Biblio

A browser extension, also known as a plugin or an addon, is a small software application that adds functionality to a web browser. However, security threats are always linked with such software where data can be compromised and ultimately trust is broken. The proposed research work jas developed a security model named WebSecAsst, which is a chrome plugin relying on the Machine Learning model XGBoost and VirusTotal to detect malicious websites visited by the user and to detect whether the files downloaded from the internet are Malicious or Safe. During this detection, the proposed model preserves the privacy of the user's data to a greater extent than the existing commercial chrome extensions.

The heterogeneous massive logs incoming from multiple sources pose major challenges to professionals responsible for IT security and system administrator. One of the challenges is to develop a scalable heterogeneous logs database for storage and further analysis. In fact, it is difficult to decide which database is suitable for the needs, the best of a use case, execution time and storage performances. In this paper, we explore, study, and compare the performance of SQL and NoSQL databases on large heterogeneous event logs. We implement the relational database using MySQL, the column-oriented database using Impala on the top of Hadoop, and the graph database using Neo4j. We experiment the databases on a large heterogeneous logs and provide advice, the pros and cons of each SQL and NoSQL database. Our findings that Impala outperforms MySQL and Neo4j databases in terms of loading logs, execution time of simple queries, and storage of logs. However, Neo4j outperforms Impala and MySQL in the execution time of complex queries.

The advancement of Information and Communication Technologies has brought numerous facilities and benefits to society. In this environment, surrounded by technologies, data, and personal information, have become an essential and coveted tool for many sectors. In this scenario, where a large amount of data has been collected, stored, and shared, privacy concerns arise, especially when dealing with sensitive data such as health data. The information owner generally has no control over his information, which can bring serious consequences such as increases in health insurance prices or put the individual in an uncomfortable situation with disclosing his physical or mental health. While privacy regulations, like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), make it clear that the information owner must have full control and management over their data, disparities have been observed in most systems and platforms. Therefore, they are often not able to give consent or have control and management over their data. For the users to exercise their right to privacy and have sufficient control over their data, they must know everything that happens to them, where their data is, and where they have been. It is necessary that the entire life cycle, from generation to deletion of data, is managed by its owner. To this end, this article presents an Information Chain of Custody Model based on Blockchain technology, which allows from the traceability of information to the offer of tools that will enable the effective management of data, offering total control to its owner. The result showed that the prototype was very useful in the traceability of the information. With that it became clear the technical feasibility of this research.

With the ever-increasing energy demand and enormous development of generation capacity, modern bulk power systems are mostly pushed to operate with narrower security boundaries. Therefore, timely and reliable assessment of power system security is an inevitable necessity to prevent widespread blackouts and cascading outages. In this paper, a new white-box decision tree-based preventive strategy is presented to evaluate and enhance the power system dynamic security versus the credible N-K contingencies originating from transient instabilities. As well, a competent operating measure is expertly defined to detect and identify the islanding and non-islanding conditions with the aid of a wide-area phasor measurement system. The newly developed strategy is outlined by a three-level simulation with the aim of guaranteeing the power system dynamic security. In the first-level, six hundred islanding and non-islanding scenarios are generated using an enhanced version of the ID3 algorithm, referred to as the C4.5 algorithms. In the second-level, optimal C4.5 decision trees are offline trained based on operating parameters achieved by the reduction error pruning method. In the third level, however, all trained decision trees are rigorously investigated offline and online; and then, the most accurate and reliable decision tree is selected. The newly developed strategy is examined on the IEEE New England 39-bus test system, and its effectiveness is assured by simulation studies.

Intelligent networked vehicles are rapidly developing in intelligence and networking. The communication architecture is becoming more complex, external interfaces are richer, and data types are more complex. Different from the information security of the traditional Internet of Things, the scenarios that need to be met for the security of the Internet of Vehicles are more diverse and the security needs to be more stable. Based on the security technology of traditional Internet of Things, password application is the main protection method to ensure the privacy and non-repudiation of data communication. This article mainly elaborates the application of security protection methods using password-related protection technologies in car-side scenarios and summarizes the security protection recommendations of contemporary connected vehicles in combination with the secure communication architecture of the Internet of Vehicles.

