Biblio

Cloud provides a low maintenance and affordable storage to various applications and users. The data owner allows the cloud users to access the documents placed in the cloud service provider based on the user's access control vector provided to the cloud users by the data owners. In such type of scenarios, the confidentiality of the documents exchanged between the cloud service provider and the users should be maintained. The existing approaches used to provide this facility are not computation and communication efficient for performing key updating in the data owner side and the key recovery in the user side. This paper discusses the key management services provided to the cloud users. Remote key management and client-side key management are two approaches used by cloud servers. This paper also aims to discuss the method for destroying the encryption/decryption group keys for shared data to securing the data after deletion. Crypto Shredding or Crypto Throw technique is deployed for the same.

Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) are implemented in many industrial and embedded control applications. Where these systems are safety-critical, correct and safe behavior is of paramount importance. Malicious attacks on such CPSs can have far-reaching repercussions. For instance, if elements of a power grid behave erratically, physical damage and loss of life could occur. Currently, there is a trend toward increased complexity and connectivity of CPS. However, as this occurs, the potential attack vectors for these systems grow in number, increasing the risk that a given controller might become compromised. In this article, we examine how the dangers of compromised controllers can be mitigated. We propose a novel application of runtime enforcement that can secure the safety of real-world physical systems. Here, we synthesize enforcers to a new hardware architecture within programmable logic controller I/O modules to act as an effective line of defence between the cyber and the physical domains. Our enforcers prevent the physical damage that a compromised control system might be able to perform. To demonstrate the efficacy of our approach, we present several benchmarks, and show that the overhead for each system is extremely minimal.

This paper presents a new incremental parallelizable message authentication code (MAC) scheme adaptable to lightweight block ciphers for memory integrity verification. The highlight of the proposed scheme is to achieve both incremental update capability and sufficient security bound with lightweight block ciphers, which is a novel feature. We extend the conventional parallelizable MAC to realize the incremental update capability while keeping the original security bound. We prove that a comparable security bound can be obtained even if this change is incorporated. We also present a hardware architecture for the proposed MAC scheme with lightweight block ciphers and demonstrate the effectiveness through FPGA implementation. The evaluation results indicate that the proposed MAC hardware achieves 3.4 times improvement in the latency-area product for the tag update compared with the conventional MAC.

How to develop AI systems that can explain how they made decisions is one of the important and hot topics today. Inspired by the dual-process theory in psychology, this paper proposes a human-in-the-loop approach to develop System-2 AI that makes an inference logically and outputs interpretable explanation. Our proposed method first asks crowd workers to raise understandable features of objects of multiple classes and collect training data from the Internet to generate classifiers for the features. Logical decision rules with the set of generated classifiers can explain why each object is of a particular class. In our preliminary experiment, we applied our method to an image classification of Asian national flags and examined the effectiveness and issues of our method. In our future studies, we plan to combine the System-2 AI with System-1 AI (e.g., neural networks) to efficiently output decisions.

The key feature of NDN is in-network caching that every router has its cache to store data for future use, thus improve the usage of the network bandwidth and reduce the network latency. However, in-network caching increases the security risks - cache pollution attacks (CPA), which includes locality disruption (ruining the cache locality by sending random requests for unpopular contents to make them popular) and False Locality (introducing unpopular contents in the router's cache by sending requests for a set of unpopular contents). In this paper, we propose a machine learning method, named Triangle Area Based Multivariate Correlation Analysis (TAB-MCA) that detects the cache pollution attacks in NDN. This detection system has two parts, the triangle-area-based MCA technique, and the threshold-based anomaly detection technique. The TAB-MCA technique is used to extract hidden geometrical correlations between two distinct features for all possible permutations and the threshold-based anomaly detection technique. This technique helps our model to be able to distinguish attacks from legitimate traffic records without requiring prior knowledge. Our technique detects locality disruption, false locality, and combination of the two with high accuracy. Implementation of XC-topology, the proposed method shows high efficiency in mitigating these attacks. In comparison to other ML-methods, our proposed method has a low overhead cost in mitigating CPA as it doesn't require attackers' prior knowledge. Additionally, our method can also detect non-uniform attack distributions.

The following topics are dealt with: authorisation; data privacy; mobile computing; security of data; cryptography; Internet of Things; message authentication; invasive software; Android (operating system); vectors.

