Biblio

This paper presents a framework to identify the authors of Thai online messages. The identification is based on 53 writing attributes and the selected algorithms are support vector machine (SVM) and C4.5 decision tree. Experimental results indicate that the overall accuracies achieved by the SVM and the C4.5 were 79% and 75%, respectively. This difference was not statistically significant (at 95% confidence interval). As for the performance of identifying individual authors, in some cases the SVM was clearly better than the C4.5. But there were also other cases where both of them could not distinguish one author from another.

With the rapid increase in cloud services collecting and using user data to offer personalized experiences, ensuring that these services comply with their privacy policies has become a business imperative for building user trust. However, most compliance efforts in industry today rely on manual review processes and audits designed to safeguard user data, and therefore are resource intensive and lack coverage. In this paper, we present our experience building and operating a system to automate privacy policy compliance checking in Bing. Central to the design of the system are (a) Legal ease-a language that allows specification of privacy policies that impose restrictions on how user data is handled, and (b) Grok-a data inventory for Map-Reduce-like big data systems that tracks how user data flows among programs. Grok maps code-level schema elements to data types in Legal ease, in essence, annotating existing programs with information flow types with minimal human input. Compliance checking is thus reduced to information flow analysis of Big Data systems. The system, bootstrapped by a small team, checks compliance daily of millions of lines of ever-changing source code written by several thousand developers.

We characterize the secrecy level of communication under Uncoordinated Frequency Hopping, a spread spectrum scheme where a transmitter and a receiver randomly hop through a set of frequencies with the goal of deceiving an adversary. In our work, the goal of the legitimate parties is to land on a given frequency without the adversary eavesdroppers doing so, therefore being able to communicate securely in that period, that may be used for secret-key exchange. We also consider the effect on secrecy of the availability of friendly jammers that can be used to obstruct eavesdroppers by causing them interference. Our results show that tuning the number of frequencies and adding friendly jammers are effective countermeasures against eavesdroppers.

The popularity of mobile devices and the enormous number of third party mobile applications in the market have naturally lead to several vulnerabilities being identified and abused. This is coupled with the immaturity of intrusion detection system (IDS) technology targeting mobile devices. In this paper we propose a modular host-based IDS framework for mobile devices that uses behavior analysis to profile applications on the Android platform. Anomaly detection can then be used to categorize malicious behavior and alert users. The proposed system accommodates different detection algorithms, and is being tested at a major telecom operator in North America. This paper highlights the architecture, findings, and lessons learned.

Many systems rely on passwords for authentication. Due to numerous accounts for different services, users have to choose and remember a significant number of passwords. Password-Manager applications address this issue by storing the user's passwords. They are especially useful on mobile devices, because of the ubiquitous access to the account passwords. Password-Managers often use key derivation functions to convert a master password into a cryptographic key suitable for encrypting the list of passwords, thus protecting the passwords against unauthorized, off-line access. Therefore, design and implementation flaws in the key derivation function impact password security significantly. Design and implementation problems in the key derivation function can render the encryption on the password list useless, by for example allowing efficient bruteforce attacks, or - even worse - direct decryption of the stored passwords. In this paper, we analyze the key derivation functions of popular Android Password-Managers with often startling results. With this analysis, we want to raise the awareness of developers of security critical apps for security, and provide an overview about the current state of implementation security of security-critical applications.

The detectability of malicious circuitry on FPGAs with varying placement properties yet has to be investigated. The authors utilize a Xilinx Virtex-II Pro target platform in order to insert a sequential denial-of-service Trojan into an existing AES design by manipulating a Xilinx-specific, intermediate file format prior to the bitstream generation. Thereby, there is no need for an attacker to acquire access to the hardware description language representation of a potential target architecture. Using a side-channel analysis setup for electromagnetic emanation (EM) measurements, they evaluate the detectability of different Trojan designs with varying location and logic distribution properties. The authors successfully distinguish the malicious from the genuine designs and provide information on how the location and distribution properties of the Trojan logic affect its detectability. To the best of their knowledge, this has been the first practically conducted Trojan detection using localized EM measurements.
 