With a broad spectrum of technologies for the protection of personal data, it is important to be able to reliably compare these technologies to choose the most suitable one for a given problem. Although technologies like Homomorphic Encryption have matured over decades, Confidential Computing is still in its infancy with not only informal but also incomplete and even conflicting definitions by the Confidential Computing Consortium (CCC). In this work, we present key issues in definitions and comparison among existing technologies by CCC. We also provide recommendations to achieve clarity and precision in the definitions as well as fair and scientific comparison among existing technologies. We emphasize on the need of formal definitions of the terms and pose it as an open challenge to the community.

Minimal adversarial perturbations added to inputs have been shown to be effective at fooling deep neural networks. In this paper, we introduce several innovations that make white-box targeted attacks follow the intuition of the attacker's goal: to trick the model to assign a higher probability to the target class than to any other, while staying within a specified distance from the original input. First, we propose a new loss function that explicitly captures the goal of targeted attacks, in particular, by using the logits of all classes instead of just a subset, as is common. We show that Auto-PGD with this loss function finds more adversarial examples than it does with other commonly used loss functions. Second, we propose a new attack method that uses a further developed version of our loss function capturing both the misclassification objective and the L∞ distance limit ϵ. This new attack method is relatively 1.5--4.2% more successful on the CIFAR10 dataset and relatively 8.2--14.9% more successful on the ImageNet dataset, than the next best state-of-the-art attack. We confirm using statistical tests that our attack outperforms state-of-the-art attacks on different datasets and values of ϵ and against different defenses.

Decentralized planning for multi-agent systems,such as fleets of robots in a search-and-rescue operation, is oftenconstrained by limitations on how agents can communicate witheach other. One such limitation is the case when agents cancommunicate with each other only when they are in line-of-sight (LOS). Developing decentralized planning methods thatguarantee safety is difficult in this case, as agents that areoccluded from each other might not be able to communicateuntil it’s too late to avoid a safety violation. In this paper, wedevelop a decentralized planning method that explicitly avoidssituations where lack of visibility of other agents would leadto an unsafe situation. Building on top of an existing Rapidly-exploring Random Tree (RRT)-based approach, our methodguarantees safety at each iteration. Simulation studies showthe effectiveness of our method and compare the degradationin performance with respect to a clairvoyant decentralizedplanning algorithm where agents can communicate despite notbeing in LOS of each other.

The intranets in modern organizations are facing severe data breaches and critical resource misuses. By reusing user credentials from compromised systems, Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) attackers can move laterally within the internal network. A promising new approach called deception technology makes the network administrator (i.e., defender) able to deploy decoys to deceive the attacker in the intranet and trap him into a honeypot. Then the defender ought to reasonably allocate decoys to potentially insecure hosts. Unfortunately, existing APT-related defense resource allocation models are infeasible because of the neglect of many realistic factors.In this paper, we make the decoy deployment strategy feasible by proposing a game-theoretic model called the APT Deception Game to describe interactions between the defender and the attacker. More specifically, we decompose the decoy deployment problem into two subproblems and make the problem solvable. Considering the best response of the attacker who is aware of the defender’s deployment strategy, we provide an elitist reservation genetic algorithm to solve this game. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our deployment strategy compared with other heuristic strategies.

In August 2020, Intel asked the research community for feedback on the newly offered architecture extensions, called Intel Trust Domain Extensions (TDX), which give more control to Trust Domains (TDs) over processor resources. One of the key features of these extensions is the remote attestation mechanism, which provides a unified report verification mechanism for TDX and its predecessor Software Guard Extensions (SGX). Based on our experience and intuition, we respond to the request for feedback by formally specifying the attestation mechanism in the TDX using ProVerif's specification language. Although the TDX technology seems very promising, the process of formal specification reveals a number of subtle discrepancies in Intel's specifications that could potentially lead to design and implementation flaws. After resolving these discrepancies, we also present fully automated proofs that our specification of TD attestation preserves the confidentiality of the secret and authentication of the report by considering the state-of-the-art Dolev-Yao adversary in the symbolic model using ProVerif. We have submitted the draft to Intel, and Intel is in the process of making the changes.

Software-defined network (SDN) is a network architecture that used to build, design the hardware components virtually. We can dynamically change the settings of network connections. In the traditional network, it's not possible to change dynamically, because it's a fixed connection. SDN is a good approach but still is vulnerable to DDoS attacks. The DDoS attack is menacing to the internet. To prevent the DDoS attack, the machine learning algorithm can be used. The DDoS attack is the multiple collaborated systems that are used to target the particular server at the same time. In SDN control layer is in the center that link with the application and infrastructure layer, where the devices in the infrastructure layer controlled by the software. In this paper, we propose a machine learning technique namely Decision Tree and Support Vector Machine (SVM) to detect malicious traffic. Our test outcome shows that the Decision Tree and Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithm provides better accuracy and detection rate.

