Biblio

Nowadays, microservice architecture is known as a successful and promising architecture for smart city applications. Applying microservices in the designing and implementation of systems has many advantages such as autonomy, loosely coupled, composability, scalability, fault tolerance. However, the complexity of calling between microservices leads to problems in security, accessibility, and data management in the execution of systems. In order to address these challenges, in recent years, various researchers and developers have focused on the use of microservice patterns in the implementation of microservice-based systems. Microservice patterns are the result of developers’ successful experiences in addressing common challenges in microservicebased systems. However, hitherto no guideline has been provided for an in-depth understanding of microservice patterns and how to apply them to real systems. The purpose of this paper is to investigate in detail the most widely used and important microservice patterns in order to analyze the function of each pattern, extract the behavioral signatures and construct a service dependency graph for them so that researchers and enthusiasts use the provided guideline to create a microservice-based system equipped with design patterns. To construct the proposed guideline, five real open source projects have been carefully investigated and analyzed and the results obtained have been used in the process of making the guideline.

Many organizations use internal phishing campaigns to gauge awareness and coordinate training efforts based on those findings. Ongoing content design is important for phishing training tools due to the influence recency has on phishing susceptibility. Traditional approaches for content development require significant investment and can be prohibitively costly, especially during the requirements engineering phase of software development and for applications that are constantly evolving. While prior research primarily depends upon already known phishing cues curated by experts, our project, Phish Finders, uses crowdsourcing to explore phishing cues through the unique perspectives and thought processes of everyday users in a realistic yet safe online environment, Zooniverse. This paper contributes qualitative analysis of crowdsourced comments that identifies novel cues, such as formatting and typography, which were identified by the crowd as potential phishing indicators. The paper also shows that crowdsourcing may have the potential to scale as a requirements engineering approach to meet the needs of content labeling for improved training tool development.

With 3.78 billion social media users worldwide in 2021 (48% of the human population), almost 3 billion images are shared daily. At the same time, a consistent evolution of smartphone cameras has led to a photography explosion with 85% of all new pictures being captured using smartphones. However, lately, there has been an increased discussion of privacy concerns when a person being photographed is unaware of the picture being taken or has reservations about the same being shared. These privacy violations are amplified for people with disabilities, who may find it challenging to raise dissent even if they are aware. Such unauthorized image captures may also be misused to gain sympathy by third-party organizations, leading to a privacy breach. Privacy for people with disabilities has so far received comparatively less attention from the AI community. This motivates us to work towards a solution to generate privacy-conscious cues for raising awareness in smartphone users of any sensitivity in their viewfinder content. To this end, we introduce PrivPAS (A real time Privacy-Preserving AI System) a novel framework to identify sensitive content. Additionally, we curate and annotate a dataset to identify and localize accessibility markers and classify whether an image is sensitive to a featured subject with a disability. We demonstrate that the proposed lightweight architecture, with a memory footprint of a mere 8.49MB, achieves a high mAP of 89.52% on resource-constrained devices. Furthermore, our pipeline, trained on face anonymized data. achieves an F1-score of 73.1%.

Sometimes we have the need to inject new services in an operational satellite, but as the injection of new codes in equipment that has communication link is a critical process due to the possibility of injection of broke or malicious codes, this document proposes a protocol for the safe injection of code in satellite microcontrollers of the CubeSat’ type. This protocol is based on the use of HMAC with SHA-3 to guarantee integrity and authenticity and is enhanced by the same security measures to mitigate communication link problems and satellite attacks, such as the guarantee of delivery and displacement between communication windows and periods of high processing.

The use of image data in multimedia communication based applications like military applications and medical images security applications are increasing every day and the secrecy of the image data is extremely important for such applications. A number of methods and techniques for securely transmitting images are proposed in the literature based on image encryption and steganography approaches. A novel mechanism for transmitting color images securely is proposed in this paper mainly based on public key cryptography mechanism also by combining the advantage of simplicity of symmetric schemes. The technique combines the strengths of Elliptic Curve Cryptography and the classical symmetric cryptographic mechanism called Hill Cipher encryption method. The technique also includes the concept of Magic Square for jumbling the pixels yielding maximum diffusion in the image pixels. In the performance evaluation, the proposed method proved that the new system works pretty well. The method is proved to be effective in maintaining the confidentiality of the image in transit and also for resisting security attacks.

