Biblio

Online privacy policies are lengthy and hard to comprehend. To address this problem, researchers have utilized machine learning (ML) to devise tools that automatically summarize online privacy policies for web users. One such tool is our free and publicly available browser extension, PrivacyCheck. In this paper, we enhance PrivacyCheck by adding a competitor analysis component-a part of PrivacyCheck that recommends other organizations in the same market sector with better privacy policies. We also monitored the usage patterns of about a thousand actual PrivacyCheck users, the first work to track the usage and traffic of an ML-based privacy analysis tool. Results show: (1) there is a good number of privacy policy URLs checked repeatedly by the user base; (2) the users are particularly interested in privacy policies of software services; and (3) PrivacyCheck increased the number of times a user consults privacy policies by 80%. Our work demonstrates the potential of ML-based privacy analysis tools and also sheds light on how these tools are used in practice to give users actionable knowledge they can use to pro-actively protect their privacy.

Load profiling is to cluster power consumption data to generate load patterns showing typical behaviors of consumers, and thus it has enormous potential applications in smart grid. However, short-interval readings would generate massive smart meter data. Although cloud computing provides an excellent choice to analyze such big data, it also brings significant privacy concerns since the cloud is not fully trustworthy. In this paper, based on a modified vector homomorphic encryption (VHE), we propose a privacy-preserving and outsourced k-means clustering scheme (PPOk M) for secure load profiling over encrypted meter data. In particular, we design a similarity-measuring method that effectively and non-interactively performs encrypted distance metrics. Besides, we present an integrity verification technique to detect the sloppy cloud server, which intends to stop iterations early to save computational cost. In addition, extensive experiments and analysis show that PPOk M achieves high accuracy and performance while preserving convergence and privacy.

As a new paradigm for the monitoring and troubleshooting of backbone networks, the multilayer in-band network telemetry (ML-INT) with deep learning (DL) based data analytics (DA) has recently been proven to be effective on realtime visualization and fine-grained monitoring. However, the existing studies on ML-INT&DA systems have overlooked the privacy and security issues, i.e., a malicious party can apply tapping in the data reporting channels between the data and control planes to illegally obtain plaintext ML-INT data in them. In this paper, we discuss a privacy-preserving DL-based ML-INT&DA system for realizing AI-assisted network automation in backbone networks in the form of IP-over-Optical. We first show a lightweight encryption scheme based on integer vector homomorphic encryption (IVHE), which is used to encrypt plaintext ML-INT data. Then, we architect a DL model for anomaly detection, which can directly analyze the ciphertext ML-INT data. Finally, we present the implementation and experimental demonstrations of the proposed system. The privacy-preserving DL-based ML-INT&DA system is realized in a real IP over elastic optical network (IP-over-EON) testbed, and the experimental results verify the feasibility and effectiveness of our proposal.

With the increasing prevalent of digital devices and their abuse for digital content creation, forgeries of digital images and video footage are more rampant than ever. Digital forensics is challenged into seeking advanced technologies for forgery content detection and acquisition device identification. Unfortunately, existing solutions that address image tampering problems fail to identify the device that produces the images or footage while techniques that can identify the camera is incapable of locating the tampered content of its captured images. In this paper, a new perceptual data-device hash is proposed to locate maliciously tampered image regions and identify the source camera of the received image data as a non-repudiable attestation in digital forensics. The presented image may have been either tampered or gone through benign content preserving geometric transforms or image processing operations. The proposed image hash is generated by projecting the invariant image features into a physical unclonable function (PUF)-defined Bernoulli random space. The tamper-resistant random PUF response is unique for each camera and can only be generated upon triggered by a challenge, which is provided by the image acquisition timestamp. The proposed hash is evaluated on the modified CASIA database and CMOS image sensor-based PUF simulated using 180 nm TSMC technology. It achieves a high tamper detection rate of 95.42% with the regions of tampered content successfully located, a good authentication performance of above 98.5% against standard content-preserving manipulations, and 96.25% and 90.42%, respectively, for the more challenging geometric transformations of rotation (0 360°) and scaling (scale factor in each dimension: 0.5). It is demonstrated to be able to identify the source camera with 100% accuracy and is secure against attacks on PUF.

