Biblio

Acoustic communication is a key enabler for underwater Internet of Things networks between autonomous underwater platforms. Underwater Internet of Things networks face a harsh communications environment and limited energy resources which makes them susceptible to interference, whether intentional (i.e., jamming) or unintentional. Resilient, power efficient waveforms and modulation schemes are needed for underwater acoustic communications in order to avoid outages and excessive power drain. We explore the impact of modulation scheme on the resiliency of underwater acoustic communications in the presence of channel impairments, interference, and jamming. In particular, we consider BFSK and OFDM schemes for underwater acoustic communications and assess the utility of Polar coding for strengthening resiliency.

The digital transformation brought on by 5G is redefining current models of end-to-end (E2E) connectivity and service reliability to include security-by-design principles necessary to enable 5G to achieve its promise. 5G trustworthiness highlights the importance of embedding security capabilities from the very beginning while the 5G architecture is being defined and standardized. Security requirements need to overlay and permeate through the different layers of 5G systems (physical, network, and application) as well as different parts of an E2E 5G architecture within a risk-management framework that takes into account the evolving security-threats landscape. 5G presents a typical use-case of wireless communication and computer networking convergence, where 5G fundamental building blocks include components such as Software Defined Networks (SDN), Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and the edge cloud. This convergence extends many of the security challenges and opportunities applicable to SDN/NFV and cloud to 5G networks. Thus, 5G security needs to consider additional security requirements (compared to previous generations) such as SDN controller security, hypervisor security, orchestrator security, cloud security, edge security, etc. At the same time, 5G networks offer security improvement opportunities that should be considered. Here, 5G architectural flexibility, programmability and complexity can be harnessed to improve resilience and reliability. The working group scope fundamentally addresses the following: •5G security considerations need to overlay and permeate through the different layers of the 5G systems (physical, network, and application) as well as different parts of an E2E 5G architecture including a risk management framework that takes into account the evolving security threats landscape. •5G exemplifies a use-case of heterogeneous access and computer networking convergence, which extends a unique set of security challenges and opportunities (e.g., related to SDN/NFV and edge cloud, etc.) to 5G networks. Similarly, 5G networks by design offer potential security benefits and opportunities through harnessing the architecture flexibility, programmability and complexity to improve its resilience and reliability. •The IEEE FNI security WG's roadmap framework follows a taxonomic structure, differentiating the 5G functional pillars and corresponding cybersecurity risks. As part of cross collaboration, the security working group will also look into the security issues associated with other roadmap working groups within the IEEE Future Network Initiative.

Mobile terminals especially smartphones are changing people's work and life style. For example, mobile payments are experiencing rapid growth as consumers use mobile terminals as part of lifestyles. However, security is a big challenge for mobile application services. In order to reduce security risks, mobile terminal security assessment should be conducted before providing application services. An approach of comprehensive security assessment is proposed in this paper by defining security metrics with the corresponding scores and determining the relative weights of security metrics based on the analytical hierarchy process (AHP). Overall security assessment of Android-based mobile terminals is implemented for mobile payment services with payment fraud detection accuracy of 89%, which shows that the proposed approach of security assessment is reasonable.

One of the fifth generation’s most promising solutions for addressing the network system capacity issue is the ultra-dense network. However, a new problem arises because the user equipment secure access is made up of access points that are independent, transitory, and dynamic. The APs are independent and equal in this. It is possible to think of it as a decentralized access network. The access point’s coverage is less than the standard base stations. The user equipment will interface with access points more frequently as it moves, which is a problem. The current 4G Authentication and Key Agreement method, however, is unable to meet this need for quick and frequent authentication. This study means to research how blockchain innovation is being utilized in production network the executives, as well as its forthcoming purposes and arising patterns. To more readily comprehend the direction of important exploration and illuminate the benefits, issues, and difficulties in the blockchain-production network worldview, a writing overview and a logical evaluation of the current examination on blockchain-based supply chains were finished. Multifaceted verification strategies have as of late been utilized as possible guards against blockchain attacks. To further develop execution, scatter administration, and mechanize processes, inventory network tasks might be upset utilizing blockchain innovation

