Biblio

This work introduces a new microcomputing node with long-term resistant data security, based on asymmetric and symmetric encryption combined with the modern and established scripting language Python. The presented microcomputing node integrates a MicroPython runtime environment to address a wide audience of application engineers as user base instead of a selected group of embedded engineers, who have deep knowledge in programming IoT devices using C/C++. It combines its scripting capabilities with security features of modern smartcards and secure cellular networking based on 4G.

Because of the rise of the Monroe coin, many JavaScript files with embedded malicious code are used to mine cryptocurrency using the computing power of the browser client. This kind of script does not have any obvious behaviors when it is running, so it is difficult for common users to witness them easily. This feature could lead the browser side cryptocurrency mining abused without the user’s permission. Traditional browser security strategies focus on information disclosure and malicious code execution, but not suitable for such scenes. Thus, we present a novel detection method named MineDetector using a machine learning algorithm and static features for automatically detecting browser-side cryptojacking scripts on the websites. MineDetector extracts five static feature groups available from the abstract syntax tree and text of codes and combines them using the machine learning method to build a powerful cryptojacking classifier. In the real experiment, MineDetector achieves the accuracy of 99.41% and the recall of 93.55% and has better performance in time comparing with present dynamic methods. We also made our work user-friendly by developing a browser extension that is click-to-run on the Chrome browser.

The HPC application community has proposed many new application communication structures, middleware interfaces, and communication models to improve HPC application performance. Modifying proxy applications is the standard practice for the evaluation of these novel methodologies. Currently, this requires the creation of a new version of the proxy application for each combination of the approach being tested. In this article, we present a modular proxy-application framework, MiniMod, that enables evaluation of a combination of independently written computation kernels, data transfer logic, communication access, and threading libraries. MiniMod is designed to allow rapid development of individual modules which can be combined at runtime. Through MiniMod, developers only need a single implementation to evaluate application impact under a variety of scenarios.We demonstrate the flexibility of MiniMod’s design by using it to implement versions of a heat diffusion kernel and the miniFE finite element proxy application, along with a variety of communication, granularity, and threading modules. We examine how changing communication libraries, communication granularities, and threading approaches impact these applications on an HPC system. These experiments demonstrate that MiniMod can rapidly improve the ability to assess new middleware techniques for scientific computing applications and next-generation hardware platforms.

The operation of the modern power grid is becoming increasingly reliant on its underlying communication network, especially within the context of the rapidly growing integration of Distributed Energy Resources (DERs). This tight cyber-physical coupling brings uncertainties and challenges for the power grid operation and control. To help operators manage the complex cyber-physical environment, ensure the integrity, and continuity of reliable grid operation, a two-stage approach is proposed that is compatible with current ICS protocols to improve the deliverability of time critical operations. With the proposed framework, the impact Denial of Service (DoS) attack can have on a Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) session could be effectively prevented and mitigated. This coordinated approach combines the efficiency of congestion window reconfiguration and the applicability of physical-only mitigation approaches. By expanding the state and action space to encompass both the cyber and physical domains. This approach has been proven to outperform the traditional, physical-only method, in multiple network congested scenarios that were emulated in a real-time cyber-physical testbed.

Computer network and virtual machine security is very essential in today's era. Various architectures have been proposed for network security or prevent malicious access of internal or external users. Various existing systems have already developed to detect malicious activity on victim machines; sometimes any external user creates some malicious behavior and gets unauthorized access of victim machines to such a behavior system considered as malicious activities or Intruder. Numerous machine learning and soft computing techniques design to detect the activities in real-time network log audit data. KKDDCUP99 and NLSKDD most utilized data set to detect the Intruder on benchmark data set. In this paper, we proposed the identification of intruders using machine learning algorithms. Two different techniques have been proposed like a signature with detection and anomaly-based detection. In the experimental analysis, demonstrates SVM, Naïve Bayes and ANN algorithm with various data sets and demonstrate system performance on the real-time network environment.

