Biblio

Tactile Internet (TI) applications such as industry automation, connected autonomous cars, augmented reality and remote surgery, are based on secure data transmissions at a very low end-to-end latency. In order to fulfill those requirements in real applications, it is necessary to implement traffic encryption when data flows at higher communication protocol layers. Nevertheless, the implementation of the aforementioned protocols is a computing intensive task, in which many arithmetic operations are involved, leading to considerable delay. Therefore, hardware acceleration may be a solution to reduce the overall computing time, while delivering enough throughput during the execution of the network security functions. In this paper, we implement hardware accelerators for cryptographic algorithms on heterogeneous multicore dedicated hardware, using state-of-the-art embedded libraries, cryptographic cores and hardware extensions. By comparing our implementation to software-only solutions in terms of latency and throughput using variable data sets, we find latency reductions in the computing time around 80% as well as performance improvements up to three orders of magnitude.

When biometric databases grow larger, a security breach or leak can affect millions. In order to protect against such a threat, the use of encryption is a natural choice. However, a biometric identification attempt then requires the decryption of a potential huge database, making a traditional approach potentially unfeasible. The use of selective JPEG2000 encryption can reduce the encryption’s computational load and enable a secure storage of biometric sample data. In this paper we will show that selective encryption of face biometric samples is secure. We analyze various encoding settings of JPEG2000, selective encryption parameters on the "Labeled Faces in the Wild" database and apply several traditional and deep learning based face recognition methods.

In-browser cryptomining uses the computational power of a website's visitors to mine cryptocurrency, i.e., to create new coins. With the rise of ready-to-use mining scripts distributed by service providers (e.g., Coinhive), it has become trivial to turn a website into a cryptominer by copying and pasting the mining script. Both legitimate webpage owners who want to raise an extra revenue under users' explicit consent and malicious actors who wish to exploit the computational power of the users' computers without their consent have started to utilize this emerging paradigm of cryptocurrency operations. In-browser cryptomining, though mostly abused by malicious actors in practice, is indeed a promising funding model that can be utilized by website owners, publishers, or non-profit organizations for legitimate business purposes, such as to collect revenue or donations for humanitarian projects, inter alia. However, our analysis in this paper shows that in practice, regardless of their being legitimate or not, all in-browser mining scripts are treated the same as malicious cryptomining samples (aka cryptojacking) and blacklisted by browser extensions or antivirus programs. Indeed, there is a need for a better understanding of the in-browser cryptomining ecosystem. Hence, in this paper, we present an in-depth empirical analysis of in-browser cryptomining processes, focusing on the samples explicitly asking for user consent, which we call permissioned cryptomining. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study focusing on the permissioned cryptomining samples. For this, we created a dataset of 6269 unique web sites containing cryptomining scripts in their source codes to characterize the in-browser cryptomining ecosystem by differentiating permissioned and permissionless cryptomining samples. We believe that (1) this paper is the first attempt showing that permissioned in-browser cryptomining could be a legitimate and viable monetization tool if implemented responsibly and without interrupting the user, and (2) this paper will catalyze the widespread adoption of legitimate crvptominina with user consent and awareness.

Blockchain transactions are signed by private keys. Secure key storage and tamper resistant computing, are critical requirements for deployments of trusted infrastructure. In this paper we identify some threats against blockchain wallets, and we introduce a set of physical and logical countermeasures in order to defeat them. We introduce open software and hardware architectures based on secure elements, which enable detection of cloned device and corrupted software. These technologies are based on resistant computing (javacard), smartcard anti cloning, smartcard self content attestation, applicative firewall, bare metal architecture, remote attestation, dynamic PUF (Physical Unclonable Function), and programming token as root of trust.