Algorithms for unsupervised anomaly detection have proven their effectiveness and flexibility, however, first it is necessary to calculate with what ratio a certain class begins to be considered anomalous by the autoencoder. For this reason, we propose to conduct a study of the efficiency of autoencoders depending on the ratio of anomalous and non-anomalous classes. The emergence of high-speed networks in electric power systems creates a tight interaction of cyberinfrastructure with the physical infrastructure and makes the power system susceptible to cyber penetration and attacks. To address this problem, this paper proposes an innovative approach to develop a specification-based intrusion detection framework that leverages available information provided by components in a contemporary power system. An autoencoder is used to encode the causal relations among the available information to create patterns with temporal state transitions, which are used as features in the proposed intrusion detection. This allows the proposed method to detect anomalies and cyber attacks.

With the development of 5G technology and intelligent terminals, the future direction of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) evolution is Pervasive Edge Computing (PEC). In the pervasive edge computing environment, intelligent terminals can perform calculations and data processing. By migrating part of the original cloud computing model's calculations to intelligent terminals, the intelligent terminal can complete model training without uploading local data to a remote server. Pervasive edge computing solves the problem of data islands and is also successfully applied in scenarios such as vehicle interconnection and video surveillance. However, pervasive edge computing is facing great security problems. Suppose the remote server is honest but curious. In that case, it can still design algorithms for the intelligent terminal to execute and infer sensitive content such as their identity data and private pictures through the information returned by the intelligent terminal. In this paper, we research the problem of honest but curious remote servers infringing intelligent terminal privacy and propose a differential privacy collaborative deep learning algorithm in the pervasive edge computing environment. We use a Gaussian mechanism that meets the differential privacy guarantee to add noise on the first layer of the neural network to protect the data of the intelligent terminal and use analytical moments accountant technology to track the cumulative privacy loss. Experiments show that with the Gaussian mechanism, the training data of intelligent terminals can be protected reduction inaccuracy.

The utilization of "cloud storage services (CSS)", empowering people to store their data in cloud and avoid from maintenance cost and local data storage. Various data integrity auditing (DIA) frameworks are carried out to ensure the quality of data stored in cloud. Mostly, if not all, of current plans, a client requires to utilize his private key (PK) to generate information authenticators for knowing the DIA. Subsequently, the client needs to have hardware token to store his PK and retain a secret phrase to actuate this PK. In this hardware token is misplaced or password is forgotten, the greater part of existing DIA plans would be not able to work. To overcome this challenge, this research work suggests another DIA without "private key storage (PKS)"plan. This research work utilizes biometric information as client's fuzzy private key (FPK) to evade utilizing hardware token. In the meantime, the plan might in any case viably complete the DIA. This research work uses a direct sketch with coding and mistake correction procedures to affirm client identity. Also, this research work plan another mark conspire that helps block less. Verifiability, yet in addition is viable with linear sketch Keywords– Data integrity auditing (DIA), Cloud Computing, Block less Verifiability, fuzzy biometric data, secure cloud storage (SCS), key exposure resilience (KER), Third Party Auditor (TPA), cloud audit server (CAS), cloud storage server (CSS), Provable Data Possession (PDP)

Buffer overflow (BOF) vulnerability is one of the most dangerous security vulnerability which can be exploited by unwanted users. This vulnerability can be detected by both static and dynamic analysis techniques. For dynamic analysis, execution of the program is required in which the behavior of the program according to specifications is checked while in static analysis the source code is analyzed for security vulnerabilities without execution of code. Despite the fact that many open source and commercial security analysis tools employ static and dynamic methods but there is still a margin for improvement in BOF vulnerability detection capability of these tools. We propose an enhancement in Cppcheck tool for statically detecting BOF vulnerability using data flow analysis in C programs. We have used the Juliet Test Suite to test our approach. We selected two best tools cited in the literature for BOF detection (i.e. Frama-C and Splint) to compare the performance and accuracy of our approach. From the experiments, our proposed approach generated Youden Index of 0.45, Frama-C has only 0.1 Youden's score and Splint generated Youden score of -0.47. These results show that our technique performs better as compared to both Frama-C and Splint static analysis tools.