DNN models have suffered from adversarial example attacks, which lead to inconsistent prediction results. As opposed to the gradient-based attack, which assumes white-box access to the model by the attacker, we focus on more realistic input perturbations from the real-world and their actual impact on the model robustness without any presence of the attackers. In this work, we promote a standardized framework to quantify the robustness against real-world threats. It is composed of a set of safety properties associated with common violations, a group of metrics to measure the minimal perturbation that causes the offense, and various criteria that reflect different aspects of the model robustness. By revealing comparison results through this framework among 13 pre-trained ImageNet classifiers, three state-of-the-art object detectors, and three cloud-based content moderators, we deliver the status quo of the real-world model robustness. Beyond that, we provide robustness benchmarking datasets for the community.

In modern high-performance computing (HPC) systems, network congestion is an important factor that contributes to performance degradation. However, how network congestion impacts application performance is not fully understood. As Aries network, a recent HPC network architecture featuring a dragonfly topology, is equipped with network counters measuring packet transmission statistics on each router, these network metrics can potentially be utilized to understand network performance. In this work, by experiments on a large HPC system, we quantify the impact of network congestion on various applications' performance in terms of execution time, and we correlate application performance with network metrics. Our results demonstrate diverse impacts of network congestion: while applications with intensive MPI operations (such as HACC and MILC) suffer from more than 40% extension in their execution times under network congestion, applications with less intensive MPI operations (such as Graph500 and HPCG) are mostly not affected. We also demonstrate that a stall-to-flit ratio metric derived from Aries network counters is positively correlated with performance degradation and, thus, this metric can serve as an indicator of network congestion in HPC systems.

Software development and deployment are generally fast-pacing practices, yet to date there is still a significant amount of legacy software running in various critical industries with years or even decades of lifespans. As the source code of some legacy software became unavailable, it is difficult for maintainers to actively patch the vulnerabilities, leaving the outdated binaries appealing targets of advanced security attacks. One of the most powerful attacks today is code reuse, a technique that can circumvent most existing system-level security facilities. While there have been various countermeasures against code reuse, applying them to sourceless software appears to be exceptionally challenging. Fine-grained code randomization is considered to be an effective strategy to impede modern code-reuse attacks. To apply it to legacy software, a technique called binary rewriting is employed to directly reconstruct binaries without symbol or relocation information. However, we found that current rewriting-based randomization techniques, regardless of their designs and implementations, share a common security defect such that the randomized binaries may remain vulnerable in certain cases. Indeed, our finding does not invalidate fine-grained code randomization as a meaningful defense against code reuse attacks, for it significantly raises the bar for exploits to be successful. Nevertheless, it is critical for the maintainers of legacy software systems to be aware of this problem and obtain a quantitative assessment of the risks in adopting a potentially incomprehensive defense. In this paper, we conducted a systematic investigation into the effectiveness of randomization techniques designed for hardening outdated binaries. We studied various state-of-the-art, fine-grained randomization tools, confirming that all of them can leave a certain part of the retrofitted binary code still reusable. To quantify the risks, we proposed a set of concrete criteria to classify gadgets immune to rewriting-based randomization and investigated their availability and capability.

Domain name system (DNS) resolves the IP addresses of domain names and is critical for IP networking. Recent denial-of-service (DoS) attacks on Internet targeted the DNS system (e.g., Dyn), which has the cascading effect of denying the availability of the services and applications relying on the targeted DNS. In view of these attacks, we investigate the DoS on DNS system and introduce the query-crafting threats where the attacker controls the DNS query payload (the domain name) to maximize the threat impact per query (increasing the communications between the DNS servers and the threat time duration), which is orthogonal to other DoS approaches to increase the attack impact such as flooding and DNS amplification. We model the DNS system using a state diagram and comprehensively analyze the threat space, identifying the threat vectors which include not only the random/invalid domains but also those using the domain name structure to combine valid strings and random strings. Query-crafting DoS threats generate new domain-name payloads for each query and force increased complexity in the DNS query resolution. We test the query-crafting DoS threats by taking empirical measurements on the Internet and show that they amplify the DoS impact on the DNS system (recursive resolver) by involving more communications and taking greater time duration. To defend against such DoS or DDoS threats, we identify the relevant detection features specific to query-crafting threats and evaluate the defense using our prototype in CloudLab.

