Biblio

Virtual worlds was becoming increasingly popular in a variety of fields, including education, business, space exploration, and video games. Establishing the security of virtual worlds was becoming more critical as they become more widely used. Virtual users were identified using a behavioral biometric system. Improve the system's ability to identify objects by fusing scores from multiple sources. Identification was based on a review of user interactions in virtual environments and a comparison with previous recordings in the database. For behavioral biometric systems like the one described, it appears that score-level biometric fusion was a promising tool for improving system performance. As virtual worlds become more immersive, more people will want to participate in them, and more people will want to be able to interact with each other. Each region of the Meta-verse was given a glimpse of the current state of affairs and the trends to come. As hardware performance and institutional and public interest continue to improve, the Meta-verse's development is hampered by limitations like computational method limits and a lack of realized collaboration between virtual world stakeholders and developers alike. A major goal of the proposed research was to verify the accuracy of the biometric system to enhance the security in virtual world. In this study, the precision of the proposed work was compared to that of previous work.

Edge computing is a prospective notion for expanding the potential of cloud computing. It is vital to maintaining a decent atmosphere free of all forms of security and breaches in order to continue utilizing computer services. The security concerns surrounding the edge computing environment has been impeded as a result of the security issues that surround the area. Many researchers have looked into edge computing security issues, however, not all have thoroughly studied the needs. Security requirements are the goals that specify the capabilities and operations that a process that is carried out by a system in order to eliminate various security flaws. The purpose of this study is to give a complete overview of the many different artificial intelligence technologies that are now being utilized for edge computing security with the intention of aiding research in the future in locating research potential. This article analyzed the most recent research and shed light on the following topics: state-of-the-art techniques used to combat security threats, technological trends used by the method, metrics utilize to assess the techniques' ability, and opportunities of research for future researchers in the area of artificial intelligence for edge computing security.

Resilience of urban infrastructure to sudden, system-wide, potentially catastrophic events is a critical need across domains. The growing connectivity of infrastructure, including its cyber-physical components which can be controlled in real time, offers an attractive path towards rapid adaptation to adverse events and adjustment of system objectives. However, existing work in the field often offers disjoint approaches that respond to particular scenarios. On the other hand, abstract work on control of complex systems focuses on attempting to adapt to the changes in the system dynamics or environment, but without understanding that the system may simply not be able to perform its original task after an adverse event. To address this challenge, this programmatic paper proposes a vision for a new paradigm of infrastructure resilience. Such a framework treats infrastructure across domains through a unified theory of controlled dynamical systems, but remains cognizant of the lack of knowledge about the system following a widespread adverse event and aims to identify the system's fundamental limits. As a result, it will enable the infrastructure operator to assess and assure system performance following an adverse event, even if the exact nature of the event is not yet known. Building off ongoing work on assured resilience of control systems, in this paper we identify promising early results, challenges that motivate the development of resilience theory for infrastructure system, and possible paths forward for the proposed effort.

In recent decennium, hardware security has gained a lot of attention due to different types of attacks being launched, such as IP theft, reverse engineering, counterfeiting, etc. The critical testing infrastructure incorporated into ICs is very popular among attackers to mount side-channel attacks. The IEEE standard 1687 (IJTAG) is one such testing infrastructure that is the focus of attackers these days. To secure access to the IJTAG network, various techniques based on Locking SIB (LSIB) have been proposed. One such very effective technique makes use of Security Linear Feedback Shift Register (SLFSR) along with LSIB. The SLFSR obfuscates the scan chain information from the attacker and hence makes the brute-force attack against LSIB ineffective.In this work, it is shown that the SLFSR based Locking SIB is vulnerable to side-channel attacks. A power analysis attack along with known-plaintext attack is used to determine the IJTAG network structure. First, the known-plaintext attack is used to retrieve the SLFSR design information. This information is further used along with power analysis attack to determine the exact length of the scan chain which in turn breaks the whole security scheme. Further, a countermeasure is proposed to prevent the aforementioned hybrid attack.

