Biblio

Privacy has become a critical topic in the engineering of electric systems. This work proposes an approach for smart-grid-specific privacy requirements engineering by extending previous general privacy requirements engineering frameworks. The proposed extension goes one step further by focusing on privacy in the smart grid. An alignment of smart grid privacy requirements, dependability issues and privacy requirements engineering methods is presented. Starting from this alignment a Threat Tree Analysis is performed to obtain a first set of generic, high level privacy requirements. This set is formulated mostly on the data instead of the information level and provides the basis for further project-specific refinement.

Cyber-has often been considered as a coordination and control, as opposed to collaborative influence, media. This conceptual-design paper, uniquely, builds upon a number of entangled, cross disciplinary research strands – integrating engineering and conflict studies – and a detailed literature review to propose a new paradigm of assurance and deterrence models. We consider an ontology for Cyber-sûréte, which combines both the social trusts necessary for [knowledge &, information] assurance such as collaboration by social influence (CSI) and the technological controls and rules for secure information management referred as coordination by rule and control (CRC). We posit Cyber-sûréte as enabling both a 'safe-to-fail' ecology (in which learning, testing and adaptation can take place) within a fail-safe supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA type) system, e.g. in a nuclear power plant. Building upon traditional state-based threat analysis, we consider Warning Time and the Threat equation with relation to policies for managing Cyber-Deterrence. We examine how the goods of Cyber-might be galvanised so as to encourage virtuous behaviour and deter and / or dissuade ne'er-do-wells through multiple transparencies. We consider how the Deterrence-escalator may be managed by identifying both weak influence and strong control signals so as to create a more benign and responsive cyber-ecology, in which strengths can be exploited and weaknesses identified. Finally, we consider declaratory / mutual transparencies as opposed to legalistic / controlled transparency.

Access policies are hard to express in existing programming languages. However, their accurate expression is a prerequisite for many of today's applications. We propose a new language that uses classes, first-class relationships, and first-class states to express access policies in a more declarative and fine-grained way than existing solutions allow.

Researchers interested in security often wish to introduce new primitives into a language. Extensible languages hold promise in such scenarios, but only if the extension mechanism is sufficiently safe and expressive. This paper describes several modifications to an extensible language motivated by end-to-end security concerns.

This study looks at the question of how to reduce/eliminate employee Internet Abuse. Companies have used acceptable use policies (AUP) and technology in an attempt to mitigate employees' personal use of company resources. Research shows that AUPs do not do a good job at this but that technology does. Research also shows that while technology can be used to greatly restrict personal use of the internet in the workplace, employee satisfaction with the workplace suffers when this is done. In this research experiment we used technology not to restrict employee use of company resources for personal use, but to make the employees more aware of the current Acceptable Use Policy, and measured the decrease in employee internet abuse. The results show that this method can result in a drop from 27 to 21 percent personal use of the company networks.

Despite the benefits offered by smart grids, energy producers, distributors and consumers are increasingly concerned about possible security and privacy threats. These threats typically manifest themselves at runtime as new usage scenarios arise and vulnerabilities are discovered. Adaptive security and privacy promise to address these threats by increasing awareness and automating prevention, detection and recovery from security and privacy requirements' failures at runtime by re-configuring system controls and perhaps even changing requirements. This paper discusses the need for adaptive security and privacy in smart grids by presenting some motivating scenarios. We then outline some research issues that arise in engineering adaptive security. We particularly scrutinize published reports by NIST on smart grid security and privacy as the basis for our discussions.

A successful Smart Grid system requires purpose-built security architecture which is explicitly designed to protect customer data confidentiality. In addition to the investment on electric power infrastructure for protecting the privacy of Smart Grid-related data, entities need to actively participate in the NIST interoperability framework process; establish policies and oversight structure for the enforcement of cyber security controls of the data through adoption of security best practices, personnel training, cyber vulnerability assessments, and consumer privacy audits.