The Domain Name System (DNS) is critical to Internet communications. EDNS Client Subnet (ECS), a DNS extension, allows recursive resolvers to include client subnet information in DNS queries to improve CDN end-user mapping, extending the visibility of client information to a broader range. Major content delivery network (CDN) vendors, content providers (CP), and public DNS service providers (PDNS) are accelerating their IPv6 infrastructure development. With the increasing deployment of IPv6-enabled services and DNS being the most foundational system of the Internet, it becomes important to analyze the behavioral and privacy status of IPv6 resolvers. However, there is a lack of research on ECS for IPv6 DNS resolvers.In this paper, we study the ECS deployment and compliance status of IPv6 resolvers. Our measurement shows that 11.12% IPv6 open resolvers implement ECS. We discuss abnormal noncompliant scenarios that exist in both IPv6 and IPv4 that raise privacy and performance issues. Additionally, we measured if the sacrifice of clients’ privacy can enhance IPv6 CDN performance. We find that in some cases ECS helps end-user mapping but with an unnecessary privacy loss. And even worse, the exposure of client address information can sometimes backfire, which deserves attention from both Internet users and PDNSes.

Web evolution and Web 2.0 social media tools facilitate communication and support the online economy. On the other hand, these tools are actively used by extremist, terrorist and criminal groups. These malicious groups use these new communication channels, such as forums, blogs and social networks, to spread their ideologies, recruit new members, market their malicious goods and raise their funds. They rely on anonymous communication methods that are provided by the new Web. This malicious part of the web is called the “dark web”. Dark web analysis became an active research area in the last few decades, and multiple research studies were conducted in order to understand our enemy and plan for counteract. We have conducted a systematic literature review to identify the state-of-art and open research areas in dark web analysis. We have filtered the available research papers in order to obtain the most relevant work. This filtration yielded 28 studies out of 370. Our systematic review is based on four main factors: the research trends used to analyze dark web, the employed analysis techniques, the analyzed artifacts, and the accuracy and confidence of the available work. Our review results have shown that most of the dark web research relies on content analysis. Also, the results have shown that forum threads are the most analyzed artifacts. Also, the most significant observation is the lack of applying any accuracy metrics or validation techniques by most of the relevant studies. As a result, researchers are advised to consider using acceptance metrics and validation techniques in their future work in order to guarantee the confidence of their study results. In addition, our review has identified some open research areas in dark web analysis which can be considered for future research work.

With the advent of ease of access to the internet and an increase in digital literacy among citizens, digitization of the banking sector has throttled. Countries are now aiming for a cashless society. The introduction of a Unified Payment Interface (UPI) by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) in April 2016 is a game-changer for cashless models. UPI payment model is currently considered the world’s most advanced payment system, and we see many countries adopting this cashless payment mode. With the increase in its popularity, there arises the increased need to strengthen the security posture of the payment solution. In this work, we explore the privacy challenges in the existing data flow of UPI models and propose approaches to preserve the privacy of customers using the Unified Payments Interface.

Machine learning-based DDoS attack detection methods are mostly implemented at the packet level with expensive computational time costs, and the space cost of those sketch-based detection methods is uncertain. This paper proposes a two-stage DDoS attack detection algorithm combining time series-based multi-dimensional sketch and machine learning technologies. Besides packet numbers, total lengths, and protocols, we construct the time series-based multi-dimensional sketch with limited space cost by storing elephant flow information with the Boyer-Moore voting algorithm and hash index. For the first stage of detection, we adopt CNN to generate sketch-level DDoS attack detection results from the time series-based multi-dimensional sketch. For the sketch with potential DDoS attacks, we use RNN with flow information extracted from the sketch to implement flow-level DDoS attack detection in the second stage. Experimental results show that not only is the detection accuracy of our proposed method much close to that of packet-level DDoS attack detection methods based on machine learning, but also the computational time cost of our method is much smaller with regard to the number of machine learning operations.