We use mobile apps on a daily basis and there is an app for everything. We trust these applications with our most personal data. It is therefore important that these apps are as secure and well usable as possible. So far most studies on the maintenance and security of mobile applications have been done on Android applications. We do, however, not know how well these results translate to iOS.This research project aims to close this gap by analysing iOS applications with regards to maintainability and security. Regarding maintainability, we analyse code smells in iOS applications, the evolution of code smells in iOS applications and compare code smell distributions in iOS and Android applications. Regarding security, we analyse the evolution of the third-party library dependency network for the iOS ecosystem. Additionally, we analyse how publicly reported vulnerabilities spread in the library dependency network.Regarding maintainability, we found that the distributions of code smells in iOS and Android applications differ. Code smells in iOS applications tend to correspond to smaller classes, such as Lazy Class. Regarding security, we found that the library dependency network of the iOS ecosystem is not growing as fast as in some other ecosystems. There are less dependencies on average than for example in the npm ecosystem and, therefore, vulnerabilities do not spread as far.

The spread of the Internet of Things (IoT) and the use of smart control systems in many mission-critical or safety-critical applications domains, like automotive or aeronautical, make devices attractive targets for attackers. Nowadays, several of these are mixed-criticality systems, i.e., they run both high-criticality tasks (e.g., a car control system) and low-criticality ones (e.g., infotainment). High-criticality routines often employ Real-Time Operating Systems (RTOS) to enforce hard real-time requirements, while the tasks with lower constraints can be delegated to more generic-purpose operating systems (GPOS).Much of the control code for these devices is written in memory-unsafe languages such as C and C++. This makes them susceptible to powerful binary attacks, such as the famous Return-Oriented Programming (ROP). Control-Flow Integrity (CFI) is the most investigated security technique to protect against such threats. At now, CFI solutions for real-time embedded systems are not as mature as the ones for general-purpose systems, and even more, there is a lack of in-depth studies on how different operating systems with different security requirements and timing constraints can coexist on a single multicore platform.This paper aims at drawing attention to the subject, discussing the current scientific proposal, and in turn proposing a solution for an optimized asymmetric verification system for execution integrity. By using an embedded hypervisor, predefined cores could be dedicated to only high or low-criticality tasks, with the high-priority core being monitored by the lower-criticality core, relying on offline binary instrumentation and a light exchange of information and signals at runtime. The work also presents preliminary results about a possible implementation for multicore ARM platforms, running both RTOS and GPOS, both in terms of security and performance penalties.

Traditional magnetic mirrors are appealing because of their comparably simple geometry which lends itself to cost-effective construction. However, magnetic mirrors suffer from several inherent problems that make them poor choices for confining and heating plasmas. The chief concerns are the loss-cone instability which continuously saps hot particles from the trap and the interchange instability which effectively transports hot plasma from the core of the trap to the edges where it is lost to the walls. Centrifugal confinement schemes address these concerns with the addition of supersonic poloidal rotation which can effectively shut off the loss-cone. In addition, velocity shear in the flow may mitigate or even turn off the interchange instability if high enough rotation speeds can be achieved. Previous experiments have verified the efficacy of centrifugal confinement but have been unable to achieve sufficient rotation velocities to entirely shut down the interchange modes. [1] The rotation velocity in these experiments was limited by the Critical-Ionization-Velocity (CIV) instability. [3] We plan an experiment to verify that the CIV is the limiting factor in supersonic plasma centrifuges and to explore strategies for avoiding the CIV limit and achieving sufficient rotation speeds to enable stable plasma confinement.

This publication deals with the robust attitude stabilization of a quadrotor subject to stealthy actuator attacks. Based first on the nonlinear model of the system, the sector non-linearity approach will be applied in order to deduce a polytopic Takagi-sugeno model. In parallel, a polytopic fuzzy T-S modeling of the data-deception malicious attacks (time-varying parameters) is presented. After some mathematical development, it will be shown that our original nonlinear system subject to stealthy actuator attacks can be represented as an uncertain polytopic T-S system. Based on this latest model, basic concepts for attitude stabilization will be used to implement the control law. The stabilization conditions will be given in terms of Linear Matrix Inequalities (LMIs) deduced from a classical Lyapunov approach. In order to highlight the efficiency of the proposed approach, simulation results will be given.

The internet has grown increasingly important in everyone's everyday lives due to the availability of numerous web services such as email, cloud storage, video streaming, music streaming, and search engines. On the other hand, attacks by computer programmes such as bots are a common hazard to these internet services. Captcha is a computer program that helps a server-side company determine whether or not a real user is requesting access. Captcha is a security feature that prevents unauthorised access to a user's account by protecting restricted areas from automated programmes, bots, or hackers. Many websites utilise Captcha to prevent spam and other hazardous assaults when visitors log in. However, in recent years, the complexity of Captcha solving has become difficult for humans too, making it less user friendly. To solve this, we propose creating a Captcha that is both simple and engaging for people while also robust enough to protect sensitive data from bots and hackers on the internet. The suggested captcha scheme employs animated artifacts, rotation, and variable fonts as resistance techniques. The proposed captcha technique proves successful against OCR bots with less than 15% accuracy while being easier to solve for human users with more than 98% accuracy.