Intrusion Detection System (IDS) is used to identify malicious traffic on the network. Apart from rule-based IDS, machine learning and deep learning based on IDS are also being developed to improve the accuracy of IDS detection. In this study, the public dataset CIC IDS 2017 was used in developing deep learning-based IDS because this dataset contains the new types of attacks. In addition, this dataset also meets the criteria as an intrusion detection dataset. The dataset was split into train data, validation data and test data. We proposed Bidirectional Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) for building neural network. We created 24 scenarios with various changes in training parameters which were trained for 100 epochs. The training parameters used as research variables are optimizer, activation function, and learning rate. As addition, Dropout layer and L2-regularizer were implemented on every scenario. The result shows that the model used Adam optimizer, Tanh activation function and a learning rate of 0.0001 produced the highest accuracy compared to other scenarios. The accuracy and F1 score reached 97.7264% and 97.7516%. The best model was trained again until 1000 iterations and the performance increased to 98.3448% in accuracy and 98.3793% in F1 score. The result exceeded several previous works on the same dataset.

Face recognition has been used widely for personal authentication. However, there is a problem that it is vulnerable to a presentation attack in which a counterfeit such as a photo is presented to a camera to impersonate another person. Although various presentation attack detection methods have been proposed, these methods have not been able to sufficiently cope with the diversity of the heterogeneous environments including presentation attack instruments (PAIs) and lighting conditions. In this paper, we propose Learning by Environment Clusters (LEC) which divides training data into some clusters of similar photographic environments and trains bona-fide and attack classification models for each cluster. Experimental results using Replay-Attack, OULU-NPU, and CelebA-Spoof show the EER of the conventional method which trains one classification model from all data was 20.0%, but LEC can achieve 13.8% EER when using binarized statistical image features (BSIFs) and support vector machine used as the classification method.

The emergence of the 5G network has boosted the advancements in the field of the internet of things (IoT) and edge/cloud computing. We present a novel architecture to detect fire in indoor and outdoor environments, dubbed as EAC-FD, an abbreviation of edge and cloud-based fire detection. Compared with existing frameworks, ours is lightweight, secure, cost-effective, and reliable. It utilizes a hybrid edge and cloud computing framework with Intel neural compute stick 2 (NCS2) accelerator is for inference in real-time with Raspberry Pi 3B as an edge device. Our fire detection model runs on the edge device while also capable of cloud computing for more robust analysis making it a secure system. We compare different versions of SSD-MobileNet architectures with ours suitable for low-end devices. The fire detection model shows a good balance between computational cost frames per second (FPS) and accuracy.

Numerical simulation of fluid flow is a significant research concern during the design process of a machine component that experiences fluid-structure interaction (FSI). State-of-the-art in traditional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has made CFD reach a relative perfection level during the last couple of decades. However, the accuracy of CFD is highly dependent on mesh size; therefore, the computational cost depends on resolving the minor feature. The computational complexity grows even further when there are multiple physics and scales involved making the approach time-consuming. In contrast, machine learning (ML) has shown a highly encouraging capacity to forecast solutions for partial differential equations. A trained neural network has offered to make accurate approximations instantaneously compared with conventional simulation procedures. This study presents transient fluid flow prediction past a fully immersed body as an integral part of the ML-CFD project. MLCFD is a hybrid approach that involves initialising the CFD simulation domain with a solution forecasted by an ML model to achieve fast convergence in traditional CDF. Initial results are highly encouraging, and the entire time-based series of fluid patterns past the immersed structure is forecasted using a deep learning algorithm. Prepared results show a strong agreement compared with fluid flow simulation performed utilising CFD.

Malware such as metamorphic virus changes its codes and it cannot be detected by pattern matching. Such malware can be detected by surface analysis, dynamic analysis or static analysis. We focused on surface analysis since neither virtual environments nor high level engineering is required. A representative method in surface analysis is n-gram with machine learning. On the other hand, important features are sometimes cut off by n-gram since n is not variable in some existing methods. Hence, scores of malware detection methods are not perfect. Moreover, creating n-gram features takes long time for comparing files. Furthermore, in some n-gram methods, invisible malware can be created when the methods are known to attackers. Therefore, we proposed a new malware subspecies detection method by suffix arrays and machine learning. We evaluated the method with four real malware subspecies families and succeeded to classify them with almost 100% accuracy.