The parameters of transmission line vary with environmental and operating conditions, thus the paper proposes a digital twin-based transmission line model. Based on synchrophasor measurements from phasor measurement units, the proposed model can use the maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) to reduce uncertainty between the digital twin and its physical counterpart. A case study has been conducted in the paper to present the influence of the uncertainty in the measurements on the digital twin for the transmission line and analyze the effectiveness of the MLE method. The results show that the proposed digital twin-based model is effective in reducing the influence of the uncertainty in the measurements and improving the fault location accuracy.

Blockchain has emerged as a leading technological innovation because of its indisputable safety and services in a distributed setup. Applications of blockchain are rising covering varied fields such as financial transactions, supply chains, maintenance of land records, etc. Supply chain management is a potential area that can immensely benefit from blockchain technology (BCT) along with smart contracts, making supply chain operations more reliable, safer, and trustworthy for all its stakeholders. However, there are numerous challenges such as scalability, coordination, and safety-related issues which are yet to be resolved. Multi-agent systems (MAS) offer a completely new dimension for scalability, cooperation, and coordination in distributed culture. MAS consists of a collection of automated agents who can perform a specific task intelligently in a distributed environment. In this work, an attempt has been made to develop a framework for implementing a multi-agent system for a large-scale product manufacturing supply chain with blockchain technology wherein the agents communicate with each other to monitor and organize supply chain operations. This framework eliminates many of the weaknesses of supply chain management systems. The overall goal is to enhance the performance of SCM in terms of transparency, traceability, trustworthiness, and resilience by using MAS and BCT.

User authentication based on muscle tension manifested during password typing seems to be an interesting additional layer of security. It represents another way of verifying a person’s identity, for example in the context of continuous verification. In order to explore the possibilities of such authentication method, it was necessary to create a capturing software that records and stores data from EMG (electromyography) sensors, enabling a subsequent analysis of the recorded data to verify the relevance of the method. The work presented here is devoted to the design, implementation and evaluation of such a solution. The solution consists of a protocol and a software application for collecting multimodal data when typing on a keyboard. Myo armbands on both forearms are used to capture EMG and inertial data while additional modalities are collected from a keyboard and a camera. The user experience evaluation of the solution is presented, too.

It is proposed to address existing methodological issues in the educational process with the development of intellectual technologies and knowledge representation systems to improve the efficiency of higher education institutions. For this purpose, the structure of relational database is proposed, it will store the information about defended dissertations in the form of a set of attributes (heuristics), representing the mandatory qualification attributes of theses. An inference algorithm is proposed to process the information. This algorithm represents an artificial intelligence, its work is aimed at generating queries based on the applicant preferences. The result of the algorithm's work will be a set of choices, presented in ranked order. Given technologies will allow applicants to quickly become familiar with known scientific results and serve as a starting point for new research. The demand for co-researcher practice in solving the problem of updating the projective thinking methodology and managing the scientific research process has been justified. This article pays attention to the existing parallels between the concepts of technical and human sciences in the framework of their convergence. The concepts of being (economic good and economic utility) and the concepts of consciousness (humanitarian economic good and humanitarian economic utility) are used to form projective thinking. They form direct and inverse correspondences of technology and humanitarian practice in the techno-humanitarian mathematical space. It is proposed to place processed information from the language of context-free formal grammar dissertation abstracts in this space. The principle of data manipulation based on formal languages with context-free grammar allows to create new structures of subject areas in terms of applicants' preferences.It is believed that the success of applicants’ work depends directly on the cognitive training of applicants, which needs to be practiced psychologically. This practice is based on deepening the objectivity and adequacy qualities of obtaining information on the basis of heuristic methods. It requires increased attention and development of intelligence. The paper studies the use of heuristic methods by applicants to find new research directions leads to several promising results. These results can be perceived as potential options in future research. This contributes to an increase in the level of retention of higher education professionals.