We propose thrombolysis using a magnetic nanoparticle microswarm with tissue plasminogen activator (tPA) under ultrasound imaging. The microswarm is generated in blood using an oscillating magnetic field and can be navigated with locomotion along both the long and short axis. By modulating the input field, the aspect ratio of the microswarm can be reversibly tuned, showing the ability to adapt to different confined environments. Simulation results indicate that both in-plane and out-of-plane fluid convection are induced around the microswarm, which can be further enhanced by tuning the aspect ratio of the microswarm. Under ultrasound imaging, the microswarm is navigated in a microchannel towards a blood clot and deformed to obtain optimal lysis. Experimental results show that the lysis rate reaches -0.1725 ± 0.0612 mm3/min in the 37°C blood environment under the influence of the microswarm-induced fluid convection and tPA. The lysis rate is enhanced 2.5-fold compared to that without the microswarm (-0.0681 ± 0.0263 mm3/min). Our method provides a new strategy to increase the efficiency of thrombolysis by applying microswarm-induced fluid convection, indicating that swarming micro/nanorobots have the potential to act as effective tools towards targeted therapy.

In order to accurately extract the data from unstructured Chinese text, this paper proposes a rule-based method based on natural language processing and regular expression. This method makes use of the language expression rules of the data in the text and other related knowledge to form the feature word lists and rule template to match the text. Experimental results show that the accuracy of the designed algorithm is 94.09%.

Using artificial intelligence technology to help network security has become a major trend. At present, major countries in the world have successively invested R & D force in the attack and defense of automatic network based on artificial intelligence. The U.S. Navy, the U.S. air force, and the DOD strategic capabilities office have invested heavily in the development of artificial intelligence network defense systems. DARPA launched the network security challenge (CGC) to promote the development of automatic attack system based on artificial intelligence. In the 2016 Defcon final, mayhem (the champion of CGC in 2014), an automatic attack team, participated in the competition with 14 human teams and once defeated two human teams, indicating that the automatic attack method generated by artificial intelligence system can scan system defects and find loopholes faster and more effectively than human beings. Japan's defense ministry also announced recently that in order to strengthen the ability to respond to network attacks, it will introduce artificial intelligence technology into the information communication network defense system of Japan's self defense force. It can be predicted that the deepening application of artificial intelligence in the field of network attack and defense may bring about revolutionary changes and increase the imbalance of the strategic strength of cyberspace in various countries. Therefore, it is necessary to systematically investigate the current situation of network attack and defense based on artificial intelligence at home and abroad, comprehensively analyze the development trend of relevant technologies at home and abroad, deeply analyze the development outline and specification of artificial intelligence attack and defense around the world, and refine the application status and future prospects of artificial intelligence attack and defense, so as to promote the development of artificial intelligence attack and Defense Technology in China and protect the core interests of cyberspace, of great significance

With the rapid development of network storage service, a number of companies and individuals have stored data on a third-party server. Encryption is an effective means of protecting the confidentiality and privacy of data, but retrieval on the encrypted data is a very difficult task. Thus, searchable encryption has become a hot topic in recent years. The paper first introduces the existing searchable encryption algorithms. Then studies the new PEKS scheme (NPEKS) and analyzes its performance and efficiency. In the end, based on NPEKS, introduced attribute encryption, designed a scheme which is suitable for corporate cloud storage environment. This scheme not only has the advantages of simplicity and efficiency, but also can realize the secret retrieval of the third-party data. Experiments show that comparing with existing PEKS schemes and other improved schemes, this scheme has the advantages of simplicity and high efficiency. In addition, its security is the same as existing PEKS schemes.

Based on the analysis of cluster supply chain risk characteristics, starting from the analysis of technical risk dimensions, information risk dimensions, human risk dimensions, and capital risk dimensions, a cluster supply chain risk severity assessment index system is designed. The fuzzy C-means clustering algorithm based on data flow is used to cluster each supply chain, analyze the risk severity of the supply chain, and evaluate the decision of the supply chain risk severity level based on the cluster weights and cluster center range. Based on the analytic hierarchy process, the risk severity of the entire clustered supply chain is made an early warning decision, and the clustered supply chain risk severity early warning level is obtained. The results of simulation experiments verify the feasibility of the decision method for cluster supply chain risk severity, and improve the theoretical support for cluster supply chain risk severity prediction.