The model-free adaptive security tracking control (MFASTC) problem of nonlinear networked control systems is explored in this paper with DoS attacks and delays consideration. In order to alleviate the impact of DoS attack and RTT delays on NCSs performance, an attack compensation mechanism and a networked predictive-based delay compensation mechanism are designed, respectively. The data-based designed method need not the dynamic and structure of the system, The MFASTC algorithm is proposed to ensure the output tracking error being bounded in the mean-square sense. Finally, an example is given to illustrate the effectiveness of the new algorithm by a comparison.

In this paper, we investigate joint sensor-actuator cyber attacks in discrete event systems. We assume that attackers can attack some sensors and actuators at the same time by altering observations and control commands. Because of the nondeterminism in observation and control caused by cyber attacks, the behavior of the supervised systems becomes nondeterministic and deviates from the target. We define two bounds on languages, an upper-bound and a lower-bound, to describe the nondeterministic behavior. We then use the upper-bound language to investigate the safety supervisory control problem under cyber attacks. After introducing CA-controllability and CA-observability, we successfully solve the supervisory control problem under cyber attacks.

Due to the insufficient awareness of decision makers on the security risks of industrial cyber-physical systems(ICPS) under cyber-attacks, it is difficult to take effective defensive measures according to the characteristics of different cyber-attacks in advance. To solve the above problem, this paper gives a qualitative analysis method of ICPS security risk from the perspective of defenders. The ICPS being attacked is modeled as a dynamic closed-loop fusion model where the mathematical models of the physical plant and the feedback controller are established. Based on the fusion model, the disruption resources generated by attacks are mathematically described. Based on the designed Kalman filter, the detection of attacks is judged according to the residual value of the system. According to the disruption resources and detectability, a general security risk level model is further established to evaluate the security risk level of the system under attacks. The simulation experiments are conducted by using Matlab to analyze the destructiveness and detectability of attacks, where the results show that the proposed qualitative analysis method can effectively describe the security risk under the cyber-attacks.

The ecosystem of the Internet of Things (IoT) continues growing now and covers more and more fields. One of these areas is the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) which integrates sensors and actuators, business applications, open web applications, multimedia security systems, positioning, and tracking systems. Each of these components creates its own data stream and has its own parameters of the probability distribution when transmitting information packets. One such distribution, specific to the TrumpfTruPrint 1000 IIoT system, is the beta distribution. We described issues of the processing of such a data flow by an agent model of the \$5\textbackslashtextbackslashtimes5\$ NoC switch fabric. The concepts of modern telecommunication networks 5G/6G imply the processing of “small” data in the place of their origin, not excluding the centralized processing of big data. This process, which involves the transmission, distribution, and processing of data, involves a large number of devices: routers, multiprocessor systems, multi-core systems, etc. We assumed that the data stream is processed by a device with the network structure, such as NoC, and goes to its built-in router. We carried out a study how the average queues of the \$5\textbackslashtextbackslashtimes5\$ router change with changes in the parameters of a data stream that has a beta distribution.

In this paper, we present a theoretical approach concerning the econometric modelling for the estimation of cyber-security risk, with the use of time-series analysis methods and alternatively with Machine Learning (ML) based, deep learning methodology. Also we present work performed in the framework of SAINT H2020 Project [1], concerning innovative data mining techniques, based on automated web scrapping, for the retrieving of the relevant time-series data. We conclude with a review of emerging challenges in cyber-risk assessment brought by the rapid development of adversarial AI.

In recent years, many modifications have been done to combat the weaknesses of the Vigenère Cipher Algorithm. Several studies have been carried out to rectify the flaw of the algorithm’s repeating key nature by increasing the key length equal to that of the plain text. However, some characters cannot be encrypted due to the limited set of characters in the key. This paper modified the algorithm’s key generation process using a Pseudo-Random Number Generator to improve the algorithm’s security and expanded the table of characters to up to 190 characters. The results show that based on Monobit examination and frequency analysis, the repeating nature of the key is non-existent, and the generated key can be used to encrypt a larger set of characters. The ciphertext has a low IC value of 0.030, which is similar to a random string and polyalphabetic cipher with an IC value of 0.038 but not equal to a monoalphabetic cipher with an IC value of 0.065. Results show that the modified version of the algorithm performs better than some of the recent studies conducted on it