This paper provides an in-depth analysis of Android malware that bypassed the strictest defenses of the Google Play application store and penetrated the official Android market between January 2016 and July 2021. We systematically identified 1,238 such malicious applications, grouped them into 134 families, and manually analyzed one application from 105 distinct families. During our manual analysis, we identified malicious payloads the applications execute, conditions guarding execution of the payloads, hiding techniques applications employ to evade detection by the user, and other implementation-level properties relevant for automated malware detection. As most applications in our dataset contain multiple payloads, each triggered via its own complex activation logic, we also contribute a graph-based representation showing activation paths for all application payloads in form of a control- and data-flow graph. Furthermore, we discuss the capabilities of existing malware detection tools, put them in context of the properties observed in the analyzed malware, and identify gaps and future research directions. We believe that our detailed analysis of the recent, evasive malware will be of interest to researchers and practitioners and will help further improve malware detection tools.

Soft real-time applications, including multimedia, gaming, and smart appliances, rely on specific architectural characteristics to deliver output in a time-constrained fashion. Any violation of application deadlines can lower the Quality-of-Service (QoS). The data sets associated with these applications are distributed over cores that communicate via Network-on-Chip (NoC) in multi-core systems. Accordingly, the response time of such applications depends on the worst-case latency of request/reply packets. A malicious implant such as Hardware Trojan (HT) that initiates a delay-of-service attack can tamper with the system performance. We model an HT that mounts a time-delay attack in the system by violating the path selection strategy used by the adaptive NoC router. Our analysis shows that once activated, the proposed HT increases the packet latency by 17% and degrades the system performance (IPC) by 18% over the Baseline. Furthermore, we propose an HT detection framework that uses packet traffic analysis and path monitoring to localise the HT. Experiment results show that the proposed detection framework exhibits 4.8% less power consumption and 6.4% less area than the existing technique.

Emails are widely used as a form of communication and sharing files in an organization. However, email is widely used by cybercriminals to spread malware and carrying out cyber-attacks. We implemented an open-source email gateway in conjunction with a security sandbox for securing emails against malicious attachments. The email gateway scans all incoming and outgoing emails and stops emails containing suspicious files. An automated python script would then send the suspected email to the sandboxing element through sandbox API for further analysis, while the script is used also for the prevention of duplicate results. Moreover, the mail server administrator receives notifications from the email gateway about suspicious attachments. If detected attachment is a true positive based on the sandbox analysis result, email is deleted, otherwise, the email is delivered to the recipient. The paper describes in an empirical way the steps followed during the implementation, results, and conclusions of our research.

The age of data (AoD) is identified as one of the most novel and important metrics to measure the quality of big data analytics for Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications. Meanwhile, mobile edge computing (MEC) is envisioned as an enabling technology to minimize the AoD of IoT applications by processing the data in edge servers close to IoT devices. In this paper, we study the AoD minimization problem for IoT big data processing in MEC networks. We first propose an exact solution for the problem by formulating it as an Integer Linear Program (ILP). We then propose an efficient heuristic for the offline AoD minimization problem. We also devise an approximation algorithm with a provable approximation ratio for a special case of the problem, by leveraging the parametric rounding technique. We thirdly develop an online learning algorithm with a bounded regret for the online AoD minimization problem under dynamic arrivals of IoT requests and uncertain network delay assumptions, by adopting the Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) technique. We finally evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms by extensive simulations and implementations in a real test-bed. Results show that the proposed algorithms outperform existing approaches by reducing the AoD around 10%.

One way to detect and assess software vulnerabilities is by extracting security-related information from commit messages. Automating the detection and assessment of vulnerabilities upon security commit messages is still challenging due to the lack of structured and clear messages. We created a convention, called SECOM, for security commit messages that structure and include bits of security-related information that are essential for detecting and assessing vulnerabilities for both humans and tools. The full convention and details are available here: https://tqrg.github.io/secom/.

Healthcare has become one of the most important aspects of people’s lives, resulting in a surge in medical big data. Healthcare providers are increasingly using Internet of Things (IoT)-based wearable technologies to speed up diagnosis and treatment. In recent years, Through the Internet, billions of sensors, gadgets, and vehicles have been connected. One such example is for the treatment and care of patients, technology—remote patient monitoring—is already commonplace. However, these technologies also offer serious privacy and data security problems. Data transactions are transferred and logged. These medical data security and privacy issues might ensue from a pause in therapy, putting the patient’s life in jeopardy. We planned a framework to manage and analyse healthcare large data in a safe manner based on blockchain. Our model’s enhanced privacy and security characteristics are based on data sanitization and restoration techniques. The framework shown here make data and transactions more secure.