The University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (Illinois), Pacific Northwest National Labs (PNNL), and the University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute (USC-ISI) consortium is working toward providing tools and expertise to enable collaborative research to improve security and resiliency of cyber physical systems. In this extended abstract we discuss the challenges and the solution space. We demonstrate the feasibility of some of the proposed components through a wide-area situational awareness experiment for the power grid across the three sites.
 

Persisting to ignore the consequences of Cyber Warfare will bring severe concerns to all people. Hackers and governments alike should understand the barriers of which their methods take them. Governments use Cyber Warfare to give them a tactical advantage over other countries, defend themselves from their enemies or to inflict damage upon their adversaries. Hackers use Cyber Warfare to gain personal information, commit crimes, or to reveal sensitive and beneficial intelligence. Although both methods can provide ethical uses, the equivalent can be said at the other end of the spectrum. Knowing and comprehending these devices will not only strengthen the ability to detect these attacks and combat against them but will also provide means to divulge despotic government plans, as the outcome of Cyber Warfare can be worse than the outcome of conventional warfare. The paper discussed the concept of ethics and reasons that led to use information technology in military war, the effects of using cyber war on civilians, the legality of the cyber war and ways of controlling the use of information technology that may be used against civilians. This research uses a survey methodology to overlook the awareness of Arab citizens towards the idea of cyber war, provide findings and evidences of ethics behind the offensive cyber warfare. Detailed strategies and approaches should be developed in this aspect. The author recommended urging the scientific and technological research centers to improve the security and develop defending systems to prevent the use of technology in military war against civilians.
 

Programming languages have long incorporated type safety, increasing their level of abstraction and thus aiding programmers. Type safety eliminates whole classes of security-sensitive bugs, replacing the tedious and error-prone search for such bugs in each application with verifying the correctness of the type system. Despite their benefits, these protections often end at the process boundary, that is, type safety holds within a program but usually not to the file system or communication with other programs. Existing operating system approaches to bridge this gap require the use of a single programming language or common language runtime. We describe the deep integration of type safety in Ethos, a clean-slate operating system which requires that all program input and output satisfy a recognizer before applications are permitted to further process it. Ethos types are multilingual and runtime-agnostic, and each has an automatically generated unique type identifier. Ethos bridges the type-safety gap between programs by (1) providing a convenient mechanism for specifying the types each program may produce or consume, (2) ensuring that each type has a single, distributed-system-wide recognizer implementation, and (3) inescapably enforcing these type constraints.
 

In this paper we address the problem of designing a fault tolerant control scheme for an HVAC control system where sensing and actuation data are exchanged with a centralized controller via a wireless sensors and actuators network where the communication nodes are subject to permanent failures and malicious intrusions.

Sensors of diverse capabilities and modalities, carried by us or deeply embedded in the physical world, have invaded our personal, social, work, and urban spaces. Our relationship with these sensors is a complicated one. On the one hand, these sensors collect rich data that are shared and disseminated, often initiated by us, with a broad array of service providers, interest groups, friends, and family. Embedded in this data is information that can be used to algorithmically construct a virtual biography of our activities, revealing intimate behaviors and lifestyle patterns. On the other hand, we and the services we use, increasingly depend directly and indirectly on information originating from these sensors for making a variety of decisions, both routine and critical, in our lives. The quality of these decisions and our confidence in them depend directly on the quality of the sensory information and our trust in the sources. Sophisticated adversaries, benefiting from the same technology advances as the sensing systems, can manipulate sensory sources and analyze data in subtle ways to extract sensitive knowledge, cause erroneous inferences, and subvert decisions. The consequences of these compromises will only amplify as our society increasingly complex human-cyber-physical systems with increased reliance on sensory information and real-time decision cycles.Drawing upon examples of this two-faceted relationship with sensors in applications such as mobile health and sustainable buildings, this talk will discuss the challenges inherent in designing a sensor information flow and processing architecture that is sensitive to the concerns of both producers and consumer. For the pervasive sensing infrastructure to be trusted by both, it must be robust to active adversaries who are deceptively extracting private information, manipulating beliefs and subverting decisions. While completely solving these challenges would require a new science of resilient, secure and trustworthy networked sensing and decision systems that would combine hitherto disciplines of distributed embedded systems, network science, control theory, security, behavioral science, and game theory, this talk will provide some initial ideas. These include an approach to enabling privacy-utility trade-offs that balance the tension between risk of information sharing to the producer and the value of information sharing to the consumer, and method to secure systems against physical manipulation of sensed information.