Privacy-Preserving Data Mining (PPDM) has become an exciting topic to discuss in recent decades due to the growing interest in big data and data mining. A technique of securing data but still preserving the privacy that is in it. This paper provides an alternative perturbation-based PPDM technique which is carried out by modifying the RNP algorithm. The novelty given in this paper are modifications of some steps method with a specific purpose. The modifications made are in the form of first narrowing the selection of the disturbance value. With the aim that the number of attributes that are replaced in each record line is only as many as the attributes in the original data, no more and no need to repeat; secondly, derive the perturbation function from the cumulative distribution function and use it to find the probability distribution function so that the selection of replacement data has a clear basis. The experiment results on twenty-five perturbed data show that the modified RNP algorithm balances data utility and security level by selecting the appropriate disturbance value and perturbation value. The level of security is measured using privacy metrics in the form of value difference, average transformation of data, and percentage of retains. The method presented in this paper is fascinating to be applied to actual data that requires privacy preservation.

In recent days cloud domain gains a lot of user attention in order to store and access the data from remote locations connected through the internet. As it is generally known that all the sensitive data come from remote locations will be stored in the centralized storage medium and then try to access the data from that centralized storage space controlled by the cloud server. It is facing a problem like there is no security for the data in terms of user authorization and data authentication from the centralized storage location. Hence, it is required to migrate for a new storage procedure like Decentralized storage of cloud data in which the systems that do not rely on a central authority, so that the collusion resistance can be avoided by maintaining a global identifier. Here, the term de-centralized access means granting multi authorities to control the access for providing more security for the sensitive data. The proposed research study attempts to develop a new scheme by adding a global identifier like Attribute Authority (AA) for providing access keys for the data users who wish to access the sensitive information from the cloud server. The proposed research work attempts to incorporate the composite order bilinear groups scheme for providing access facility for the data users and provide more security for the sensitive data. By conducting various experiments on the proposed model, the obtained result clearly tells that the proposed system is very efficient to access the data in a de-centralized manner by using a global identifier.

With the development of quantum computers, classical cryptography for secure communication is in danger of becoming obsolete. Quantum cryptography, however, can exploit the laws of quantum mechanics to guarantee unconditional security independently of the computational power of a potential eavesdropper. An example is quantum key distribution (QKD), which allows two parties to encrypt a message through a random secret key encoded in the degrees of freedom of quantum particles, typically photons.

Recent projects regarding the exploration of the functions of microbiomes within communities brought about a plethora of new data. That specific field of study is called Metagenomics and one of its more advancing approach is the application of network analysis. The paper introduces NAMData which is a web-application tool for the network analysis of microbiome data. The system handles the compositionality and sparsity nature of microbiome data by applying taxa filtration, normalization, and zero treatment. Furthermore, compositionally aware correlation estimators were used to compute for the correlation between taxa and the system divides the network into the positive and negative correlation network. NAMData aims to capitalize on the unique network features namely network visualization, centrality scores, and community detection. The system enables researchers to include network analysis in their analysis pipelines even without any knowledge of programming. Biological concepts can be integrated with the network findings gathered from the system to either support existing facts or form new insights.

Background: Most of the people are not medically qualified for studying or understanding the extremity of their diseases or symptoms. This is the place where natural language processing plays a vital role in healthcare. These chatbots collect patients' health data and depending on the data, these chatbot give more relevant data to patients regarding their body conditions and recommending further steps also. Purposes: In the medical field, AI powered healthcare chatbots are beneficial for assisting patients and guiding them in getting the most relevant assistance. Chatbots are more useful for online search that users or patients go through when patients want to know for their health symptoms. Methods: In this study, the health assistant system was developed using Dialogflow application programming interface (API) which is a Google's Natural language processing powered algorithm and the same is deployed on google assistant, telegram, slack, Facebook messenger, and website and mobile app. With this web application, a user can make health requests/queries via text message and might also get relevant health suggestions/recommendations through it. Results: This chatbot acts like an informative and conversational chatbot. This chatbot provides medical knowledge such as disease symptoms and treatments. Storing patients personal and medical information in a database for further analysis of the patients and patients get real time suggestions from doctors. Conclusion: In the healthcare sector AI-powered applications have seen a remarkable spike in recent days. This covid crisis changed the whole healthcare system upside down. So this NLP powered chatbot system reduced office waiting, saving money, time and energy. Patients might be getting medical knowledge and assisting ourselves within their own time and place.