The Intrusion Detection System (IDS) is one of the technologies available to protect mobile ad hoc networks. The system monitors the network and detects intrusion from malicious nodes, aiming at passive (eavesdropping) or positive attack to disrupt the network. This paper proposes a new Intrusion detection system using three Machine Learning (ML) techniques. The ML techniques were Random Forest (RF), support vector machines (SVM), and Naïve Bayes(NB) were used to classify nodes in MANET. The data set was generated by the simulator network simulator-2 (NS-2). The routing protocol was used is Dynamic Source Routing (DSR). The type of IDS used is a Network Intrusion Detection System (NIDS). The dataset was pre-processed, then split into two subsets, 67% for training and 33% for testing employing Python Version 3.8.8. Obtaining good results for RF, SVM and NB when applied randomly selected features in the trial and error method from the dataset to improve the performance of the IDS and reduce time spent for training and testing. The system showed promising results, especially with RF, where the accuracy rate reached 100%.

Crypto-ransomware is a malware that uses the system’s cryptography functions to encrypt user data. The irreversible effect of crypto-ransomware makes it challenging to survive the attack compared to other malware categories. When a crypto-ransomware attack encrypts user files, it becomes difficult to access these files without having the decryption key. Due to the availability of ransomware development tool kits like Ransomware as a Service (RaaS), many ransomware variants are being developed. This contributes to the rise of ransomware attacks witnessed nowadays. However, the conventional approaches employed by malware detection solutions are not suitable to detect ransomware. This is because ransomware needs to be detected as early as before the encryption takes place. These attacks can effectively be handled only if detected during the pre-encryption phase. Early detection of ransomware attacks is challenging due to the limited amount of data available before encryption. An adaptive pre-encryption model is proposed in this paper which is expected to deal with the population concept drift of crypto-ransomware given the limited amount of data collected during the pre-encryption phase of the attack lifecycle. With such adaptability, the model can maintain up-to-date knowledge about the attack behavior and identify the polymorphic ransomware that continuously changes its behavior.

The data-driven period produces more and more security-related challenges that even experts can hardly deal with. One of the most complex threats is ransomware, which is very taxing and devastating to detect and mainly prevent. Our research methods showed significant results in identifying ransomware processes using the honeypot concept augmented with symbolic linking to reduce damage made to the file system. The CIA (confidentiality, integrity, availability) metrics have been adhered to. We propose to optimize the malware process termination procedure and introduce an artificial intelligence-human collaboration to enhance ransomware classification and detection.

People are dependent on Trusted Third Party (TTP) administration based Centralized systems for content sharing having a deficit of security, faith, immutability, and clearness. This work has proposed a file-sharing environment based on Blockchain by clouting the Interplanetary File System (IPFS) and Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) systems, advantages for overcoming these troubles. The smart contract is implemented to control the access privilege and the modified version of IPFS software is utilized to enforce the predefined access-control list. An application framework on a secure decentralized file sharing system is presented in combination with IPFS and PKI to secure file sharing. PKI having public and private keys is used to enable encryption and decryption of every file transaction and authentication of identities through Metamask to cryptographically recognize account ownership in the Blockchain system. A gas consumption-based result analysis is done in the private Ethereum network and it attains transparency, security managed access, and quality of data indicating better efficacy of this work.