With the advancement of computing and communication technologies, data transmission in the internet are getting bigger and faster. However, it is necessary to secure the data to prevent fraud and criminal over the internet. Furthermore, most of the data related to statistics requires to be analyzed securely such as weather data, health data, financial and other services. This paper presents an implementation of cloud security using homomorphic encryption for data analytic in the cloud. We apply the homomorphic encryption that allows the data to be processed without being decrypted. Experimental results show that, for the polynomial degree 26, 28, and 210, the total executions are 2.2 ms, 4.4 ms, 25 ms per data, respectively. The implementation is useful for big data security such as for environment, financial and hospital data analytics.

Recently, Future Internet research has attracted enormous attentions towards the design of clean slate Future Internet Architecture. A large number of research projects has been established by National Science Foundation's (NSF), Future Internet Architecture (FIA) program in this area. One of these projects is MobilityFirst, which recognizes the predominance of mobile networking and aims to address the challenges of this paradigm shift. Future Internet Architecture Projects, are usually deploying on large scale experimental networks for testing and evaluating the properties of new architecture and protocols. Currently only some specific experiments, like routing and name resolution scalability in MobilityFirst architecture has been performed over the ORBIT and GENI platforms. However, to move from this experimental networking to technology trials with real-world users and applications deployment of alternative testbeds are necessary. In this paper, MobilityFirst Future Internet testbed is designed and deployed on Future Networks Laboratory, University of Science and Technology of China, China. Which provides a realistic environment for MobilityFirst experiments. Next, in this paper, for MF traffic transmission between MobilityFirst networks through current networking protocols (TCP), MobilityFirst Proxies are designed and implemented. Furthermore, the results and experience obtained from experiments over proposed testbed are presented.

Random numbers have a wide usage in the area of cryptography. In practice, pseudo random number generators are used in place of true random number generators, as regeneration of them may be required. Therefore because of generation methods of pseudo random number sequences, statistical randomness tests have a vital importance. In this paper, a randomness test suite is specified for long binary sequences. In literature, there are many randomness tests and test suites. However, in most of them, to apply randomness test, long sequences are partitioned into a certain fixed length and the collection of short sequences obtained is evaluated instead. In this paper, instead of partitioning a long sequence into fixed length subsequences, a concept of dynamic partitioning is introduced in accordance with the random variable in consideration. Then statistical methods are applied. The suggested suite, containing four statistical tests: Collision Tests, Weight Test, Linear Complexity Test and Index Coincidence Test, all of them work with the idea of dynamic partitioning. Besides the adaptation of this approach to randomness tests, the index coincidence test is another contribution of this work. The distribution function and the application of all tests are given in the paper.

Side-channel attacks occur on smartphone keystrokes, where the input can be intercepted by a tapping sound. Ilia et al. reported that keystrokes can be predicted with 61% accuracy from tapping sounds listened to by the built-in microphone of a legitimate user's device. Li et al. reported that by emitting sonar sounds from an attacker smartphone's built-in speaker and analyzing the reflected waves from a legitimate user's finger at the time of tap input, keystrokes can be estimated with 90% accuracy. However, the method proposed by Ilia et al. requires prior penetration of the target smartphone and the attack scenario lacks plausibility; if the attacker's smartphone can be penetrated, the keylogger can directly acquire the keystrokes of a legitimate user. In addition, the method proposed by Li et al. is a side-channel attack in which the attacker actively interferes with the terminals of legitimate users and can be described as an active attack scenario. Herein, we analyze the extent to which a user's keystrokes are leaked to the attacker in a passive attack scenario, where the attacker wiretaps the sounds of the legitimate user's keystrokes using an external microphone. First, we limited the keystrokes to the personal identification number input. Subsequently, mel-frequency cepstrum coefficients of tapping sound data were represented as image data. Consequently, we found that the input is discriminated with high accuracy using a convolutional neural network to estimate the key input.

Due to environmental influence and technology limitation, a wireless sensor/sensors module can neither store or process all raw data locally nor reliably forward it to a destination in heterogeneous IoT environment. As a result, the data collected by the IoT's sensors are inherently noisy, unreliable, and may trigger many false alarms. These false or misleading data can lead to wrong decisions once the data reaches end entities. Therefore, it is highly recommended and desirable to acquire trustworthy data before data transmission, aggregation, and data storing at the end entities/cloud. In this paper, we propose an In-network Generalized Trustworthy Data Collection (IGTDC) framework for trustworthy data acquisition and faulty sensor detection in the IoT environment. The key idea of IGTDC is to allow a sensor's module to examine locally whether the raw data is trustworthy before transmitting towards upstream nodes. It further distinguishes whether the acquired data can be trusted or not before data aggregation at the sink/edge node. Besides, IGTDC helps to recognize a faulty or compromised sensor. For a reliable data collection, we use collaborative IoT technique, gate-level modeling, and programmable logic device (PLD) to ensure that the acquired data is reliable before transmitting towards upstream nodes/cloud. We use a hardware-based technique called “Gray Code” to detect a faulty sensor. Through simulations we reveal that the acquired data in IGTDC framework is reliable that can make a trustworthy data collection for event detection, and assist to distinguish a faulty sensor.