Sensors of diverse capabilities and modalities, carried by us or deeply embedded in the physical world, have invaded our personal, social, work, and urban spaces. Our relationship with these sensors is a complicated one. On the one hand, these sensors collect rich data that are shared and disseminated, often initiated by us, with a broad array of service providers, interest groups, friends, and family. Embedded in this data is information that can be used to algorithmically construct a virtual biography of our activities, revealing intimate behaviors and lifestyle patterns. On the other hand, we and the services we use, increasingly depend directly and indirectly on information originating from these sensors for making a variety of decisions, both routine and critical, in our lives. The quality of these decisions and our confidence in them depend directly on the quality of the sensory information and our trust in the sources. Sophisticated adversaries, benefiting from the same technology advances as the sensing systems, can manipulate sensory sources and analyze data in subtle ways to extract sensitive knowledge, cause erroneous inferences, and subvert decisions. The consequences of these compromises will only amplify as our society increasingly complex human-cyber-physical systems with increased reliance on sensory information and real-time decision cycles.Drawing upon examples of this two-faceted relationship with sensors in applications such as mobile health and sustainable buildings, this talk will discuss the challenges inherent in designing a sensor information flow and processing architecture that is sensitive to the concerns of both producers and consumer. For the pervasive sensing infrastructure to be trusted by both, it must be robust to active adversaries who are deceptively extracting private information, manipulating beliefs and subverting decisions. While completely solving these challenges would require a new science of resilient, secure and trustworthy networked sensing and decision systems that would combine hitherto disciplines of distributed embedded systems, network science, control theory, security, behavioral science, and game theory, this talk will provide some initial ideas. These include an approach to enabling privacy-utility trade-offs that balance the tension between risk of information sharing to the producer and the value of information sharing to the consumer, and method to secure systems against physical manipulation of sensed information.
 

Web Service (WS) plays an important role in today's word to provide effective services for humans and these web services are built with the standard of SOAP, WSDL & UDDI. This technology enables various service providers to register and service sender their intelligent agent based privacy preserving modelservices to utilize the service over the internet through pre established networks. Also accessing these services need to be secured and protected from various types of attacks in the network environment. Exchanging data between two applications on a secure channel is a challenging issue in today communication world. Traditional security mechanism such as secured socket layer (SSL), Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Internet Protocol Security (IP Sec) is able to resolve this problem partially, hence this research paper proposes the privacy preserving named as HTTPI to secure the communication more efficiently. This HTTPI protocol satisfies the QoS requirements, such as authentication, authorization, integrity and confidentiality in various levels of the OSI layers. This work also ensures the QoS that covers non functional characteristics like performance (throughput), response time, security, reliability and capacity. This proposed intelligent agent based model results in excellent throughput, good response time and increases the QoS requirements.
 

This paper discusses strategies for I/O sharing in Multiple Independent Levels of Security (MILS) systems mostly deployed in the special environment of avionic systems. MILS system designs are promising approaches for handling the increasing complexity of functionally integrated systems, where multiple applications run concurrently on the same hardware platform. Such integrated systems, also known as Integrated Modular Avionics (IMA) in the aviation industry, require communication to remote systems located outside of the hosting hardware platform. One possible solution is to provide each partition, the isolated runtime environment of an application, a direct interface to the communication's hardware controller. Nevertheless, this approach requires a special design of the hardware itself. This paper discusses efficient system architectures for I/O sharing in the environment of high-criticality embedded systems and the exemplary analysis of Free scale's proprietary Data Path Acceleration Architecture (DPAA) with respect to generic hardware requirements. Based on this analysis we also discuss the development of possible architectures matching with the MILS approach. Even though the analysis focuses on avionics it is equally applicable to automotive architectures such as Auto SAR.