Internet of Things (IoT) is defined as the connection between places and physical objects (i.e., things) over the internet/network via smart computing devices. IoT is a rapidly emerging paradigm that now encompasses almost every aspect of our modern life. As such, it is crucial to ensure IoT devices follow strict security requirements. At the same time, the prevalence of IoT devices offers developers a chance to design and develop Machine Learning (ML)-based intelligent software systems using their IoT devices. However, given the diversity of IoT devices, IoT developers may find it challenging to introduce appropriate security and ML techniques into their devices. Traditionally, we learn about the IoT ecosystem/problems by conducting surveys of IoT developers/practitioners. Another way to learn is by analyzing IoT developer discussions in popular online developer forums like Stack Overflow (SO). However, we are aware of no such studies that focused on IoT developers’ security and ML-related discussions in SO. This paper offers the results of preliminary study of IoT developer discussions in SO. First, we collect around 53K IoT posts (questions + accepted answers) from SO. Second, we tokenize each post into sentences. Third, we automatically identify sentences containing security and ML-related discussions. We find around 12% of sentences contain security discussions, while around 0.12% sentences contain ML-related discussions. There is no overlap between security and ML-related discussions, i.e., IoT developers discussing security requirements did not discuss ML requirements and vice versa. We find that IoT developers discussing security issues frequently inquired about how the shared data can be stored, shared, and transferred securely across IoT devices and users. We also find that IoT developers are interested to adopt deep neural network-based ML models into their IoT devices, but they find it challenging to accommodate those into their resource-constrained IoT devices. Our findings offer implications for IoT vendors and researchers to develop and design novel techniques for improved security and ML adoption into IoT devices.

An effective response against information security violations in the technical systems remains relevant challenge nowadays, when their number, complexity, and the level of possible losses are growing. The violation can be caused by the set of the intruder's consistent actions. In the area of countermeasure selection for a proactive and reactive response against security violations, there are a large number of techniques. The techniques based on graph models seem to be promising. These models allow representing the set of actions caused the violation. Their advantages include the ability to forecast violations for timely decision-making on the countermeasures, as well as the ability to analyze and consider the coverage of countermeasures in terms of steps caused the violation. The paper proposes and describes a decision support method for responding against information security violations in the technical systems based on the graph models, as well as the developed models, including the countermeasure model and the graph representing the set of actions caused the information security violation.

Autonomous navigation of a robot is more challenging in an uncontrolled environment owing to the necessity of coordination among several activities. This includes, creating a map of the surrounding, localizing the robot inside the map, generating a motion plan consistent with the map, executing the plan with control and all other tasks involved concurrently. Moreover, autonomous navigation problems are significant for future robotics applications such as package delivery, security, cleaning, agriculture, surveillance, search and rescue, construction, and transportation which take place in uncontrolled environments. Therefore, an attempt has been made in this research to develop a robot which could function as a security agent for a house to address the aforesaid particulars. This robot has the capability to navigate autonomously in the prescribed map of the operating zone by the user. The desired map can be generated using a Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) sensor. For robot navigation, it requires to pick out the robot location accurately itself, otherwise robot will not move autonomously to a particular target. Therefore, Adaptive Monte Carlo Localization (AMCL) method was used to validate the accuracy of robot localization process. Moreover, additional sensors were placed around the building to sense the prevailing security threats from intruders with the aid of the robot.

Emerging blockchain and cryptocurrency-based technologies are redefining the way we conduct business in cyberspace. Today, a myriad of blockchain and cryp-tocurrency systems, applications, and technologies are widely available to companies, end-users, and even malicious actors who want to exploit the computational resources of regular users through cryptojacking malware. Especially with ready-to-use mining scripts easily provided by service providers (e.g., Coinhive) and untraceable cryptocurrencies (e.g., Monero), cryptojacking malware has become an indispensable tool for attackers. Indeed, the banking industry, major commercial websites, government and military servers (e.g., US Dept. of Defense), online video sharing platforms (e.g., Youtube), gaming platforms (e.g., Nintendo), critical infrastructure resources (e.g., routers), and even recently widely popular remote video conferencing/meeting programs (e.g., Zoom during the Covid-19 pandemic) have all been the victims of powerful cryptojacking malware campaigns. Nonetheless, existing detection methods such as browser extensions that protect users with blacklist methods or antivirus programs with different analysis methods can only provide a partial panacea to this emerging crypto-jacking issue as the attackers can easily bypass them by using obfuscation techniques or changing their domains or scripts frequently. Therefore, many studies in the literature proposed cryptojacking malware detection methods using various dynamic/behavioral features. However, the literature lacks a systemic study with a deep understanding of the emerging cryptojacking malware and a comprehensive review of studies in the literature. To fill this gap in the literature, in this SoK paper, we present a systematic overview of cryptojacking malware based on the information obtained from the combination of academic research papers, two large cryptojacking datasets of samples, and 45 major attack instances. Finally, we also present lessons learned and new research directions to help the research community in this emerging area.