Natural Language Processing is being used in every field of human to machine interaction. Database queries although have a confined set of instructions, but still found to be complex and dedicated human resources are required to write, test, optimize and execute structured query language statements. This makes it difficult, time-consuming and many a time inaccurate too. Such difficulties can be overcome if the queries are formed dynamically with standard procedures. In this work, parsing, lexical analysis, synonym detection and formation processes of the natural language processing are being proposed to be used for dynamically generating SQL queries and optimization of them for fast processing with high accuracy. NLP parsing of the user inputted text for retrieving, creation and insertion of data are being proposed to be created dynamically from English text inputs. This will help users of the system to generate reports from the data as per the requirement without the complexities of SQL. The proposed system will not only generate queries dynamically but will also provide high accuracy and performance.

Network security is of vital importance, and Information Technology admins must always be vigilant. But they often lack the expertise and skills required to harden the network properly, in with the emergence of security threats. The router plays a significant role in maintaining operational security for an organization. When it comes to information security, information security professionals mainly focus on protecting items such as firewalls, virtual private networks, etc. Routers are the foundation of any network's communication method, which means all the network information passes through the routers, making them a desirable target. The proposed automation of the router security hardening solution will immediately improve the security of routers and ensure that they are updated and hardened with minimal human intervention and configuration changes. This is specially focused on small and medium-sized organizations lacking workforce and expertise on network security and will help secure the routers with less time consumption, cost, and increased efficiency. The solution consists of four primary functions, initial configuration, vulnerability fixing, compliance auditing, and rollback. These focus on all aspects of router security in a network, from its configuration when it is initially connected to the network to checking its compliance errors, continuously monitoring the vulnerabilities that need to be fixed, and ensuring that the behavior of the devices is stable and shows no abnormalities when it comes to configuration changes.

Recently, the informatics infrastructure of INRiM Time and Frequency Laboratory has been completely renewed with particular attention to network security and software architecture aspects, with the aims to improve the reliability, robustness and automation of the overall set-up. This upgraded infrastructure has allowed, since January 2020, a fully automated generation and monitoring of the Italian time scale UTC(IT), based on dedicated software developed in-house [1]. We focus in this work on the network and software aspects of our set-up, which enable a robust and reliable automatic time scale generation with continuous monitoring and minimal human intervention.

Deep learning models have been successful and shown to perform better in terms of accuracy and efficiency for facial recognition applications. However, they require huge amount of data samples that were well annotated to be successful. Their data requirements have led to some complications which include increased processing demands of the systems where such systems were to be deployed. Reducing the training sample sizes of deep learning models is still an open problem. This paper proposes the reduction of the number of samples required by the convolutional neutral network used in training a facial recognition system using a new Facial Image Deviation Estimation and Image Selection Algorithm (FIDE-ISA). The algorithm was used to select appropriate facial image training samples incrementally based on their facial deviation. This will reduce the need for huge dataset in training deep learning models. Preliminary results indicated a 100% accuracy for models trained with 54 images (at least 3 images per individual) and above.

Modern IoT infrastructure consists of different sub-systems, devices, applications, platforms, varied connectivity protocols with distinct operating environments scattered across different subsystems within the whole network. Each of these subsystems of the global system has its peculiar computational and security challenges. A security loophole in one subsystem has a directly negative impact on the security of the whole system. The nature and intensity of recent cyber-attacks within IoT networks have increased in recent times. Blockchain technology promises several security benefits including a decentralized authentication mechanism that addresses almost readily the challenges with a centralized authentication mechanism that has the challenges of introducing a single point of failure that affects data and system availability anytime such systems are compromised. The different design specifications and the unique functional requirements for most IoT devices require a strong yet universal authentication mechanism for multimedia data that assures an additional security layer to IoT data. In this paper, the authors propose a decentralized authentication to validate data integrity at the IoT node level. The proposed mechanism guarantees integrity, privacy, and availability of IoT node data.