This research evaluates the accuracy of two methods of authorship prediction: syntactical analysis and n-gram, and explores its potential usage. The proposed algorithm measures n-gram, and counts adjectives, adverbs, verbs, nouns, punctuation, and sentence length from the training data, and normalizes each metric. The proposed algorithm compares the metrics of training samples to testing samples and predicts authorship based on the correlation they share for each metric. The severity of correlation between the testing and training data produces significant weight in the decision-making process. For example, if analysis of one metric approximates 100% positive correlation, the weight in the decision is assigned a maximum value for that metric. Conversely, a 100% negative correlation receives the minimum value. This new method of authorship validation holds promise for future innovation in fraud protection, the study of historical documents, and maintaining integrity within academia.

Network security is a prominent topic that is gaining international attention. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is often regarded as one of the most serious threats to network security. Software Defined Network (SDN) decouples the control plane from the data plane, which can meet various network requirements. But SDN can also become the object of DDoS attacks. This paper proposes an automated DDoS attack mitigation method that is based on the programmability of the Ryu controller and the features of the OpenFlow switch flow tables. The Mininet platform is used to simulate the whole process, from SDN traffic generation to using a K-Nearest Neighbor model for traffic classification, as well as identifying and mitigating DDoS attack. The packet counts of the victim's malicious traffic input port are significantly lower after the mitigation method is implemented than before the mitigation operation. The purpose of mitigating DDoS attack is successfully achieved.

Software vulnerabilities are closely monitored by the security community to timely address the security and privacy issues in software systems. Before a vulnerability is published by vulnerability management systems, it needs to be characterized to highlight its unique attributes, including affected software products and versions, to help security professionals prioritize their patches. Associating product names and versions with disclosed vulnerabilities may require a labor-intensive process that may delay their publication and fix, and thereby give attackers more time to exploit them. This work proposes a machine learning method to extract software product names and versions from unstructured CVE descriptions automatically. It uses Word2Vec and Char2Vec models to create context-aware features from CVE descriptions and uses these features to train a Named Entity Recognition (NER) model using bidirectional Long short-term memory (LSTM) networks. Based on the attributes of the product names and versions in previously published CVE descriptions, we created a set of Expert System (ES) rules to refine the predictions of the NER model and improve the performance of the developed method. Experiment results on real-life CVE examples indicate that using the trained NER model and the set of ES rules, software names and versions in unstructured CVE descriptions could be identified with F-Measure values above 0.95.

The purpose of this article is to consider one of the options for automating the process of collecting information from open sources when conducting penetration testing in an organization's information security audit using the capabilities of the Python programming language. Possible primary vectors for collecting information about the organization, personnel, software, and hardware are shown. The basic principles of operation of the software product are presented in a visual form, which allows automated analysis of information from open sources about the object under study.

Legacy programs are normally monolithic (that is, all code runs in a single process and is not partitioned), and a bug in a program may result in the entire program being vulnerable and therefore untrusted. Program partitioning can be used to separate a program into multiple partitions, so as to isolate sensitive data or privileged operations. Manual program partitioning requires programmers to rewrite the entire source code, which is cumbersome, error-prone, and not generic. Automatic program partitioning tools can separate programs according to the dependency graph constructed based on data or programs. However, programmers still need to manually implement remote service interfaces for inter-partition communication. Therefore, in this paper, we propose AutoSlicer, whose purpose is to partition a program more automatically, so that the programmer is only required to annotate sensitive data. AutoSlicer constructs accurate data dependency graphs (DDGs) by enabling execution flow graphs, and the DDG-based partitioning algorithm can compute partition information based on sensitive annotations. In addition, the code refactoring toolchain can automatically transform the source code into sensitive and insensitive partitions that can be deployed on the remote procedure call framework. The experimental evaluation shows that AutoSlicer can effectively improve the accuracy (13%-27%) of program partitioning by enabling EFG, and separate real-world programs with a relatively smaller performance overhead (0.26%-9.42%).