As malware detection algorithms and methods become more sophisticated, malware authors adopt equally sophisticated evasion mechanisms to defeat them. Anecdotal evidence claims Living-Off-The-Land (LotL) techniques are one of the major evasion techniques used in many malware attacks. These techniques leverage binaries already present in the system to conduct malicious actions. We present the first large-scale systematic investigation of the use of these techniques by malware on Windows systems.In this paper, we analyse how common the use of these native system binaries is across several malware datasets, containing a total of 31,805,549 samples. We identify an average 9.41% prevalence. Our results show that the use of LotL techniques is prolific, particularly in Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) malware samples where the prevalence is 26.26%, over twice that of commodity malware.To illustrate the evasive potential of LotL techniques, we test the usage of LotL techniques against several fully patched Windows systems in a local sandboxed environment and show that there is a generalised detection gap in 10 of the most popular anti-virus products.

Code-reuse techniques have emerged as a way to defeat the control-flow defenses that prevent the injection and execution of new code, as they allow an adversary to hijack the control flow of a victim program without injected code. A well-known code-reuse attack technique is Return-OrientedProgramming (ROP), which considers and links together (relatively short) code snippets, named ROP gadgets, already present in the victim’s memory address space through a controlled use of the stack values of the victim program. Although ROP attacks are known to be Turing-complete, there are still open question such as the quantification of the executional power of an adversary, which is determined by whatever code exists in the memory of a victim program, and whether an adversary can build a ROP chain, made up of ROP gadgets, for any kind of algorithm. To fill these gaps, in this paper we first define a virtual language, dubbed ROPLANG, that defines a set of operations (specifically, arithmetic, assignment, dereference, logical, and branching operations) which are mapped to ROP gadgets. We then use it to evaluate the executional power of an adversary in Windows 7 and Windows 10, in both 32- and 64-bit versions. In addition, we have developed ROP3, a tool that accepts a set of program files and a ROP chain described with our language and returns the code snippets that make up the ROP chain. Our results show that there are enough ROP gadgets to simulate any virtual operation and that branching operations are the less frequent ones. As expected, our results also indicate that the larger a program file is, the more likely to find ROP gadgets within it for every virtual operation.

Along with technological developments in the mobile environment, mobile devices are used in many areas like banking, social media and communication. The common characteristic of applications in these fields is that they contain personal or financial information of users. These types of applications are developed for Android or IOS operating systems and have become the target of attackers. To detect weakness, security analysts, perform mobile penetration tests using security analysis tools. These analysis tools have advantages and disadvantages to each other. Some tools can prioritize static or dynamic analysis, others not including these types of tests. Within the scope of the current model, we are aim to gather security analysis tools under the penetration testing framework, also contributing analysis results by data fusion algorithm. With the suggested model, security analysts will be able to use these types of analysis tools in addition to using the advantage of fusion algorithms fed by analysis tools outputs.

Two established approaches to engineer adaptive systems are architecture-based adaptation that uses a Monitor-Analysis-Planning-Executing (MAPE) loop that reasons over architectural models (aka Knowledge) to make adaptation decisions, and control-based adaptation that relies on principles of control theory (CT) to realize adaptation. Recently, we also observe a rapidly growing interest in applying machine learning (ML) to support different adaptation mechanisms. While MAPE and CT have particular characteristics and strengths to be applied independently, in this paper, we are concerned with the question of how these approaches are related with one another and whether combining them and supporting them with ML can produce better adaptive systems. We motivate the combined use of different adaptation approaches using a scenario of a cloud-based enterprise system and illustrate the analysis when combining the different approaches. To conclude, we offer a set of open questions for further research in this interesting area.