Cloud computing, supported by advancements in virtualisation and distributed computing, became the default options for implementing the IT infrastructure of organisations. Medical data and in particular medical images have increasing storage space and remote access requirements. Cloud computing satisfies these requirements but unclear safeguards on data security can expose sensitive data to possible attacks. Furthermore, recent changes in legislation imposed additional security constraints in technology to ensure the privacy of individuals and the integrity of data when stored in the cloud. In contrast with this trend, current data security methods, based on encryption, create an additional overhead to the performance, and often they are not allowed in public cloud servers. Hence, this paper proposes a mechanism that combines data fragmentation to protect medical images on the public cloud servers, and a NoSQL database to secure an efficient organisation of such data. Results of this paper indicate that the latency of the proposed method is significantly lower if compared with AES, one of the most adopted data encryption mechanisms. Therefore, the proposed method is an optimal trade-off in environments with low latency requirements or limited resources.

Any technique to ensure memory safety requires knowledge of (a) precise array bounds and (b) the data types accessed by memory load/store and pointer move instructions (called, owners) in the program. While this information can be effectively derived by compiler-level approaches much of this information may be lost during the compilation process and become unavailable to binary-level tools. In this work we conduct the first detailed study on how accurately can this information be extracted or reconstructed by current state-of-the-art static reverse engineering (RE) platforms for binaries compiled with and without debug symbol information. Furthermore, it is also unclear how the imprecision in array bounds and instruction owner information that is obtained by the RE tools impacts the ability of techniques to detect illegal memory accesses at run-time. We study this issue by designing, building, and deploying a novel binary-level technique to assess the properties and effectiveness of the information provided by the static RE algorithms in the first stage to guide the run-time instrumentation to detect illegal memory accesses in the decoupled second stage. Our work explores the limitations and challenges for static binary analysis tools to develop accurate binary-level techniques to detect memory errors.

This project develops a face recognition-based door locking system with two-factor authentication using OpenCV. It uses Raspberry Pi 4 as the microcontroller. Face recognition-based door locking has been around for many years, but most of them only provide face recognition without any added security features, and they are costly. The design of this project is based on human face recognition and the sending of a One-Time Password (OTP) using the Twilio service. It will recognize the person at the front door. Only people who match the faces stored in its dataset and then inputs the correct OTP will have access to unlock the door. The Twilio service and image processing algorithm Local Binary Pattern Histogram (LBPH) has been adopted for this system. Servo motor operates as a mechanism to access the door. Results show that LBPH takes a short time to recognize a face. Additionally, if an unknown face is detected, it will log this instance into a "Fail" file and an accompanying CSV sheet.

Safety- and security-critical developers have long recognized the importance of applying a high degree of scrutiny to a system’s (or subsystem’s) I/O messages. However, lack of care in the development of message-handling components can lead to an increase, rather than a decrease, in the attack surface. On the DARPA Cyber-Assured Systems Engineering (CASE) program, we have focused our research effort on identifying cyber vulnerabilities early in system development, in particular at the Architecture development phase, and then automatically synthesizing components that mitigate against the identified vulnerabilities from high-level specifications. This approach is highly compatible with the goals of the LangSec community. Advances in formal methods have allowed us to produce hardware/software implementations that are both performant and guaranteed correct. With these tools, we can synthesize high-assurance “building blocks” that can be composed automatically with high confidence to create trustworthy systems, using a method we call Security-Enhancing Architectural Transformations. Our synthesis-focused approach provides a higherleverage insertion point for formal methods than is possible with post facto analytic methods, as the formal methods tools directly contribute to the implementation of the system, without requiring developers to become formal methods experts. Our techniques encompass Systems, Hardware, and Software Development, as well as Hardware/Software Co-Design/CoAssurance. We illustrate our method and tools with an example that implements security-improving transformations on system architectures expressed using the Architecture Analysis and Design Language (AADL). We show how message-handling components can be synthesized from high-level regular or context-free language specifications, as well as a novel specification language for self-describing messages called Contiguity Types, and verified to meet arithmetic constraints extracted from the AADL model. Finally, we guarantee that the intent of the message processing logic is accurately reflected in the application binary code through the use of the verified CakeML compiler, in the case of software, or the Restricted Algorithmic C toolchain with ACL2-based formal verification, in the case of hardware/software co-design.