In this paper, we implemented a mobile augmented reality system based on cloud computing. This system uses a mobile device with a camera to capture images of book spines and sends processed features to the cloud. In the cloud, the features are compared with the database and the information of the best matched book would be sent back to the mobile device. The information will then be rendered on the display via augmented reality. In order to reduce the transmission cost, the mobile device is used to perform most of the image processing tasks, such as the preprocessing, resizing, corner detection, and augmented reality rendering. On the other hand, the cloud is used to realize routine but large quantity feature comparisons. Using the cloud as the database also makes the future extension much more easily. For our prototype system, we use an Android smart phone as our mobile device, and Chunghwa Telecoms hicloud as the cloud.

Security issues are crucial in a number of machine learning applications, especially in scenarios dealing with human activity rather than natural phenomena (e.g., information ranking, spam detection, malware detection, etc.). In such cases, learning algorithms may have to cope with manipulated data aimed at hampering decision making. Although some previous work addressed the issue of handling malicious data in the context of supervised learning, very little is known about the behavior of anomaly detection methods in such scenarios. In this contribution, we analyze the performance of a particular method–online centroid anomaly detection–in the presence of adversarial noise. Our analysis addresses the following security-related issues: formalization of learning and attack processes, derivation of an optimal attack, and analysis of attack efficiency and limitations. We derive bounds on the effectiveness of a poisoning attack against centroid anomaly detection under different conditions: attacker's full or limited control over the traffic and bounded false positive rate. Our bounds show that whereas a poisoning attack can be effectively staged in the unconstrained case, it can be made arbitrarily difficult (a strict upper bound on the attacker's gain) if external constraints are properly used. Our experimental evaluation, carried out on real traces of HTTP and exploit traffic, confirms the tightness of our theoretical bounds and the practicality of our protection mechanisms.

Cloud security is one of the major issues that worry individuals and organizations about cloud computing. Therefore, defending cloud systems against attacks such asinsiders' attacks has become a key demand. This paper investigates insider threat in cloud relational database systems(cloud RDMS). It discusses some vulnerabilities in cloud computing structures that may enable insiders to launch attacks, and shows how load balancing across multiple availability zones may facilitate insider threat. To prevent such a threat, the paper suggests three models, which are Peer-to-Peer model, Centralized model and Mobile-Knowledgebase model, and addresses the conditions under which they work well.

What does it mean to trust, or not trust, an augmented reality system? Froma computer security point of view, trust in augmented reality represents a real threat to real people. The fact that augmented reality allows the programmer to tinker with the user's senses creates many opportunities for malfeasance. It might be natural to think that if we warn users to be careful it will lower their trust in the system, greatly reducing risk.

Very often in the software development life cycle, security is applied too late or important security aspects are overlooked. Although the use of security patterns is gaining popularity, the current state of security requirements patterns is such that there is not much in terms of a defining structure. To address this issue, we are working towards defining the important characteristics as well as the boundaries for security requirements patterns in order to make them more effective. By examining an existing general pattern format that describes how security patterns should be structured and comparing it to existing security requirements patterns, we are deriving characterizations and boundaries for security requirements patterns. From these attributes, we propose a defining format. We hope that these can reduce user effort in elicitation and specification of security requirements patterns.

Protecting critical infrastructure from cyberattacks by other nations is a matter of considerable concern. Can deterrence play a role in such protection? Can lessons from nuclear deterrence-the most elaborated and successful version of deterrence-be adapted to the cyber case? Currently, little overlap exists between the two, although that might change in the aftermath of an extensive, destructive cyberattack. The most effective way to protect the cyber-dependent infrastructure is a comprehensive defense (deterrence by denial), which was impractical in the nuclear regime. However, this approach presents challenges. Existing legal norms, particularly those related to controlling collateral damage, might provide some deterrence. Another option might be a new international agreement, but that would involve several difficult issues.

The question of whether strategic deterrence in cyberspace is achievable given the challenges of detection, attribution and credible retaliation is a topic of contention among military and civilian defense strategists. This paper examines the traditional strategic deterrence theory and its application to deterrence in cyberspace (the newly defined 5th battlespace domain, following land, air, sea and space domains), which is being used increasingly by nation-states and their proxies to achieve information dominance and to gain tactical and strategic economic and military advantage. It presents a taxonomy of cyberattacks that identifies which types of threats in the confidentiality, integrity, availability cybersecurity model triad present the greatest risk to nation-state economic and military security, including their political and social facets. The argument is presented that attacks on confidentiality cannot be subject to deterrence in the current international legal framework and that the focus of strategy needs to be applied to integrity and availability attacks. A potential cyberdeterrence strategy is put forth that can enhance national security against devastating cyberattacks through a credible declaratory retaliation capability that establishes red lines which may trigger a counter-strike against all identifiable responsible parties. The author believes such strategy can credibly influence nation-state threat actors who themselves exhibit serious vulnerabilities to cyber attacks from launching a devastating cyber first strike.

