it for free, and they can install it almost anywhere. Some companies download it and install it on their internal servers, while others download and install it in the cloud (on any provider they want). There are also cloud service companies that provide hosted versions of Elasticsearch, which means they host and manage Elasticsearch clusters for their customers, such as Company Tencent.

Smart grid is the next generation for power generation, consumption and distribution. However, with the introduction of smart communication in such sensitive components, major risks from cybersecurity perspective quickly emerged. This survey reviews and reports on the state-of-the-art techniques for detecting cyber attacks in smart grids, mainly through machine learning techniques.

Legacy programs are normally monolithic (that is, all code runs in a single process and is not partitioned), and a bug in a program may result in the entire program being vulnerable and therefore untrusted. Program partitioning can be used to separate a program into multiple partitions, so as to isolate sensitive data or privileged operations. Manual program partitioning requires programmers to rewrite the entire source code, which is cumbersome, error-prone, and not generic. Automatic program partitioning tools can separate programs according to the dependency graph constructed based on data or programs. However, programmers still need to manually implement remote service interfaces for inter-partition communication. Therefore, in this paper, we propose AutoSlicer, whose purpose is to partition a program more automatically, so that the programmer is only required to annotate sensitive data. AutoSlicer constructs accurate data dependency graphs (DDGs) by enabling execution flow graphs, and the DDG-based partitioning algorithm can compute partition information based on sensitive annotations. In addition, the code refactoring toolchain can automatically transform the source code into sensitive and insensitive partitions that can be deployed on the remote procedure call framework. The experimental evaluation shows that AutoSlicer can effectively improve the accuracy (13%-27%) of program partitioning by enabling EFG, and separate real-world programs with a relatively smaller performance overhead (0.26%-9.42%).

Ensuring data rights, openness and transaction flow is important in today’s digital economy. Few scholars have studied in the area of data confirmation, it is only with the development of blockchain that it has started to be taken seriously. However, blockchain has open and transparent natures, so there exists a certain probability of exposing the privacy of data owners. Therefore, in this paper we propose a new measure of data confirmation based on Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Base Encryption(CP-ABE). The information with unique identification of the data owner is embedded in the ciphertext of CP-ABE by paillier homomorphic encryption, and the data can have multiple sharers. No one has access to the plaintext during the whole confirmation process, which reduces the risk of source data leakage.

Current sensors are widely used in power grid for power metering, automation and power equipment monitoring. Since the tradeoff between the sensitivity and the measurement range needs to be made to design a current sensor, it is difficult to deploy one sensor to measure both the small-magnitude and the large-magnitude current. In this research, we design a surface-mount current sensor by using the tunneling magneto-resistance (TMR) devices and show that the tradeoff between the sensitivity and the detection range can be broken. Two TMR devices of different sensitivity degrees were integrated into one current sensor module, and a signal processing algorithm was implemented to fusion the outputs of the two TMR devices. Then, a platform was setup to test the performance of the surface-mount current sensor. The results showed that the designed current sensor could measure the current from 2 mA to 100 A with an approximate 93 dB dynamic range. Besides, the nonintrusive feature of the surface-mount current sensor could make it convenient to be deployed on-site.

A huge amount of stored and transferred data is expanding rapidly. Therefore, managing and securing the big volume of diverse applications should have a high priority. However, Structured Query Language Injection Attack (SQLIA) is one of the most common dangerous threats in the world. Therefore, a large number of approaches and models have been presented to mitigate, detect or prevent SQL injection attack but it is still alive. Most of old and current models are created based on static, dynamic, hybrid or machine learning techniques. However, SQL injection attack still represents the highest risk in the trend of web application security risks based on several recent studies in 2021. In this paper, we present a review of the latest research dealing with SQL injection attack and its types, and demonstrating several types of most recent and current techniques, models and approaches which are used in mitigating, detecting or preventing this type of dangerous attack. Then, we explain the weaknesses and highlight the critical points missing in these techniques. As a result, we still need more efforts to make a real, novel and comprehensive solution to be able to cover all kinds of malicious SQL commands. At the end, we provide significant guidelines to follow in order to mitigate such kind of attack, and we strongly believe that these tips will help developers, decision makers, researchers and even governments to innovate solutions in the future research to stop SQLIA.