The accelerated move toward adopting the Smart Grid paradigm has resulted in numerous drawbacks as far as security is concerned. Traditional power grids are becoming more vulnerable to cyberattacks as all the control decisions are generated based on the data the Smart Grid generates during its operation. This data can be tampered with or attacked in communication lines to mislead the control room in decision-making. The false data injection attack (FDIA) is one of the most severe cyberattacks on today’s cyber-physical power system, as it has the potential to cause significant physical and financial damage. However, detecting cyberattacks are incredibly challenging since they have no known patterns. In this paper, we launch a random FDIA on IEEE-39 bus system. Later, we propose a Bagging MLP-based autoencoder to detect the FDIAs in the power system and compare the result with a single ML model. The Bagging MLP-based autoencoder outperforms the Isolation forest while detecting FDIAs.

The outsourcing of databases is very popular among IT companies and industries. It acts as a solution for businesses to ensure availability of the data for their users. The solution of outsourcing the database is to encrypt the data in a form where the database service provider can perform relational operations over the encrypted database. At the same time, the associated security risk of data leakage prevents many potential industries from deploying it. In this paper, we present a secure outsourcing database search scheme (BASDB) with the use of a smart contract for search operation over index of encrypted database and storing encrypted relational database in the cloud. Our proposed scheme BASDB is a simple and practical solution for effective search on encrypted relations and is well resistant to information leakage against attacks like search and access pattern leakage.

The recent experience in the use of virtual reality (VR) technology has shown that users prefer Electromyography (EMG) sensor-based controllers over hand controllers. The results presented in this paper show the potential of EMG-based controllers, in particular the Myo armband, to identify a computer system user. In the first scenario, we train various classifiers with 25 keyboard typing movements for training and test with 75. The results with a 1-dimensional convolutional neural network indicate that we are able to identify the user with an accuracy of 93% by analyzing only the EMG data from the Myo armband. When we use 75 moves for training, accuracy increases to 96.45% after cross-validation.

Blockchain technology has made it possible to store and send digital currencies. Bitcoin wallets and marketplaces have made it easy for nontechnical users to use the protocol. Since its inception, the price of Bitcoin is going up and the number of nodes in the network has increased drastically. The increasing popularity of Bitcoin has made exchanges and individual nodes a target for an attack. Understanding the Bitcoin protocol better helps security engineers to harden the network and helps regular users secure their hot wallets. In this paper, Bitcoin protocol is presented with description of the mining process which secures transactions. In addition, the Bitcoin algorithms and their security are described with potential vulnerabilities in the protocol and potential exploits for attackers. Finally, we propose some security solutions to help mitigate attacks on Bitcoin exchanges and hot wallets.

Identity Management Systems (IdMS) have seemingly evolved in recent years, both in terms of modelling approach and in terms of used technology. The early centralized, later federated and user-centric Identity Management (IdM) was finally replaced by Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI). Solutions based on Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) appeared, with prominent examples of uPort, Sovrin or ShoCard. In effect, users got more freedom in creation and management of their identities. IdM systems became more distributed, too. However, in the area of interoperability, dynamic and ad-hoc identity management there has been almost no significant progress. Quest for the best IdM system which will be used by all entities and organizations is deemed to fail. The environment of IdM systems is, and in the near future will still be, heterogenous. Therefore a person will have to manage her or his identities in multiple IdM systems. In this article authors argument that future-proof IdM systems should be able to interoperate with each other dynamically, i.e. be able to discover existence of different identities of a person across multiple IdM systems, dynamically build trust relations and be able to translate identity assertions and claims across various IdM domains. Finally, authors introduce identity relationship model and corresponding identity discovery algorithm, propose IdMS-agnostic identity discovery service design and its implementation with use of Ethereum and Smart Contracts.