Protecting energy consumers's data and privacy is a key factor for the further adoption and diffusion of smart grid technologies and applications. However, current smart grid initiatives and implementations around the globe tend to either focus on the need for technical security to the detriment of privacy or consider privacy as a feature to add after system design. This paper aims to contribute towards filling the gap between this fact and the accepted wisdom that privacy concerns should be addressed as early as possible (preferably when modeling system's requirements). We present a methodological framework for tackling privacy concerns throughout all phases of the smart grid system development process. We describe methods and guiding principles to help smart grid engineers to elicit and analyze privacy threats and requirements from the outset of the system development, and derive the best suitable countermeasures, i.e. privacy enhancing technologies (PETs), accordingly. The paper also provides a summary of modern PETs, and discusses their context of use and contributions with respect to the underlying privacy engineering challenges and the smart grid setting being considered.

Information Technology (IT) security is a growing concern for governments around the world. Cyber terrorism poses a direct threat to the security of the nations' critical infrastructures and ITs as a low-cost asymmetric warfare element. Most of these nations are aware of the vulnerability of the information technologies and the significance of protecting critical infrastructures. To counteract the threat of potentially disastrous cyber attacks, nations' policy makers are increasingly pondering on the use of deterrence strategies to supplement cyber defense. Nations create their own national policies and strategies which cover cyber security countermeasures including cyber defense and deterrence against cyber threats. But it is rather hard to cope with the threat by means of merely `national' cyber defense policies and strategies, since the cyberspace spans worldwide and attack's origin can even be overseas. The term “cyber terrorism” is another source of controversy. An agreement on a common definition of cyber terrorism among the nations is needed. However, the international community has not been able to succeed in developing a commonly accepted comprehensive definition of “terrorism” itself. This paper evaluates the importance of building international cooperation on cyber defense and deterrence against cyber terrorism. It aims to improve and further existing contents and definitions of cyber terrorism; discusses the attractiveness of cyber attacks for terrorists and past experiences on cyber terrorism. It emphasizes establishing international legal measures and cooperation between nations against cyber terrorism in order to maintain the international stability and prosperity. In accordance with NATO's new strategic concept, it focuses on developing the member nations' ability to prevent, detect, defend against and recover from cyber attacks to enhance and coordinate national cyber defense capabilities. It provides necessary steps that have to be taken globally in order to counter cyber terrorism.

Computer crime is a topic prevalent in both the research literature and in industry, due to a number of recent high-profile cyber attacks on e-commerce organizations. While technical means for defending against internal and external hackers have been discussed at great length, researchers have shown a distinct preference towards understanding deterrence of the internal threat and have paid little attention to external deterrence. This paper uses the criminological thesis known as Broken Windows Theory to understand how external computer criminals might be deterred from attacking a particular organization. The theory's focus upon disorder as a precursor to crime is discussed, and the notion of decreasing public IS disorder to create the illusion of strong information systems security is examined. A case study of a victim e-commerce organization is reviewed in light of the theory and implications for research and practice are discussed.

This paper studies Wireless Information-Theoretic Security for low-speed mobility in autonomic networks. More specifically, the impact of user movement on the Probability of Non-Zero Secrecy Capacity and Outage Secrecy Capacity for different channel conditions has been investigated. This is accomplished by establishing a link between different user locations and the boundaries of information-theoretic secure communication. Human mobility scenarios are considered, and its impact on physical layer security is examined, considering quasi-static Rayleigh channels for the fading phenomena. Simulation results have shown that the Secrecy Capacity depends on the relative distance of legitimate and illegitimate (eavesdropper) users in reference to the given transmitter.