The architecture and functioning of the electricity markets are rapidly evolving in favour of solutions based on real-time data sharing and decentralised, distributed, renewable energy generation. Peer-to-peer (P2P) energy markets allow two individuals to transact with one another without the need of intermediaries, reducing the load on the power grid during peak hours. However, such a P2P energy market is prone to various cyber attacks. Blockchain technology has been proposed to implement P2P energy trading to support this change. One of the most crucial components of blockchain technology in energy trading is the consensus mechanism. It determines the effectiveness and security of the blockchain for energy trading. However, most of the consensus used in energy trading today are traditional consensus such as Proof-of-Work (PoW) and Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT). These traditional mechanisms cannot be directly adopted in P2P energy trading due to their huge computational power, low throughput, and high latency. Therefore, we propose the Block Alliance Consensus (BAC) mechanism based on Hashgraph. In a massive P2P energy trading network, BAC can keep Hashgraph's throughput while resisting Sybil attacks and supporting the addition and deletion of energy participants. The high efficiency and security of BAC and the blockchain-based energy trading platform are verified through experiments: our improved BAC has an average throughput that is 2.56 times more than regular BFT, 5 times greater than PoW, and 30% greater than the original BAC. The improved BAC has an average latency that is 41% less than BAC and 81% less than original BFT. Our energy trading blockchain (ETB)'s READ performance can achieve the most outstanding throughput of 1192 tps at a workload of 1200 tps, while WRITE can achieve 682 tps at a workload of 800 tps with a success rate of 95% and 0.18 seconds of latency.

Recently exposed vulnerabilities reveal the necessity to improve the security of branch predictors. Branch predictors record history about the execution of different processes, and such information from different processes are stored in the same structure and thus accessible to each other. This leaves the attackers with the opportunities for malicious training and malicious perception. Physical or logical isolation mechanisms such as using dedicated tables and flushing during context-switch can provide security but incur non-trivial costs in space and/or execution time. Randomization mechanisms incurs the performance cost in a different way: those with higher securities add latency to the critical path of the pipeline, while the simpler alternatives leave vulnerabilities to more sophisticated attacks.This paper proposes HyBP, a practical hybrid protection and effective mechanism for building secure branch predictors. The design applies the physical isolation and randomization in the right component to achieve the best of both worlds. We propose to protect the smaller tables with physically isolation based on (thread, privilege) combination; and protect the large tables with randomization. Surprisingly, the physical isolation also significantly enhances the security of the last-level tables by naturally filtering out accesses, reducing the information flow to these bigger tables. As a result, key changes can happen less frequently and be performed conveniently at context switches. Moreover, we propose a latency hiding design for a strong cipher by precomputing the "code book" with a validated, cryptographically strong cipher. Overall, our design incurs a performance penalty of 0.5% compared to 5.1% of physical isolation under the default context switching interval in Linux.

The discussion about forward error correction (FEC) used for 800G unamplified link (800LR) is ongoing. Aiming at two potential options for FEC bit error ratio (BER) threshold, we propose two FEC schemes, respectively based on channel-polarized (CP) multilevel coding (MLC) and bit interleaved coded modulation (BICM), with the same inner FEC code. The field-programmable gate array (FPGA) verification results indicate that with the same FEC overhead (OH), proposed CP-MLC outperforms BICM scheme with less resource and power consumption.

Malicious attacks, malware, and ransomware families pose critical security issues to cybersecurity, and it may cause catastrophic damages to computer systems, data centers, web, and mobile applications across various industries and businesses. Traditional anti-ransomware systems struggle to fight against newly created sophisticated attacks. Therefore, state-of-the-art techniques like traditional and neural network-based architectures can be immensely utilized in the development of innovative ransomware solutions. In this paper, we present a feature selection-based framework with adopting different machine learning algorithms including neural network-based architectures to classify the security level for ransomware detection and prevention. We applied multiple machine learning algorithms: Decision Tree (DT), Random Forest (RF), Naïve Bayes (NB), Logistic Regression (LR) as well as Neural Network (NN)-based classifiers on a selected number of features for ransomware classification. We performed all the experiments on one ransomware dataset to evaluate our proposed framework. The experimental results demonstrate that RF classifiers outperform other methods in terms of accuracy, F -beta, and precision scores.

The expansion of the internet has resulted in huge growth in every industry. It does, however, have a substantial impact on the downsides. Because of the internet's rapid growth, personally identifiable information (PII) should be kept secure in the coming years. Obtaining someone's personal information is rather simple nowadays. There are some established methods for keeping our personal information private. Further, it is essential because we must provide our identity cards to someone for every verification step. In this paper, we will look at some of the attempted methods for protecting our identities. We will highlight the research gaps and potential future enhancements in the research for more enhanced security based on our literature review.