An efficient and reversible meaningful image encryption scheme is proposed in this paper. The plain image is first compressed and encrypted simultaneously by Adaptive Block Compressive Sensing (ABCS) framework to create a noise-like secret image. Next, Least Significant Bit (LSB) embedding is employed to embed the secret image into a carrier image to generate the final meaningful cipher image. In this scheme, ABCS improves the compression and efficiency performance, and the embedding and extraction operations are absolutely reversible. The simulation results and security analyses are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness, compression, secrecy of the proposed scheme.

This work reviews various methods which improve the effective coupling coefficient ( k2eff) of non-bulk acoustic wave (BAW) aluminum nitride (AlN) based RF MEMS resonators, mainly focusing on the innovative structural design of the resonators. k2eff is the key parameter for a resonator in communication applications because it measures the achievable fractional bandwidth of the filter constructed. The resonator's configuration, dimension, material stack and the fabrication process will all have impact on its k2eff. In this paper, the authors will review the efforts in improving the k2eff of piezoelectric MEMS resonators from research community in the past 15 years, mainly from the following three approaches: coupling lateral wave with vertical wave, exciting two-dimensional (2-D) lateral wave, as well as coupling 2-D lateral wave with vertical wave. The material will be limited to AlN family, which is proven to be manageable for manufacturing. The authors will also try to make recommendations to the effectiveness of various approaches and the path forward.

Securing the supply chain of information and communications technology (ICT) has recently emerged as a critical concern for national security and integrity. With the proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and their increasing role in controlling real world infrastructure, there is a need to analyze risks in networked systems beyond established security analyses. Existing methods in literature typically leverage attack and fault trees to analyze malicious activity and its impact. In this paper, we develop RIoTS, a security risk assessment framework borrowing from system reliability theory to incorporate the supply chain. We also analyze the impact of grouping within suppliers that may pose hidden risks to the systems from malicious supply chain actors. The results show that the proposed analysis is able to reveal hidden threats posed to the IoT ecosystem from potential supplier collusion.

With the increasing popularity of geo-positioning technologies and mobile Internet, spatial keyword data services have attracted growing interest from both the industrial and academic communities in recent years. Meanwhile, a massive amount of data is increasingly being outsourced to cloud in the encrypted form for enjoying the advantages of cloud computing while without compromising data privacy. Most existing works primarily focus on the privacy-preserving schemes for either spatial or keyword queries, and they cannot be directly applied to solve the spatial keyword query problem over encrypted data. In this paper, we study the challenging problem of Privacy-preserving Boolean Range Query (PBRQ) over encrypted spatial databases. In particular, we propose two novel PBRQ schemes. Firstly, we present a scheme with linear search complexity based on the space-filling curve code and Symmetric-key Hidden Vector Encryption (SHVE). Then, we use tree structures to achieve faster-than-linear search complexity. Thorough security analysis shows that data security and query privacy can be guaranteed during the query process. Experimental results using real-world datasets show that the proposed schemes are efficient and feasible for practical applications, which is at least ×70 faster than existing techniques in the literature.

For most of the current research on physical-layer security in indoor visible light communication (VLC) systems, a static communication environment was mainly considered, where secure communication about static users was investigated. However, much secure problems remain to be settled about mobile users. To improve the secrecy performance of mobile users, a two-dimensional circular optical atto-cell with security protected zone is considered. The proposed VLC systems include a LED transmitter Alice, a mobile user Bob and a passive eavesdropper Eve. A typical random waypoint model (RWP) being assumed, the secrecy outage probability (SOP) and secrecy throughput (ST) have been investigated for mobile users in VLC systems. The theoretical analysis results have been verified through Monte Carlo simulations. The simulation results show that the secrecy performance of mobile users in VLC can be improved by enlarging the radius of protected zone, and it also depends on the target secrecy rate and the LEDs' configuration.

Internet of Things (IoT) enable information transmission and sharing among massive IoT devices. However, the key establishment and management in IoT become more challenging due to the low latency requirements and resource constrained IoT devices. In this work, we propose a practical physical layer based secret key sharing scheme for MIMO (multiple-input-multiple-output) IoT devices to reduce the communication delay caused by key establishment of MIMO IoT devices. This is because the proposed scheme attachs secret key sharing with communication simultaneously. It is achieved by the proposed MIMO self-injection AN (SAN) tranmsission, which is designed to deliberately maximum the receive SNR (signal to noise ratio) at different antenna of the legitimate IoT device, based on the value of secret key sharing to him. The simulation results verified the validity and security of the proposed scheme.