This paper presents an anomalous IP address detection algorithm for network traffic logs. It is based on word embedding techniques derived from natural language processing to extract the representative features of IP addresses. However, the features extracted from vanilla word embeddings are not always compatible with machine learning-based anomaly detection algorithms. Therefore, we developed an algorithm that enables the extraction of more compatible features of IP addresses for anomaly detection than conventional methods. The proposed algorithm optimizes the objective functions of word embedding-based feature extraction and anomaly detection, simultaneously. According to the experimental results, the proposed algorithm outperformed conventional approaches; it improved the detection performance from 0.876 to 0.990 in the area under the curve criterion in a task of detecting the IP addresses of attackers from network traffic logs.

We consider a wireless communication system that consists of a transmitter, a receiver, and an adversary. The transmitter transmits signals with different modulation types, while the receiver classifies its received signals to modulation types using a deep learning-based classifier. In the meantime, the adversary makes over-the-air transmissions that are received as superimposed with the transmitter's signals to fool the classifier at the receiver into making errors. While this evasion attack has received growing interest recently, the channel effects from the adversary to the receiver have been ignored so far such that the previous attack mechanisms cannot be applied under realistic channel effects. In this paper, we present how to launch a realistic evasion attack by considering channels from the adversary to the receiver. Our results show that modulation classification is vulnerable to an adversarial attack over a wireless channel that is modeled as Rayleigh fading with path loss and shadowing. We present various adversarial attacks with respect to availability of information about channel, transmitter input, and classifier architecture. First, we present two types of adversarial attacks, namely a targeted attack (with minimum power) and non-targeted attack that aims to change the classification to a target label or to any other label other than the true label, respectively. Both are white-box attacks that are transmitter input-specific and use channel information. Then we introduce an algorithm to generate adversarial attacks using limited channel information where the adversary only knows the channel distribution. Finally, we present a black-box universal adversarial perturbation (UAP) attack where the adversary has limited knowledge about both channel and transmitter input. By accounting for different levels of information availability, we show the vulnerability of modulation classifier to over-the-air adversarial attacks.

Chemical sensing is an important issue in food, water, environment, biomedical, and pharmaceutical field. Conventional methods used in laboratory for sensing the chemical are costly, time consuming, and sometimes wastes significant amount of sample. Photonic Crystal Fiber (PCF) offers high compactness and design flexibility and it can be used as biosensor, chemical sensor, liquid sensor, temperature sensor, mechanical sensor, gas sensor, and so on. In this work, we designed PCF to sense different concentrations of different liquids by one PCF structure. We designed different structure for silica cladding hexagonal PCF to sense different concentrations of benzene-toluene and ethanol-water mixer. Core diameter, air hole diameter, and air hole diameter to lattice pitch ratio are varied to get the optimal result as well to explore the effect of core size, air hole size and the pitch on liquid chemical sensing. Performance of the chemical sensors was examined based on confinement loss and sensitivity. The performance of the sensor varied a lot and basically it depends not only on refractive index of the liquid but also on sensing wavelengths. Our designed sensor can provide comparatively high sensitivity and low confinement loss.

The accelerated growth of computing technologies has provided interdisciplinary teams a platform for producing innovative research at an unprecedented speed. Advanced scientific cyberinfrastructures, in particular, provide data storage, applications, software, and other resources to facilitate the development of critical scientific discoveries. Users of these environments often rely on custom developed virtual machine (VM) images that are comprised of a diverse array of open source applications. These can include vulnerabilities undetectable by conventional vulnerability scanners. This research aims to identify the installed applications, their vulnerabilities, and how they vary across images in scientific cyberinfrastructure. We propose a novel unsupervised graph embedding framework that captures relationships between applications, as well as vulnerabilities identified on corresponding GitHub repositories. This embedding is used to cluster images with similar applications and vulnerabilities. We evaluate cluster quality using Silhouette, Calinski-Harabasz, and Davies-Bouldin indices, and application vulnerabilities through inspection of selected clusters. Results reveal that images pertaining to genomics research in our research testbed are at greater risk of high-severity shell spawning and data validation vulnerabilities.