In view of the problems that the existing power grid risk assessment mainly depends on the data fusion of decision-making level, which has strong subjectivity and less effective information, this paper proposes a risk assessment method of microgrid system based on random matrix theory. Firstly, the time series data of multiple sensors are constructed into a high-dimensional matrix according to the different parameter types and nodes; Then, based on random matrix theory and sliding time window processing, the average spectral radius sequence is calculated to characterize the state of microgrid system. Finally, an example is given to verify the effectiveness of the method.

Deep learning-based semantic communications (DLSC) significantly improve communication efficiency by only transmitting the meaning of the data rather than a raw message. Such a novel paradigm can brace the high-demand applications with massive data transmission and connectivities, such as automatic driving and internet-of-things. However, DLSC are also highly vulnerable to various attacks, such as eavesdropping, surveillance, and spoofing, due to the openness of wireless channels and the fragility of neural models. To tackle this problem, we present SemKey, a novel physical layer key generation (PKG) scheme that aims to secure the DLSC by exploring the underlying randomness of deep learning-based semantic communication systems. To boost the generation rate of the secret key, we introduce a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) and tune its elements with the randomness of semantic drifts between a transmitter and a receiver. Precisely, we first extract the random features of the semantic communication system to form the randomly varying switch sequence of the RIS-assisted channel and then employ the parallel factor-based channel detection method to perform the channel detection under RIS assistance. Experimental results show that our proposed SemKey significantly improves the secret key generation rate, potentially paving the way for physical layer security for DLSC.

Source code security audit is an effective technique to deal with security vulnerabilities and software bugs. As one kind of white-box testing approaches, it can effectively help developers eliminate defects in the code. However, it suffers from performance issues. In this paper, we propose an incremental checking mechanism which enables fast source code security audits. And we conduct comprehensive experiments to verify the effectiveness of our approach.

Though several deep learning (DL) detectors have been proposed for the network attack detection and achieved high accuracy, they are computationally expensive and struggle to satisfy the real-time detection for high-speed networks. Recently, programmable switches exhibit a remarkable throughput efficiency on production networks, indicating a possible deployment of the timely detector. Therefore, we present Soter, a DL enhanced in-network framework for the accurate real-time detection. Soter consists of two phases. One is filtering packets by a rule-based decision tree running on the Tofino ASIC. The other is executing a well-designed lightweight neural network for the thorough inspection of the suspicious packets on the CPU. Experiments on the commodity switch demonstrate that Soter behaves stably in ten network scenarios of different traffic rates and fulfills per-flow detection in 0.03s. Moreover, Soter naturally adapts to the distributed deployment among multiple switches, guaranteeing a higher total throughput for large data centers and cloud networks.

Target attack identification and detection has always been a concern of network security in the current environment. However, the economic losses caused by DDoS attacks are also enormous. In recent years, DDoS attack detection has made great progress mainly in the user application layer of the network layer. In this paper, a review and discussion are carried out according to the different detection methods and platforms. This paper mainly includes three parts, which respectively review statistics-based machine learning detection, target attack detection on SDN platform and attack detection on cloud service platform. Finally, the research suggestions for DDoS attack detection are given.

With the widespread deployment of data-driven services, the demand for data volumes continues to grow. At present, many applications lack reliable human supervision in the process of data collection, which makes the collected data contain low-quality data or even malicious data. This low-quality or malicious data make AI systems potentially face much security challenges. One of the main security threats in the training phase of machine learning is data poisoning attacks, which compromise model integrity by contaminating training data to make the resulting model skewed or unusable. This paper reviews the relevant researches on data poisoning attacks in various task environments: first, the classification of attacks is summarized, then the defense methods of data poisoning attacks are sorted out, and finally, the possible research directions in the prospect.

The (IoT) paradigm’s fundamental goal is to massively connect the “smart things” through standardized interfaces, providing a variety of smart services. Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) include both physical and cyber components and can apply to various application domains (smart grid, smart transportation, smart manufacturing, etc.). The Digital Twin (DT) is a cyber clone of physical objects (things), which will be an essential component in CPS. This paper designs a systematic taxonomy to explore different attacks on DT-based CPS and how they affect the system from a four-layer architecture perspective. We present an attack space for DT-based CPS on four layers (i.e., object layer, communication layer, DT layer, and application layer), three attack objects (i.e., confidentiality, integrity, and availability), and attack types combined with strength and knowledge. Furthermore, some selected case studies are conducted to examine attacks on representative DT-based CPS (smart grid, smart transportation, and smart manufacturing). Finally, we propose a defense mechanism called Secured DT Development Life Cycle (SDTDLC) and point out the importance of leveraging other enabling techniques (intrusion detection, blockchain, modeling, simulation, and emulation) to secure DT-based CPS.