Shipboard marine radar systems are essential for safe navigation, helping seafarers perceive their surroundings as they provide bearing and range estimations, object detection, and tracking. Since onboard systems have become increasingly digitized, interconnecting distributed electronics, radars have been integrated into modern bridge systems. But digitization increases the risk of cyberattacks, especially as vessels cannot be considered air-gapped. Consequently, in-depth security is crucial. However, particularly radar systems are not sufficiently protected against harmful network-level adversaries. Therefore, we ask: Can seafarers believe their eyes? In this paper, we identify possible attacks on radar communication and discuss how these threaten safe vessel operation in an attack taxonomy. Furthermore, we develop a holistic simulation environment with radar, complementary nautical sensors, and prototypically implemented cyberattacks from our taxonomy. Finally, leveraging this environment, we create a comprehensive dataset (RadarPWN) with radar network attacks that provides a foundation for future security research to secure marine radar communication.

Next Word Prediction involves guessing the next word which is most likely to come after the current word. The system suggests a few words. A user can choose a word according to their choice from a list of suggested word by system. It increases typing speed and reduces keystrokes of the user. It is also useful for disabled people to enter text slowly and for those who are not good with spellings. Previous studies focused on prediction of the next word in different languages. Some of them are Bangla, Assamese, Ukraine, Kurdish, English, and Hindi. According to Census 2011, 43.63% of the Indian population uses Hindi, the national language of India. In this work, deep learning techniques are proposed to predict the next word in Hindi language. The paper uses Long Short Term Memory and Bidirectional Long Short Term Memory as the base neural network architecture. The model proposed in this work outperformed the existing approaches and achieved the best accuracy among neural network based approaches on IITB English-Hindi parallel corpus.

This paper investigates the robustness of the received signal strength (RSS)-based physical layer authentication (PLA) for wireless mesh networks, through experimental results. Specifically, we develop a secure wireless mesh networking framework and apply the RSS-based PLA scheme, with the aim to perform continuous authentication. The mesh setup comprises three Raspberry-PI4 computing nodes (acting as Alice, Bob, and Eve) and a server. The server role is to perform the initial authentication when a new node joins the mesh network. After that, the legitimate nodes in the mesh network perform continuous authentication, by leveraging the RSS feature of wireless signals. In particular, Bob tries to authenticate Alice in the presence of Eve. The performance of the presented framework is quantified through extensive experimental results in an outdoor environment, where various nodes' positions, relative distances, and pedestrian speeds scenarios are considered. The obtained results demonstrate the robustness of the underlying model, where an authentication rate of 99% for the static case can be achieved. Meanwhile, at the pedestrian speed, the authentication rate can drop to 85%. On the other hand, the detection rate improves when the distance between the legitimate and wiretap links is large (exceeds 20 meters) or when Alice and Eve are moving in different mobility patterns.

The world’s most important industrial economy is particularly vulnerable to both external and internal threats, such as the one uncovered in Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) and Industrial Control Systems (ICS). Upon those systems, the success criteria for security are quite dynamic. Security flaws in these automated SCADA systems have already been discovered by infiltrating the entire network in addition to reducing production line hazards. The objective of our review article is to show various potential future research voids that recent studies have, as well as how many methods are available to concentrate on specific aspects of risk assessment of manufactured systems. The state-of-the-art methods in cyber security risk assessment of SCADA systems are reviewed and compared in this research. Multiple contemporary risk assessment approaches developed for or deployed in the settings of a SCADA system are considered and examined in detail. We outline the approaches’ main points before analyzing them in terms of risk assessment, conventional analytical procedures, and research challenges. The paper also examines possible risk regions or locations where breaches in such automated SCADA systems can emerge, as well as solutions as to how to safeguard and eliminate the hazards when they arise during production manufacturing.

Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) as a techno-policy ecosystem for establishing electronic trust has survived for several decades and evolved as the de-facto model for centralized trust in electronic transactions. In this paper, we study the PKI ecosystem that are prevailing in the South Asian and Oceanic countries and brief them. We also look at how PKI has coped up with the rapid technological changes and how policies have been realigned or formulated to strengthen the PKI ecosystem in these countries.

Early detection of conflict potentials around the community is vital for the Central Java Regional Police Department, especially in the Analyst section of the Directorate of Security Intelligence. Performance in carrying out early detection will affect the peace and security of the community. The performance of potential conflict detection activities can be improved using an integrated early detection information system by shortening the time after observation, report preparation, information processing, and analysis. Developed using Unified Process as a software life cycle, the obtained result shows the time-based performance variables of the officers are significantly improved, including observation time, report production, data finding, and document formatting.

Resilience and antifragility under duress present significant challenges for autonomic and self-adaptive systems operating in contested environments. In such settings, the system has to continually plan ahead, accounting for either an adversary or an environment that may negate its actions or degrade its capabilities. This will involve projecting future states, as well as assessing recovery options, counter-measures, and progress towards system goals. For antifragile systems to be effective, we envision three self-* properties to be of key importance: self-exploration, self-learning and self-training. Systems should be able to efficiently self-explore – using adversarial search – the potential impact of the adversary’s attacks and compute the most resilient responses. The exploration can be assisted by prior knowledge of the adversary’s capabilities and attack strategies, which can be self-learned – using opponent modelling – from previous attacks and interactions. The system can self-train – using reinforcement learning – such that it evolves and improves itself as a result of being attacked. This paper discusses those visions and outlines their realisation in AWaRE, a cyber-resilient and self-adaptive multi-agent system.

Due to the widespread use of the Internet of Things (IoT) in recent years, the need for IoT technologies to handle communications with the rest of the globe has grown dramatically. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) play a vital role in the operation of the IoT. The creation of Internet of Things operating systems (OS), which can handle the newly constructed IoT hardware, as well as new protocols and procedures for all communication levels, all of which are now in development, will pave the way for the future. When compared to other devices, these gadgets require a comparatively little amount of electricity, memory, and other resources. This has caused the scientific community to become more aware of the relevance of IoT device operating systems as a result of their findings. These devices may be made more versatile and powerful by including an operating system that contains real-time capabilities, kernel, networking, and other features, among other things. IEEE 802.15.4 networks are linked together using IPv6, which has a wide address space and so enables more devices to connect to the internet using the 6LoWPAN protocol. It is necessary to address some privacy and security issues that have arisen as a result of the widespread use of the Internet, notwithstanding the great benefits that have resulted. For the Internet of Things operating systems, this research has provided a network security architecture that ensures secure communication by utilizing the Cooja network simulator in combination with the Contiki operating system and demonstrate and explained how the nodes can protect from the network layer and physical layer attacks. Also, this research has depicted the energy consumption results of each designated node type during the authentication and communication process. Finally, proposed a few further improvements for the architecture which will enhance the network layer protection.

The 5G technology will play a crucial role in global economic growth through numerous industrial developments. However, it is essential to ensure the security of these developed systems, while 5G brings unique security challenges. This paper contributes explicitly to the need for an effective Vulnerability Assessment Approach (VAA) to identify and assess the vulnerabilities in 5G networks in an accurate, salable, and dynamic way. The proposed approach develops an optimized mechanism based on the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to an Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) to analyze the vulnerabilities in 5G Edge networks from the attacker perspective while considering the dynamic and scalable Edge properties. Furthermore, we introduce a cloud-based 5G Edge security testbed to test and evaluate the accuracy, scalability, and performance of the proposed VAA.