Nowadays, video surveillance systems are part of our daily life, because of their role in ensuring the security of goods and people this generates a huge amount of video data. Thus, several research works based on the ontology paradigm have tried to develop an efficient system to index and search precisely a very large volume of videos. Due to their semantic expressiveness, ontologies are undoubtedly very much in demand in recent years in the field of video surveillance to overcome the problem of the semantic gap between the interpretation of the data extracted from the low level and the high-level semantics of the video. Despite its good expressiveness of semantics, a classical ontology may not be sufficient for good handling of uncertainty, which is however commonly present in the video surveillance domain, hence the need to consider a new ontological approach that will better represent uncertainty. Fuzzy logic is recognized as a powerful tool for dealing with vague, incomplete, imperfect, or uncertain data or information. In this work, we develop a new ontological approach based on fuzzy logic. All the relevant fuzzy concepts such as Video\_Objects, Video\_Events, Video\_Sequences, that could appear in a video surveillance domain are well represented with their fuzzy Ontology DataProperty and the fuzzy relations between them (Ontology ObjectProperty). To achieve this goal, the new fuzzy video surveillance ontology is implemented using the fuzzy ontology web language 2 (fuzzy owl2) which is an extension of the standard semantic web language, ontology web language 2 (owl2).

In the field of image steganography, edge detection based implantation methods play vital rules in providing stronger security of hided data. In this arena, researcher applies a suitable edge detection method to detect edge pixels in an image. Those detected pixels then conceive secret message bits. A very recent trend is to employ multiple edge detection methods to increase edge pixels in an image and thus to enhance the embedding capacity. The uses of multiple edge detectors additionally boost up the data security. Like as the demand for embedding capacity, many applications need to have the modified image, i.e., stego image, with good quality. Indeed, when the message payload is low, it will not be a better idea to finds more local pixels for embedding that small payload. Rather, the image quality will look better, visually and statistically, if we could choose a part but sufficient pixels to implant bits. In this article, we propose an algorithm that uses multiple edge detection algorithms to find edge pixels separately and then selects pixels which are common to all edges. This way, the proposed method decreases the number of embeddable pixels and thus, increases the image quality. The experimental results provide promising output.

Intrusion Detection System (IDS) is one of the most important security tool for many security issues that are prevailing in today's cyber world. Intrusion Detection System is designed to scan the system applications and network traffic to detect suspicious activities and issue an alert if it is discovered. So many techniques are available in machine learning for intrusion detection. The main objective of this project is to apply machine learning algorithms to the data set and to compare and evaluate their performances. The proposed application has used the SVM (Support Vector Machine) and ANN (Artificial Neural Networks) Algorithms to detect the intrusion rates. Each algorithm is used to detect whether the requested data is authorized or contains any anomalies. While IDS scans the requested data if it finds any malicious information it drops that request. These algorithms have used Correlation-Based and Chi-Squared Based feature selection algorithms to reduce the dataset by eliminating the useless data. The preprocessed dataset is trained and tested with the models to obtain the prominent results, which leads to increasing the prediction accuracy. The NSL KDD dataset has been used for the experimentation. Finally, an accuracy of about 48% has been achieved by the SVM algorithm and 97% has been achieved by ANN algorithm. Henceforth, ANN model is working better than the SVM on this dataset.

Preventing software vulnerabilities while writing code is one of the most effective ways for avoiding cyber attacks on any developed system. Although developers follow some standard guiding principles for ensuring secure code, the code can still have security bottlenecks and be compromised by an attacker. Therefore, assessing software security while developing code can help developers in writing vulnerability free code. Researchers have already focused on metrics-based and text mining based software vulnerability prediction models. The metrics based models showed higher precision in predicting vulnerabilities although the recall rate is low. In addition, current research did not investigate the impact of individual software metric on the occurrences of vulnerabilities. The main objective of this paper is to track the changes in every software metric after the developer fixes a particular vulnerability. The results of our research will potentially motivate further research on building more accurate vulnerability prediction models based on the appropriate software metrics. In particular, we have compared a total of 250 files from Apache Tomcat and Apache CXF. These files were extracted from the Apache database and were chosen because Apache released these files as vulnerable in their publicly available security advisories. Using a static analysis tool, metrics of the targeted vulnerable files and relevant fixed files (files where vulnerable code is removed by the developers) were extracted and compared. We show that eight of the 40 metrics have an average increase of 2% from vulnerable to fixed files. These metrics include CountDeclClass, CountDeclClassMethod, CountDeclClassVariable, CountDeclInstanceVariable, CountDeclMethodDefault, CountLineCode, MaxCyclomaticStrict, MaxNesting. This study will help developers to assess software security through utilizing software metrics in secure coding practices.