Audit trails are critical components in enterprise business applications, typically used for storing, tracking, and auditing data. Entities in the audit trail applications have weak trust boundaries, which expose them to various security risks and attacks. To harden the security and develop secure by design applications, blockchain technology has been recently introduced in the audit trails. Blockchains take a consensus-driven clean slate approach to equip audit trails with secure and transparent data processing, without a trusted intermediary. On a downside, blockchains significantly increase the space-time complexity of the audit trails, leading to high storage costs and low transaction throughput. In this article, we introduce BlockTrail, a novel blockchain architecture that fragments the legacy blockchain systems into layers of codependent hierarchies, thereby reducing the space-time complexity and increasing the throughput. BlockTrail is prototyped on the “practical Byzantine fault tolerance” protocol with a custom-built blockchain. Experiments with BlockTrail show that compared to the conventional schemes, BlockTrail is secure and efficient, with low storage footprint.

In this work, the use of an undercover conversational agent, acting as a participative student in a synchronous virtual reality distance learning scenario is proposed to stimulate social interaction between teacher and students. The outcome of an exploratory user study indicated that the undercover conversational agent is capable of fostering interaction, relieving social pressure, and overall leading to a more satisfactory and engaging learning experience without sacrificing learning performance.

The main limitation of acoustic particle separation for microfluidic application is its low sorting efficiency. This is due to the weak coupling of surface acoustic waves (SAWs) into the microchannel. In this work, we demonstrate bulk acoustic wave (BAW) particle sorting using capacitive micromachined ultrasonic transducers (CMUTs) for the first time. A collapsed mode CMUT was driven in air to generate acoustic pressure within the silicon substrate in the in-plane direction of the silicon die. This acoustic pressure was coupled into a water droplet, positioned at the side of the CMUT die, and measured with an optical hydrophone. By using a beam steering approach, the ultrasound generated from 32 CMUT elements were added in-phase to generate a maximum peak-to-peak pressure of 0.9 MPa. Using this pressure, 10 µm latex beads were sorted almost instantaneously.

While it is possible to exchange tokens whose smart contracts are on the same blockchain, cross-exchanging bitcoins for a Bitcoin wrapped token is still cumbersome. In particular, current methods of exchange are still custodial and perform privacy-threatening controls on the users in order to operate. To solve this problem we present BxTB: cross-chain exchanges of bitcoins for any Bitcoin wrapped tokens. BxTB lets users achieve that by bypassing the mint-and-burn paradigm of current wrapped tokens and cross-exchanging already minted tokens in a P2P way. Instead of relaying on HTLCs and the overhead of communication and slowness due to time-locks, we leverage Stateless SPVs, i.e. proof-of-inclusion of transactions in the Bitcoin chain validated through a smart contract deployed on the other blockchain. Furthermore, since this primitive has not been introduced in the academic literature yet, we formally introduce it and we prove its security.

This paper presents CaptchaGG, a model for recognizing linear graphical CAPTCHAs. As in the previous society, CAPTCHA is becoming more and more complex, but in some scenarios, complex CAPTCHA is not needed, and usually, linear graphical CAPTCHA can meet the corresponding functional scenarios, such as message boards of websites and registration of accounts with low security. The scheme is based on convolutional neural networks for feature extraction of CAPTCHAs, recurrent neural forests A neural network that is too complex will lead to problems such as difficulty in training and gradient disappearance, and too simple will lead to underfitting of the model. For the single problem of linear graphical CAPTCHA recognition, the model which has a simple architecture, extracting features by convolutional neural network, sequence modeling by recurrent neural network, and finally classification and recognition, can achieve an accuracy of 96% or more recognition at a lower complexity.

This paper presents a case study for designing and implementing a secure communication protocol over a Controller Area Network (CAN). The CAN based protocol uses a hybrid encryption method on a relatively simple hardware / software environment. Moreover, the blockchain technology is proposed as a working solution to provide an extra secure level of the proposed system.