Nowadays, industrial control systems are increasingly subject to cyber-attacks. In this regard, the relevance of ICS modeling for security research and for teaching employees the basics of information security is increasing. Most of the existing testbeds for research on information security of industrial control systems are software and hardware solutions that contain elements of industrial equipment. However, when implementing distance-learning programs, it is not possible to fully use such testbeds. This paper describes the approach of complete virtualization of technological processes in ICS based on the open source programmable logic controller OpenPLC. This enables a complete information security training from any device with Internet access. A unique feature of this stand is also the support of several PLCs and a lower-level subsystem implemented by a distributed I/O system. The study describes the implementation scheme of the stand, and several case of reproduction of attacks. Scaling approaches for this solution are also considered.

The number of Mobile device users in the word has evolved rapidly. Many internet users currently want to connect the internet for all utilities automatically. One of the technologies in the IPv6 network, which supports data access from moving users, is IPv6 Mobile protocol. In its mobility, the users on a range of networks can move the range to another network. High demand for this technology will interest to a hacker or a cracker to carry out an attack. One of them is a DoS attack that compromises a target to denial its services. A firewall is usually used to protect networks from external attacks. However, since the firewall based on the attacker database, the unknown may not be detected. In order to address the obstacle, a detection tool could be used. In this research, IDS as an intrusion detection tool was integrated with a firewall to be implemented in IPv6 Mobile to stop the DoS attack. The results of some experiments showed that the integration system could block the attack at 0.9 s in Correspondent Node and 1.2 s in Home Agent. The blocked attack can decrease the network throughput up to 27.44% when a Mobile Node in Home Agent, 28,87% when the Mobile Node in a Foreign Network. The final result of the blocked attack is reducing the average CPU utilization up to 30.99%.

As the world is moving towards industry 4.0, it is estimated that in the near future billions of IoT devices will be interconnected over the Internet. The open and heterogeneous nature of IoT environment makes it vulnerable to adversarial attacks. To maintain sustainability in IoT ecosystem, this paper evaluates some of the recent IoT schemes based on key security features i.e. authentication, confidentiality, trust etc. These schemes are classified according to three-layer IoT architecture. Based on our findings, some of these solutions are applicable at physical layer while others are at network, and application layers. However, none of these schemes can provide end-to-end solution for IoT environment. Therefore, our work provides a roadmap for future research directions in IoT domain to design robust security schemes for IoT environment, thus can achieve sustainability in IoT ecosystem.

Information visualization applications have become ubiquitous, in no small part thanks to the ease of wide distribution and deployment to users enabled by the web browser. Scientific visualization applications, relying on native code libraries and parallel processing, have been less suited to such widespread distribution, as browsers do not provide the required libraries or compute capabilities. In this paper, we revisit this gap in visualization technologies and explore how new web technologies, WebAssembly and WebGPU, can be used to deploy powerful visualization solutions for large-scale scientific data in the browser. In particular, we evaluate the programming effort required to bring scientific visualization applications to the browser through these technologies and assess their competitiveness against classic native solutions. As a main example, we present a new GPU-driven isosurface extraction method for block-compressed data sets, that is suitable for interactive isosurface computation on large volumes in resource-constrained environments, such as the browser. We conclude that web browsers are on the verge of becoming a competitive platform for even the most demanding scientific visualization tasks, such as interactive visualization of isosurfaces from a 1TB DNS simulation. We call on researchers and developers to consider investing in a community software stack to ease use of these upcoming browser features to bring accessible scientific visualization to the browser.

The ability to advance the state of the art in automated cybersecurity protections for industrial control systems (ICS) has as a prerequisite of understanding the trade-off space. That is, to enable a cyber feedback loop in a control system environment you must first consider both the security mitigation available, the benefits and the impacts to the control system functionality when the mitigation is used. More damaging impacts could be precipitated that the mitigation was intended to rectify. This paper details networked ICS that controls a simulation of the frequency response represented with the swing equation. The microgrid loads and base generation can be balanced through the control of an emulated battery and power inverter. The simulated plant, which is implemented in Raspberry Pi computers, provides an inexpensive platform to realize the physical effects of cyber attacks to show the trade-offs of available mitigating actions. This network design can include a commercial ICS controller and simple plant or emulated plant to introduce real world implementation of feedback controls, and provides a scalable, physical effects measurable microgrid for cyber resilience analysis (SPEMMCRA).