Visible light communication (VLC) is a promising technique in the fifth and beyond wireless communication networks. In this paper, a secure multiple-input single-output VLC network is studied, where simultaneous lightwave information and power transfer (SLIPT) is exploited to support energy-limited devices taking into account a practical non-linear energy harvesting model. Specifically, the optimal beamforming design problems for minimizing transmit power and maximizing the minimum secrecy rate are studied under the imperfect channel state information (CSI). S-Procedure and a bisection search is applied to tackle challenging non-convex problems and to obtain efficient resource allocation algorithm. It is proved that optimal beamforming schemes can be obtained. It is found that there is a non-trivial trade-off between the average harvested power and the minimum secrecy rate. Moreover, we show that the quality of CSI has a significant impact on achievable performance.

As one of the most expensive computations in public-key cryptosystems, modular exponentiation is typically out-sourced to the cloud servers. Traditional cloud-based outsourcing algorithms depend on multiple untrusted servers to guarantee the security, which may lead to vulnerability to the collusion attack. Although recent single-server multiple-requests outsourcing algorithms are more secure, they have to perform multiple requests to the single untrusted server to guarantee the security and checkability of the data, which will incur unacceptable latency and local computational costs. In comparison, the edge computing paradigm enhances security since it has multiple computational nodes, including some highly secure local computational nodes. In this paper, we propose the secure outsourcing algorithm of modular exponentiation for the edge computing paradigm. To address the dilemma that the computational resources of different nodes vary significantly, we design two lightweight algorithms to adaptively separate the modular exponentiation to the nodes based on the computational resources. To guarantee the outsourcing checkability, we propose a protocol verify the result returned from each node. We formally prove the security and checkability of our algorithm and validate the efficiency of our algorithm based on experiments and case studies.

Open wireless channels make a wireless ad hoc network vulnerable to various security attacks, so it is crucial to design a routing protocol that can defend against the attacks of malicious nodes. In this paper, we first measure the trust value calculated by the node behavior in a period to judge whether the node is trusted, and then combine other QoS requirements as the routing metrics to design a secure routing approach. Moreover, we propose a deep learning-based model to learn the routing environment repeatedly from the data sets of packet flow and corresponding optimal paths. Then, when a new packet flow is input, the model can output a link set that satisfies the node's QoS and trust requirements directly, and therefore the optimal path of the packet flow can be obtained. The extensive simulation results show that compared with the traditional optimization-based method, our proposed deep learning-based approach cannot only guarantee more than 90% accuracy, but also significantly improves the computation time.

A secure-enhanced scheme based on deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) encoding encryption and probabilistic shaping (PS) is proposed. Experimental results verify the superiority of our proposed scheme in the achievement of security and power gain. © 2020 The Author(s).

Nowadays, Security is the biggest challenge in communication networks. Well defined security protocols not only solve the privacy and security issues but also help to reduce the implementation cost and simplify network's operation. Network society demands more reliable and secure network services as well as infrastructure. In communication networks, data theft, hacking, fraud, cyber warfare are serious security threats. Security as defined by experts is confirming protected communication amongst communication/computing systems and consumer applications in private and public networks, it is important for promising privacy, confidentiality, and protection of information. This paper highlights the security related issues and challenges in communication networks. We also present the holistic view for the underlaying physical layer including physical infrastructure attacks, jamming, interception, and eavesdropping. This research focused on improving the security measures and protocols in different communication networks.

With the rapid development of smart grids and the continuous deepening of informatization, while realizing remote telemetry and remote control of massive data-based grid operation, electricity information network security problems have become more serious and prominent. A method for electricity information network security situation prediction method based on improved deep belief network is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the affinity propagation clustering algorithm is used to determine the depth of the deep belief network and the number of hidden layer nodes based on sample parameters. Secondly, continuously adjust the scaling factor and crossover probability in the differential evolution algorithm according to the population similarity. Finally, a chaotic search method is used to perform a second search for the best individuals and similarity centers of each generation of the population. Simulation experiments show that the proposed algorithm not only enhances the generalization ability of electricity information network security situation prediction, but also has higher prediction accuracy.