The access control mechanism of most consortium blockchain is implemented through traditional Certificate Authority scheme based on trust chain and centralized key management such as PKI/CA at present. However, the uneven power distribution of CA nodes may cause problems with leakage of certificate keys, illegal issuance of certificates, malicious rejection of certificates issuance, manipulation of issuance logs and metadata, it could compromise the security and dependability of consortium blockchain. Therefore, this paper design and implement a Certificate Authority scheme based on trust ring model that can not only enhance the reliability of consortium blockchain, but also ensure high performance. Combined public key, transformation matrix and elliptic curve cryptography are applied to the scheme to generate and store keys in a cluster of CA nodes dispersedly and securely for consortium nodes. It greatly reduced the possibility of malicious behavior and key leakage. To achieve the immutability of logs and metadata, the scheme also utilized public blockchain and smart contract technology to organize the whole procedure of certificate issuance, the issuance logs and metadata for certificate validation are stored in public blockchain. Experimental results showed that the scheme can surmount the disadvantages of the traditional scheme while maintaining sufficiently good performance, including issuance speed and storage efficiency of certificates.

In the present era of the internet, image watermarking schemes are used to provide content authentication, security and reliability of various multimedia contents. In this paper image watermarking scheme which utilizes the properties of Integer Wavelet Transform (IWT), Schur decomposition and Singular value decomposition (SVD) based is proposed. In the suggested method, the cover image is subjected to a 3-level Integer wavelet transform (IWT), and the HH3 subband is subjected to Schur decomposition. In order to retrieve its singular values, the upper triangular matrix from the HH3 subband’s Schur decomposition is then subjected to SVD. The watermark image is first encrypted using a chaotic map, followed by the application of a 3-level IWT to the encrypted watermark and the usage of singular values of the LL-subband to embed by manipulating the singular values of the processed cover image. The proposed scheme is tested under various attacks like filtering (median, average, Gaussian) checkmark (histogram equalization, rotation, horizontal and vertical flipping) and noise (Gaussian, Salt & Pepper Noise). The suggested scheme provides strong robustness against numerous attacks and chaotic encryption provides security to watermark.

Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) are the secured hardware primitives to authenticate Integrated Circuits (ICs) from various unauthorized attacks. The secured key generation mechanism through PUFs is based on random Process Variations (PVs) inherited by the CMOS transistors. In this paper, we proposed a chaotic-based challenge generation mechanism to feed the arbiter PUFs. The chaotic property is introduced to increase the non-linearity in the arbitration mechanism thereby the uncertainty of the keys is attained. The chaotic sequences are easy to generate, difficult to intercept, and have the additional advantage of being in a large number Challenge-Response Pair (CRP) generation. The proposed design has a significant advantage in key generation with improved uniqueness and diffuseness of 47.33%, and 50.02% respectively. Moreover, the enhancement in the reliability of 96.14% and 95.13% range from −40C to 125C with 10% fluctuations in supply voltage states that it has prominent security assistance to the Internet of Things (IoT) enabled devices against malicious attacks.

Cloud computing is becoming a demanding technology due to its flexibility, sensibility and remote accessibility. Apart from these applications of cloud computing, privacy and security are two terms that pose a circumstantial discussion. Various authors have argued on this topic that cloud computing is more secure than other data sharing and storing methods. The conventional data storing system is a computer system or smartphone storage. The argument debate also states that cloud computing is vulnerable to enormous types of attacks which make it a more concerning technology. This current study has also tried to draw the circumstantial and controversial debate on the security and privacy system of cloud computing. Primary research has been conducted with 65 cloud computing experts to understand whether a cloud computing security technique is highly secure or not. An online survey has been conducted with them where they provided their opinions based on the security and privacy system of cloud computing. Findings showed that no particular technology is available which can provide maximum security. Although the respondents agreed that blockchain is a more secure cloud computing technology; however, the blockchain also has certain threats which need to be addressed. The study has found essential encryption systems that can be integrated to strengthen security; however, continuous improvement is required.

The major mode of communication between hearing-impaired or mute people and others is sign language. Prior, most of the recognition systems for sign language had been set simply to recognize hand signs and convey them as text. However, the proposed model tries to provide speech to the mute. Firstly, hand gestures for sign language recognition and facial emotions are trained using CNN (Convolutional Neural Network) and then by training the emotion to speech model. Finally combining hand gestures and facial emotions to realize the emotion and speech.