To ensure comprehensive information protection, it is necessary to use various means of information protection, distributed by levels and segments of the information system. This creates a contradiction, which consists in the presence of many different means of information protection and the inability to ensure their joint coordinated application in ensuring the protection of information due to the lack of an automated control system. One of the tasks that contribute to the solution of this problem is the task of generating a feasible organizational structure and the structure of such an automated control system, the results of which would provide these options and choose the one that is optimal under given initial parameters and limitations. The problem is solved by reducing the General task with particular splitting the original graph of the automated cyber defense control system into subgraphs. As a result, the organizational composition and the automated cyber defense management system structures will provide a set of acceptable variants, on the basis of which the optimal choice is made under the given initial parameters and restrictions. As a result, admissible variants for the formation technique of organizational structure and structure by the automated control system of cyber defense is received.

The transportation sector is undergoing rapid changes to reduce pollution and increase life quality in urban areas. One of the most effective approaches is flexible car rental and sharing to reduce traffic congestion and parking space issues. In this paper, we envision a flexible car sharing framework where vehicle owners want to make their vehicles available for flexible rental to other users. The owners delegate the management of their vehicles to intermediate services under certain policies, such as municipalities or authorized services, which manage the due infrastructure and services that can be accessed by users. We investigate the design of an accountable solution that allow vehicles owners, who want to share their vehicles securely under certain usage policies, to control that delegated services and users comply with the policies. While monitoring users behavior, our approach also takes care of users privacy, preventing tracking or profiling procedures by other parties. Existing approaches put high trust assumptions on users and third parties, do not consider users' privacy requirements, or have limitations in terms of flexibility or applicability. We propose an accountable protocol that extends standard delegated authorizations and integrate it with Security Credential Management Systems (SCMS), while considering the requirements and constraints of vehicular networks. We show that the proposed approach represents a practical approach to guarantee accountability in realistic scenarios with acceptable overhead.

In this paper we study the problem of regret minimization in reinforcement learning (RL) under differential privacy constraints. This work is motivated by the wide range of RL applications for providing personalized service, where privacy concerns are becoming paramount. In contrast to previous works, we take the first step towards non-tabular RL settings, while providing a rigorous privacy guarantee. In particular, we consider the adaptive control of differentially private linear quadratic (LQ) systems. We develop the first private RL algorithm, Private-OFU-RL which is able to attain a sub-linear regret while guaranteeing privacy protection. More importantly, the additional cost due to privacy is only on the order of \$\textbackslashtextbackslashfrac\textbackslashtextbackslashln(1/\textbackslashtextbackslashdelta)ˆ1/4\textbackslashtextbackslashvarepsilonˆ1/2\$ given privacy parameters \$\textbackslashtextbackslashvarepsilon, \textbackslashtextbackslashdelta \textbackslashtextgreater 0\$. Through this process, we also provide a general procedure for adaptive control of LQ systems under changing regularizers, which not only generalizes previous non-private controls, but also serves as the basis for general private controls.

Steganography is one of the techniques for secure transformation of data which aims at hiding information inside other media in such a way that no one will notice. The cover media that can accommodate secret information include text, audio, image, and video. Images are the most popular covering media in steganography, due to the fact that, they are heavily used in daily applications and have high redundancy in representation. In this paper, we propose an adaptive steganography algorithm for hiding information in RGB images. To minimize visual perceptible distortion, the proposed algorithm uses edge pixels for embedding data. It detects the edge pixels in the image using the Sobel filter. Then, the message is embedded into the LSBs of the blue channel of the edge pixels. To resist statistical attacks, the distribution of the blue channel of the edge pixels is used when embedding data in the cover image. The experimental results showed that the algorithm offers high capacity for hiding data in cover images; it does not distort the quality of the stego image; it is robust enough against statistical attacks; and its execution time is short enough for online data transfer. Also, the results showed that the proposed algorithm outperforms similar approaches in all evaluation metrics.