Infrastructure-based Vehicular Networks can be applied in different social contexts, such as health care, transportation and entertainment. They can easily take advantage of the benefices provided by wireless mesh networks (WMNs) to mobility, since WMNs essentially support technological convergence and resilience, required for the effective operation of services and applications. However, infrastructure-based vehicular networks are prone to attacks such as ARP packets flooding that compromise mobility management and users' network access. Hence, this work proposes MIRF, a secure mobility scheme based on reputation and filtering to mitigate flooding attacks on mobility management. The efficiency of the MIRF scheme has been evaluated by simulations considering urban scenarios with and without attacks. Analyses show that it significantly improves the packet delivery ratio in scenarios with attacks, mitigating their intentional negative effects, as the reduction of malicious ARP requests. Furthermore, improvements have been observed in the number of handoffs on scenarios under attacks, being faster than scenarios without the scheme.

Data confidentiality can be effectively preserved through encryption. In certain situations, this is inadequate, as users may be coerced into disclosing their decryption keys. Steganographic techniques and deniable encryption algorithms have been devised to hide the very existence of encrypted data. We examine the feasibility and efficacy of deniable encryption for mobile devices. To address obstacles that can compromise plausibly deniable encryption (PDE) in a mobile environment, we design a system called Mobiflage. Mobiflage enables PDE on mobile devices by hiding encrypted volumes within random data in a devices free storage space. We leverage lessons learned from deniable encryption in the desktop environment, and design new countermeasures for threats specific to mobile systems. We provide two implementations for the Android OS, to assess the feasibility and performance of Mobiflage on different hardware profiles. MF-SD is designed for use on devices with FAT32 removable SD cards. Our MF-MTP variant supports devices that instead share a single internal partition for both apps and user accessible data. MF-MTP leverages certain Ext4 file system mechanisms and uses an adjusted data-block allocator. These new techniques for soring hidden volumes in Ext4 file systems can also be applied to other file systems to enable deniable encryption for desktop OSes and other mobile platforms.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is here, more than 10 billion units are already connected and five times more devices are expected to be deployed in the next five years. Technological standarization and the management and fostering of rapid innovation by governments are among the main challenges of the IoT. However, security and privacy are the key to make the IoT reliable and trusted. Security mechanisms for the IoT should provide features such as scalability, interoperability and lightness. This paper addresses authentication and access control in the frame of the IoT. It presents Physical Unclonable Functions (PUF), which can provide cheap, secure, tamper-proof secret keys to authentify constrained M2M devices. To be successfully used in the IoT context, this technology needs to be embedded in a standardized identity and access management framework. On the other hand, Embedded Subscriber Identity Module (eSIM) can provide cellular connectivity with scalability, interoperability and standard compliant security protocols. The paper discusses an authorization scheme for a constrained resource server taking advantage of PUF and eSIM features. Concrete IoT uses cases are discussed (SCADA and building automation).

Virtualized environments are widely thought to cause problems for software-based random number generators (RNGs), due to use of virtual machine (VM) snapshots as well as fewer and believed-to-be lower quality entropy sources. Despite this, we are unaware of any published analysis of the security of critical RNGs when running in VMs. We fill this gap, using measurements of Linux's RNG systems (without the aid of hardware RNGs, the most common use case today) on Xen, VMware, and Amazon EC2. Despite CPU cycle counters providing a significant source of entropy, various deficiencies in the design of the Linux RNG makes its first output vulnerable during VM boots and, more critically, makes it suffer from catastrophic reset vulnerabilities. We show cases in which the RNG will output the exact same sequence of bits each time it is resumed from the same snapshot. This can compromise, for example, cryptographic secrets generated after resumption. We explore legacy-compatible countermeasures, as well as a clean-slate solution. The latter is a new RNG called Whirlwind that provides a simpler, more-secure solution for providing system randomness.
 

In this paper, we consider the security of exact-repair regenerating codes operating at the minimum-storage-regenerating (MSR) point. The security requirement (introduced in Shah et. al.) is that no information about the stored data file must be leaked in the presence of an eavesdropper who has access to the contents of ℓ1 nodes as well as all the repair traffic entering a second disjoint set of ℓ2 nodes. We derive an upper bound on the size of a data file that can be securely stored that holds whenever ℓ2 ≤ d - k + 1. This upper bound proves the optimality of the product-matrix-based construction of secure MSR regenerating codes by Shah et. al.