Renewable energy resource plays an important role due to increasing energy claim. Power generation by PV technology is one of the fastest growing renewable energy sources due to its clean, economical and sustainable property. Grid integrated PV systems plays an important role in power generation sector. As the energy demand is increasing day by day, the power transfer capability of transmission line is increasing which leads various problems like stability, increase in fault current, congestion etc. To overcome the problem, we can use either FACTS device or battery storage or construct additional lines which is cost effective. This paper deals with grid connected PV system, which functions as PV-STATCOM. Voltage and damping control are used to elevate the power transfer capacity and to achieve regulated voltage within the limits at the point of common coupling (PCC). The studies are performed on SMIB and the simulation is carried out in MATLAB/SIMULINK environment.

Internet of Things (IoT) based applications face an increasing number of potential security risks, which need to be systematically assessed and addressed. Expert-based manual assessment of IoT security is a predominant approach, which is usually inefficient. To address this problem, we propose an automated security assessment framework for IoT networks. Our framework first leverages machine learning and natural language processing to analyze vulnerability descriptions for predicting vulnerability metrics. The predicted metrics are then input into a two-layered graphical security model, which consists of an attack graph at the upper layer to present the network connectivity and an attack tree for each node in the network at the bottom layer to depict the vulnerability information. This security model automatically assesses the security of the IoT network by capturing potential attack paths. We evaluate the viability of our approach using a proof-of-concept smart building system model which contains a variety of real-world IoT devices and poten-tial vulnerabilities. Our evaluation of the proposed framework demonstrates its effectiveness in terms of automatically predicting the vulnerability metrics of new vulnerabilities with more than 90% accuracy, on average, and identifying the most vulnerable attack paths within an IoT network. The produced assessment results can serve as a guideline for cybersecurity professionals to take further actions and mitigate risks in a timely manner.

As it is easy to ensure the confidentiality of users on the Dark Web, malware and exploit kits are sold on the market, and attack methods are discussed in forums. Some services provide IoT Botnet to perform distributed denial-of-service (DDoS as a Service: DaaS), and it is speculated that the purchase of these services is made on the Dark Web. By crawling such information and storing it in a database, threat intelligence can be obtained that cannot otherwise be obtained from information on the Surface Web. However, crawling sites on the Dark Web present technical challenges. For this paper, we implemented a crawler that can solve these challenges. We also collected information on markets and forums on the Dark Web by operating the implemented crawler. Results confirmed that the dataset collected by crawling contains threat intelligence that is useful for analyzing cyber attacks, particularly those related to IoT Botnet and DaaS. Moreover, by uncovering the relationship with security reports, we demonstrated that the use of data collected from the Dark Web can provide more extensive threat intelligence than using information collected only on the Surface Web.

Software defined networking (SDN) architecture frame- work eases the work of the network administrators by separating the data plane from the control plane. This provides a programmable interface for applications development related to security and management. The centralized logical controller provides more control over the total network, which has complete network visibility. These SDN advantages expose the network to vulnerabilities and the impact of the attacks is much severe when compared to traditional networks, where the network devices have protection from the attacks and limits the occurrence of attacks. In this paper, we proposed an entropy based algorithm in SDN to detect as well as stopping distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on the servers or clouds or hosts. Firstly, there explored various attacks that can be launched on SDN at different layers. Basically DDoS is one kind of denial of service attack in which an attacker uses multiple distributed sources for attacking a particular server. Every network in a system has an entropy and an increase in the randomness of probability causes entropy to decrease. In comparison with previous entropy based approaches this approach has higher performance in distinguishing legal and illegal traffics and blocking illegal traffic paths. Linux OS and Mininet Simulator along with POX controller are used to validate the proposed approach. By conducting pervasive simulation along with theoretical analysis this method can definitely detect and stop DDoS attacks automatically.