Virtualization and Software-defined Networking (SDN) are emerging technologies that play a major role in cloud computing. Cloud computing provides efficient utilization, high performance, and resource availability on demand. However, virtualization environments are vulnerable to various types of intrusion attacks that involve installing malicious software and denial of services (DoS) attacks. Utilizing SDN technology, makes the idea of SDN-based security applications attractive in the fight against DoS attacks. Network intrusion detection system (IDS) which is used to perform network traffic analysis as a detection system implemented on SDN networks to protect virtualization servers from HTTP DoS attacks. The experimental results show that SDN-based IDS is able to detect and mitigate HTTP DoS attacks effectively.

Introduction of IoT is a big step towards the convergence of physical and virtual world as everyday objects are connected to the internet nowadays. But due to its diversity and resource constraint nature, the security of these devices in the real world has become a major challenge. Although a number of security frameworks have been suggested to ensure the security of IoT devices, frameworks for auditing this security are rare. We propose an open-source framework to audit the security of IoT devices covering hardware, firmware and communication vulnerabilities. Using existing open-source tools, we formulate a modular approach towards the implementation of the proposed framework. Standout features in the suggested framework are its modular design, extensibility, scalability, tools integration and primarily autonomous nature. The principal focus of the framework is to automate the process of auditing. The paper further mentions some tools that can be incorporated in different modules of the framework. Finally, we validate the feasibility of our framework by auditing an IoT device using proposed toolchain.

Cross site scripting (XSS) attack is one of the attacks on the web. It brings session hijack with HTTP cookies, information collection with fake HTML input form and phishing with dummy sites. As a countermeasure of XSS attack, machine learning has attracted a lot of attention. There are existing researches in which SVM, Random Forest and SCW are used for the detection of the attack. However, in the researches, there are problems that the size of data set is too small or unbalanced, and that preprocessing method for vectorization of strings causes misclassification. The highest accuracy of the classification was 98% in existing researches. Therefore, in this paper, we improved the preprocessing method for vectorization by using word2vec to find the frequency of appearance and co-occurrence of the words in XSS attack scripts. Moreover, we also used a large data set to decrease the deviation of the data. Furthermore, we evaluated the classification results with two procedures. One is an inappropriate procedure which some researchers tend to select by mistake. The other is an appropriate procedure which can be applied to an attack detection filter in the real environment.

As cloud storage and computing gains popularity, data entrusted to the cloud has the potential to be exposed to more people and thus more vulnerable to attacks. It is important to develop mechanisms to protect data privacy and integrity so that clients can safely outsource their data to the cloud. We present a method for ensuring data completeness which is one facet of the data integrity problem. Our approach converts a standard database to a Completeness Protected Database (CPDB) by inserting some semantic fake data before outsourcing it to the cloud. These fake data are initially produced using our generating function which uses Order Preserving Encryption, which allows the user to be able to regenerate these fake data and match them to fake data returned from a range query to check for completeness. The CPDB is innovative in the following ways: (1) fake data is deterministically generated but is semantically indistinguishable from other existing data; (2) since fake data is generated by deterministic functions, data owners do not need to locally store the fake data that have been inserted, instead they can re-generate fake data using the functions; (3) no costly data encryption/signature is used in our scheme compared to previous work which encrypt/sign the entire database.

The accuracy of the image classification by the convolutional neural network is exceeding the ability of human being and contributes to various fields. However, the improvement of the image recognition technology gives a great blow to security system with an image such as CAPTCHA. In particular, since the character string CAPTCHA has already added distortion and noise in order not to be read by the computer, it becomes a problem that the human readability is lowered. Adversarial examples is a technique to produce an image letting an image classification by the machine learning be wrong intentionally. The best feature of this technique is that when human beings compare the original image with the adversarial examples, they cannot understand the difference on appearance. However, Adversarial examples that is created with conventional FGSM cannot completely misclassify strong nonlinear networks like CNN. Osadchy et al. have researched to apply this adversarial examples to CAPTCHA and attempted to let CNN misclassify them. However, they could not let CNN misclassify character images. In this research, we propose a method to apply FGSM to the character string CAPTCHAs and to let CNN misclassified them.