In this paper, a wireless multicast scenario is considered in which the transmitter sends a common message to a group of client receivers through quasi-static Rayleigh fading channel in the presence of an eavesdropper. The communication between transmitter and each client receiver is said to be secured if the eavesdropper is unable to decode any information. On the basis of an information-theoretic formulation of the confidential communications between transmitter and a group of client receivers, we define the expected secrecy sum-mutual information in terms of secure outage probability and provide a complete characterization of maximum transmission rate at which the eavesdropper is unable to decode any information. Moreover, we find the probability of non-zero secrecy mutual information and present an analytical expression for ergodic secrecy multicast mutual information of the proposed model.

Insider threat makes great damage to the security of information system, traditional security methods are extremely difficult to work. Insider attack identification plays an important role in insider threat detection. Monitoring user's abnormal behavior is an effective method to detect impersonation, this method is applied to insider threat identification, to built user's behavior attribute information database based on weights changeable feedback tree augmented Bayes network, but data is massive, using the dimensionality reduction based on rough set, to establish the process information model of user's behavior attribute. Using the minimum risk Bayes decision can effectively identify the real identity of the user when user's behavior departs from the characteristic model.

The installation of a protection system can provide protection by either deterring or stopping an attacker. Both modes of effectiveness-deterring and stopping-are uncertain. Some have guessed that deterrence plays a much bigger role than stopping force. The force of deterrence should therefore be of considerable interest, especially if its effect could be estimated and incorporated into a larger risk analysis and business case for developing and buying new systems, but nowhere has it been estimated quantitatively. The effect of one type of deterrence, namely, influencing an attacker's choice of targets-or target shifting, biasing an attacker away from some targets toward others-is assessed quantitatively here using a game-theoretic approach. It is shown that its positive effects are significant. It features as a force multiplier on the order of magnitude or more, even for low-performance security countermeasures whose effectiveness may be compromised somewhat, of necessity, in order to keep the number of false alarms serviceably low. The analysis furthermore implies that there are certain minimum levels of stopping performance that a protection should provide in order to avoid attracting the choice of attackers (under deterrence). Nothing in the analysis argues for complacency in security. Developers must still design the best affordable systems. The analysis enters into the middle ground of security, between no protection and impossibly perfect protection. It counters the criticisms that some raise about lower-level, affordable, sustainable measures that security providers naturally gravitate toward. Although these measures might in some places be defeated in ways that a non-expert can imagine, the measures are not for that reason irresponsible or to be dismissed. Their effectiveness can be much greater than they first appear.

Insider attacks is a well-known problem acknowledged as a threat as early as 1980s. The threat is attributed to legitimate users who take advantage of familiarity with the computational environment and abuse their privileges, can easily cause significant damage or losses. In this paper, we present an active defense model and framework of insider threat detection and sense. Firstly, we describe the hierarchical framework which deal with insider threat from several aspects, and subsequently, show a hierarchy-mapping based insider threats model, the kernel of the threats detection, sense and prediction. The experiments show that the model and framework could sense the insider threat in real-time effectively.

We investigate the potential of an information-spectrum approach to information-theoretic security. We show how this approach provides conceptually simple yet powerful results that can be used to investigate complex communication scenarios. In particular, we illustrate the usefulness of information-spectrum methods by analyzing the effect of channel state information (CSI) on the secure rates achievable over wiretap channels. We establish a formula for secrecy capacity, which we then specialize to compute achievable rates for ergodic fading channels in the presence of imperfect CSI. Our results confirm the importance of having some knowledge about the eavesdropper's channel, but also show that imperfect CSI does not necessarily preclude security.

In this paper we consider the pollution attack in network coded systems where network nodes are computationally limited. We consider the combined use of cryptographic signature based security and information theoretic network error correction and propose a fountain-like network error correction code construction suitable for this purpose.

Different organizations or countries maybe adopt different PKI trust model in real applications. On a large scale, all certification authorities (CA) and end entities construct a huge mesh network. PKI trust model exhibits unstructured mesh network as a whole. However, mesh trust model worsens computational complexity in certification path processing when the number of PKI domains increases. This paper proposes an enhanced mesh trust model for PKI. Keys generation and signature are fulfilled in Trusted Platform Module (TPM) for higher security level. An algorithm is suggested to improve the performance of certification path processing in this model. This trust model is less complex but more efficient and robust than the existing PKI trust models.