Internet always remains the target for the cyberattacks, and attackers are getting equipped with more potent tools due to the advancement of technology to preach the security of the Internet. Industries and organizations are sponsoring many projects to avoid these kinds of problems. As a result, SDN (Software Defined Network) architecture is becoming an acceptable alternative for the traditional IP based networks which seems a better approach to defend the Internet. However, SDN is also vulnerable to many new threats because of its architectural concept. SDN might be a primary target for DoS (Denial of Service) and DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks due to centralized control and linking of data plane and control plane. In this paper, the we propose a novel technique for detection of DDoS attacks using information theory metric. We compared our approach with widely used Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) based on Shannon entropy and Renyi entropy, and proved that our proposed methodology has more power to detect malicious flows in SDN based networks. We have used precision, detection rate and FPR (False Positive Rate) as performance parameters for comparison, and validated the methodology using a topology implemented in Mininet network emulator.

Many critical industrial control systems integrate a mixture of state-of-the-art and legacy equipment. Legacy installations lack advanced, and often even basic security features, risking entire system security. Existing research primarily focuses on the development of secure protocols for emerging devices or protocol translation proxies for legacy equipment. However, a robust security framework not only needs encryption but also mechanisms to prevent reconnaissance and unauthorized access to industrial devices. This paper proposes a novel Edge Security Gateway (ESG) that provides both, communication and endpoint security. The ESG is based on double ratchet algorithm and encrypts every message with a different key. It manages the ongoing renewal of short-lived session keys and provides localized firewall protection to individual devices. The ESG is easily customizable for a wide range of industrial application. As a use case, this paper presents the design and validation for synchrophasor technology in smart grid. The ESG effectiveness is practically validated in detecting reconnaissance, manipulation, replay, and command injection attacks due to its perfect forward and backward secrecy properties.

Security is the main concern for wireless sensor nodes and exposed against malicious attacks. To secure the communication between sensor nodes several key managing arrangements are already implemented. The key managing method for any protected application must minimally deliver safety facilities such as truthfulness. Diffie–Hellman key exchange in the absence of authentication is exposed to MITM (man-in-the-middle) attacks due to which the attacker node can easily interrupt the communication, by appearing as a valid node in the network. In wireless sensor networks, single path routing is very common but it suffers with the two problems i:e link failure which results in data loss and if any node in single path is compromised, there is no alternative to send the data to the destination securely. To overcome this problem, multipath routing protocol is used which provides both availability and consistency of data. AOMDV (Ad-hoc On-demand Multipath Distance Vector Routing Protocol) is used in a proposed algorithm which provides alternative paths to reach the data packets to the destination. This paper presents an algorithm DH-SAM (Diffie-Hellman- Sybil Attack Mitigation) to spot and mitigate Sybil nodes and make the network trusted with the objective of solving the issue of MITM attack in the network. After node authentication, secure keys are established between two communicating nodes for data transmission using the Diffie-Hellman algorithm. Performance evaluation of DH-SAM is done by using different metrics such as detection rate, PDR, throughput, and average end to end (AE2E) delay.

With the proliferation of false redundant information on various e-commerce platforms, ineffective recommendations and other untrustworthy behaviors have seriously hindered the healthy development of e-commerce platforms. Modern recommendation systems often use side information to alleviate these problems and also increase prediction accuracy. One such piece of side information, which has been widely investigated, is trust. However, it is difficult to obtain explicit trust relationship data, so researchers infer trust values from other methods, such as the user-to-item relationship. In this paper, addressing the problems, we proposed a novel trust-based recommender model called UITrust, which uses user-item relationship value to improve prediction accuracy. With the improvement the traditional similarity measures by employing the entropies of user and item history ratings to reflect the global rating behavior on both. We evaluate the proposed model using two real-world datasets. The proposed model performs significantly better than the baseline methods. Also, we can use the UITrust to alleviate the sparsity problem associated with correlation-based similarity. In addition to that, the proposed model has a better computational complexity for making predictions than the k-nearest neighbor (kNN) method.