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) have a physical part that can interact with sensors and actuators. The data that is read from sensors and the one generated to drive actuators is crucial for the correct operation of this class of devices. Most implementations trust the data being read from sensors and the outputted data to actuators. Real-time validation of the input and output of data for any system is crucial for the safety of its operation. This paper proposes an architecture for handling this issue through smart data guards detached from sensors and controllers and acting solely on the data. This mitigates potential issues of malfunctioning sensors and intentional sensor and controller attacks. The data guards understand the expected data, can detect anomalies and can correct them in real-time. This approach adds more guarantees for fault-tolerant behavior in the presence of attacks and sensor failures.

Sentiment Analysis (SA) is an approach for detecting subjective information such as thoughts, outlooks, reactions, and emotional state. The majority of previous SA work treats it as a text-classification problem that requires labelled input to train the model. However, obtaining a tagged dataset is difficult. We will have to do it by hand the majority of the time. Another concern is that the absence of sufficient cross-domain portability creates challenging situation to reuse same-labelled data across applications. As a result, we will have to manually classify data for each domain. This research work applies sentiment analysis to evaluate the entire vaccine twitter dataset. The work involves the lexicon analysis using NLP libraries like neattext, textblob and multi class classification using BERT. This word evaluates and compares the results of the machine learning algorithms.

This paper belongs to a sequence of manuscripts that discuss generic and easy-to-apply security metrics for Strong PUFs. These metrics cannot and shall not fully replace in-depth machine learning (ML) studies in the security assessment of Strong PUF candidates. But they can complement the latter, serve in initial PUF complexity analyses, and are much easier and more efficient to apply: They do not require detailed knowledge of various ML methods, substantial computation times, or the availability of an internal parametric model of the studied PUF. Our metrics also can be standardized particularly easily. This avoids the sometimes inconclusive or contradictory findings of existing ML-based security test, which may result from the usage of different or non-optimized ML algorithms and hyperparameters, differing hardware resources, or varying numbers of challenge-response pairs in the training phase.This first manuscript within the abovementioned sequence treats one of the conceptually most straightforward security metrics on that path: It investigates the effects that small perturbations in the PUF-challenges have on the resulting PUF-responses. We first develop and implement several sub-metrics that realize this approach in practice. We then empirically show that these metrics have surprising predictive power, and compare our obtained test scores with the known real-world security of several popular Strong PUF designs. The latter include (XOR) Arbiter PUFs, Feed-Forward Arbiter PUFs, and (XOR) Bistable Ring PUFs. Along the way, our manuscript also suggests techniques for representing the results of our metrics graphically, and for interpreting them in a meaningful manner.

Study on the effect of nanosecond laser anneal (NLA) induced crystallization of ferroelectric (FE) Si-doped hafnium oxide (HSO) material is reported. The laser energy density (0.3 J/cm2 to 1.3 J/cm2) and pulse count (1.0 to 30) variations are explored as pathways for the HSO based metal-ferroelectric-metal (MFM) capacitors. The increase in energy density shows transition toward ferroelectric film crystallization monitored by the remanent polarization (2Pr) and coercive field (2Ec). The NLA conditions show maximum 2Pr (\$\textbackslashsim 24\textbackslash \textbackslashmu\textbackslashmathrmC/\textbackslashtextcmˆ2\$) comparable to the values obtained from reference rapid thermal processing (RTP). Reliability dependence in terms of fatigue (107 cycles) of MFMs on NLA versus RTP crystallization anneal is highlighted. The NLA based MFMs shows improved fatigue cycling at high fields for the low energy densities compared to an RTP anneal. The maximum fatigue cycles to breakdown shows a characteristic dependence on the laser energy density and pulse count. Leakage current and dielectric breakdown of NLA based MFMs at the transition of amorphous to crystalline film state is reported. The role of NLA based anneal on ferroelectric film crystallization and MFM stack reliability is reported in reference with conventional RTP based anneal.

Supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems play pivotal role in the operation of modern critical infrastructures (CIs). Technological advancements, innovations, economic trends, etc. have continued to improve SCADA systems effectiveness and overall CIs’ throughput. However, the trends have also continued to expose SCADA systems to security menaces. Intrusions and attacks on SCADA systems can cause service disruptions, equipment damage or/and even fatalities. The use of conventional intrusion detection models have shown trends of ineffectiveness due to the complexity and sophistication of modern day SCADA attacks and intrusions. Also, SCADA characteristics and requirement necessitate exceptional security considerations with regards to intrusive events’ mitigations. This paper explores the viability of supervised learning algorithms in detecting intrusions specific to SCADA systems and their communication protocols. Specifically, we examine four supervised learning algorithms: Random Forest, Naïve Bayes, J48 Decision Tree and Sequential Minimal Optimization-Support Vector Machines (SMO-SVM) for evaluating SCADA datasets. Two SCADA datasets were used for evaluating the performances of our approach. To improve the classification performances, feature selection using principal component analysis was used to preprocess the datasets. Using prominent classification metrics, the SVM-SMO presented the best overall results with regards to the two datasets. In summary, results showed that supervised learning algorithms were able to classify intrusions targeted against SCADA systems with satisfactory performances.

The strategy of permanently allocating a frequency band in a wireless communication network to one application has led to exceptionally low utilization of the vacant spectrum. By utilizing the unused licensed spectrum along with the unlicensed spectrum, Cognitive Radio Sensor Network (CRSNs) ensures the efficiency of spectrum management. To utilize the spectrum dynamically it is important to safeguard the spectrum sensing. Cooperative Spectrum Sensing (CSS) is recommended for this task. CSS aims to provide reliable spectrum sensing. However, there are various vulnerabilities experienced in CSS which can influence the performance of the network. In this work, the focus is on the Byzantine attack in CSS and current security solutions available to avoid the Byzantines in CRSN.

Internet of Things (IoT) and those protocol CoAP and MQTT has security issues that have entirely changed the security strategy should be utilized and behaved for devices restriction. Several challenges have been observed in multiple domains of security, but Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) have actually dangerous in IoT that have RT. Thus, the IoT paradigm and those protocols CoAP and MQTT have been investigated to seek whether network services could be efficiently delivered for resources usage, managed, and disseminated to the devices. Internet of Things is justifiably joined with the best practices augmentation to make this task enriched. However, factors behaviors related to traditional networks have not been effectively mitigated until now. In this paper, we present and deep, qualitative, and comprehensive systematic mapping to find the answers to the following research questions, such as, (i) What is the state-of-the-art in IoT security, (ii) How to solve the restriction devices challenges via infrastructure involvement, (iii) What type of technical/protocol/ paradigm needs to be studied, and (iv) Security profile should be taken care of, (v) As the proposals are being evaluated: A. If in simulated/virtualized/emulated environment or; B. On real devices, in which case which devices. After doing a comparative study with other papers dictate that our work presents a timely contribution in terms of novel knowledge toward an understanding of formulating IoT security challenges under the IoT restriction devices take care.

To train new staff to be efficient and ready for the tasks assigned is vital. They must be equipped with knowledge and skills so that they can carry out their responsibility to ensure smooth daily working activities. As transitioning to IPv6 has taken place for more than a decade, it is understood that having a dual-stack network is common in any organization or enterprise. However, many Internet users may not realize the importance of IPv6 security due to a lack of awareness and knowledge of cyber and computer security. Therefore, this paper presents an approach to educating people by introducing a security mechanisms model that can be applied in handling security challenges via network sandboxing by setting up an isolated dual stack network testbed using GNS3 to perform network security analysis. The finding shows that applying security mechanisms such as access control lists (ACLs) and host-based firewalls can help counter the attacks. This proves that knowledge and skills to handle dual-stack security are crucial. In future, more kinds of attacks should be tested and also more types of security mechanisms can be applied on a dual-stack network to provide more information and to provide network engineers insights on how they can benefit from network sandboxing to sharpen their knowledge and skills.

In recent years, body-worn RFID and NFC (near field communication) devices have become one of the principal technologies concurring to the rise of healthcare internet of thing (H-IoT) systems. Similarly, points of care (PoCs) moved increasingly closer to patients to reduce the costs while supporting precision medicine and improving chronic illness management, thanks to timely and frequent feedback from the patients themselves. A typical PoC involves medical sensing devices capable of sampling human health, personal equipment with communications and computing capabilities (smartphone or tablet) and a secure software environment for data transmission to medical centers. Hybrid platforms simultaneously employing NFC and ultra-high frequency (UHF) RFID could be successfully developed for the first sensing layer. An application example of the proposed hybrid system for the monitoring of acute myocardial infarction (AMI) survivors details how the combined use of NFC and UHF-RFID in the same PoC can support the multifaceted need of AMI survivors while protecting the sensitive data on the patient’s health.