In this paper, we consider the security of exact-repair regenerating codes operating at the minimum-storage-regenerating (MSR) point. The security requirement (introduced in Shah et. al.) is that no information about the stored data file must be leaked in the presence of an eavesdropper who has access to the contents of ℓ1 nodes as well as all the repair traffic entering a second disjoint set of ℓ2 nodes. We derive an upper bound on the size of a data file that can be securely stored that holds whenever ℓ2 ≤ d - k + 1. This upper bound proves the optimality of the product-matrix-based construction of secure MSR regenerating codes by Shah et. al.

Using heterogeneous clouds has been considered to improve performance of big-data analytics for healthcare platforms. However, the problem of the delay when transferring big-data over the network needs to be addressed. The purpose of this paper is to analyze and compare existing cloud computing environments (PaaS, IaaS) in order to implement middleware services. Understanding the differences and similarities between cloud technologies will help in the interconnection of healthcare platforms. The paper provides a general overview of the techniques and interfaces for cloud computing middleware services, and proposes a cloud architecture for healthcare. Cloud middleware enables heterogeneous devices to act as data sources and to integrate data from other healthcare platforms, but specific APIs need to be developed. Furthermore, security and management problems need to be addressed, given the heterogeneous nature of the communication and computing environment. The present paper fills a gap in the electronic healthcare register literature by providing an overview of cloud computing middleware services and standardized interfaces for the integration with medical devices.

Physical-layer authentication techniques exploit the unique properties of the wireless medium to enhance traditional higher-level authentication procedures. We propose to reduce the higher-level authentication overhead by using a state-of-the-art multi-target tracking technique based on Gaussian processes. The proposed technique has the additional advantage that it is capable of automatically learning the dynamics of the trusted user's channel response and the time-frequency fingerprint of intruders. Numerical simulations show very low intrusion rates, and an experimental validation using a wireless test bed with programmable radios demonstrates the technique's effectiveness.

Physical-layer authentication techniques exploit the unique properties of the wireless medium to enhance traditional higher-level authentication procedures. We propose to reduce the higher-level authentication overhead by using a state-of-the-art multi-target tracking technique based on Gaussian processes. The proposed technique has the additional advantage that it is capable of automatically learning the dynamics of the trusted user's channel response and the time-frequency fingerprint of intruders. Numerical simulations show very low intrusion rates, and an experimental validation using a wireless test bed with programmable radios demonstrates the technique's effectiveness.

Novel Internet services are emerging around an increasing number of sensors and actuators in our surroundings, commonly referred to as smart devices. Smart devices, which form the backbone of the Internet of Things (IoT), enable alternative forms of user experience by means of automation, convenience, and efficiency. At the same time new security and safety issues arise, given the Internet-connectivity and the interaction possibility of smart devices with human's proximate living space. Hence, security is a fundamental requirement of the IoT design. In order to remain interoperable with the existing infrastructure, we postulate a security framework compatible to standard IP-based security solutions, yet optimized to meet the constraints of the IoT ecosystem. In this ongoing work, we first identify necessary components of an interoperable secure End-to-End communication while incorporating Public-key Cryptography (PKC). To this end, we tackle involved computational and communication overheads. The required components on the hardware side are the affordable hardware acceleration engines for cryptographic operations and on the software side header compression and long-lasting secure sessions. In future work, we focus on integration of these components into a framework and the evaluation of an early prototype of this framework.

Novel Internet services are emerging around an increasing number of sensors and actuators in our surroundings, commonly referred to as smart devices. Smart devices, which form the backbone of the Internet of Things (IoT), enable alternative forms of user experience by means of automation, convenience, and efficiency. At the same time new security and safety issues arise, given the Internet-connectivity and the interaction possibility of smart devices with human's proximate living space. Hence, security is a fundamental requirement of the IoT design. In order to remain interoperable with the existing infrastructure, we postulate a security framework compatible to standard IP-based security solutions, yet optimized to meet the constraints of the IoT ecosystem. In this ongoing work, we first identify necessary components of an interoperable secure End-to-End communication while incorporating Public-key Cryptography (PKC). To this end, we tackle involved computational and communication overheads. The required components on the hardware side are the affordable hardware acceleration engines for cryptographic operations and on the software side header compression and long-lasting secure sessions. In future work, we focus on integration of these components into a framework and the evaluation of an early prototype of this framework.