Biblio

This paper describes the architecture and the fundamental methodology of an anomaly detector, which by continuously monitoring Simple Network Management Protocol data and by processing it as complex-events, is able to timely recognize patterns of faults and relevant cyber-attacks. This solution has been applied in the context of smart grids, and in particular as part of a security and resilience component of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) Gateway, a middleware-based architecture that correlates and fuses measurement data from different sources (e.g., Inverters, Smart Meters) to provide control coordination and to enable grid observability applications. The detector has been evaluated through experiments, where we selected some representative anomalies that can occur on the ICT side of the energy distribution infrastructure: non-malicious faults (indicated by patterns in the system resources usage), as well as effects of typical cyber-attacks directed to the smart grid infrastructure. The results show that the detection is promisingly fast and efficient.

UPI (Unified Payments Interface) is a framework in India wherein customers can send payments to merchants from their smartphones. The framework consists of UPI servers that are connected to the banks at the sender and receiver ends. To send and receive payments, customers and merchants would have to first register themselves with UPI servers by executing a registration protocol using payment apps such as BHIM, PayTm, Google Pay, and PhonePe. Weaknesses were recently reported on these protocols that allow attackers to make money transfers on behalf of innocent customers and even empty their bank accounts. But the reported weaknesses were found after informal and manual analysis. However, as history has shown, formal analysis of cryptographic protocols often reveals flaws that could not be discovered with manual inspection. In this paper, we model UPI protocols in the pattern of traditional cryptographic protocols such that they can be rigorously studied and analyzed using formal methods. The modeling simplifies many of the complexities in the protocols, making it suitable to analyze and verify UPI protocols with popular analysis and verification tools such as the Constraint Solver, ProVerif and Tamarin. Our modeling could also be used as a general framework to analyze and verify many other financial payment protocols than just UPI protocols, giving it a broader applicability.

The emerging time-sensitive applications, such as industrial automation, smart grids, and telesurgery, pose strong demands for enabling large-scale IP-based deterministic networks. The IETF DetNet working group recently proposes a Cycle Specified Queuing and Forwarding (CSQF) solution. However, CSQF only specifies an underlying device-level primitive while how to achieve network-wide flow scheduling remains undefined. Previous scheduling mechanisms are mostly oriented to the context of local area networks, making them inapplicable to the cyclic traffic in wide area networks. In this paper, we design the Cycle Tags Planning (CTP) mechanism, a first mathematical model to enable network-wide scheduling for cyclic traffic in large-scale deterministic networks. Then, a novel scheduling algorithm named flow offset and cycle shift (FO-CS) is designed to compute the flows' cycle tags. The FO-CS algorithm is evaluated under long-distance network topologies in remote industrial control scenarios. Compared with the Naive algorithm without using FO-CS, simulation results demonstrate that FO-CS improves the scheduling flow number by 31.2% in few seconds.

Existing digital identity management systems fail to deliver the desirable properties of control by the users of their own identity data, credibility of disclosed identity data, and network-level anonymity. The recently proposed Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) approach promises to give users these properties. However, we argue that without addressing privacy at the network level, SSI systems cannot deliver on this promise. In this paper we present the design and analysis of our solution TCID, created in collaboration with the Dutch government. TCID is a system consisting of a set of components that together satisfy seven functional requirements to guarantee the desirable system properties. We show that the latency incurred by network-level anonymization in TCID is significantly larger than that of identity data disclosure protocols but is still low enough for practical situations. We conclude that current research on SSI is too narrowly focused on these data disclosure protocols.

Phishing URLs mainly target individuals and/or organizations through social engineering attacks by exploiting the humans' weaknesses in information security awareness. These URLs lure online users to access fake websites, and harvest their confidential information, such as debit/credit card numbers and other sensitive information. In this work, we introduce a phishing detection technique based on URL lexical analysis and machine learning classifiers. The experiments were carried out on a dataset that originally contained 1056937 labeled URLs (phishing and legitimate). This dataset was processed to generate 22 different features that were reduced further to a smaller set using different features reduction techniques. Random Forest, Gradient Boosting, Neural Network and Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifiers were all evaluated, and results show the superiority of SVMs, which achieved the highest accuracy in detecting the analyzed URLs with a rate of 99.89%. Our approach can be incorporated within add-on/middleware features in Internet browsers for alerting online users whenever they try to access a phishing website using only its URL.

Security is a major thing to focus on during this modern era as it is very important to secure your surroundings for the well being of oneself and his family, But there are many drawbacks of using conventional security surveillance cameras as they have to be set in a particular angle for good visual and they do not cover a large area, conventional security cameras can only be used from a particular device and cannot alert the user during an unforeseen circumstance. Hence we require a much more efficient device for better security a web controlled surveillance robot is much more practical device to be used compared to conventional security surveillance, this system needs a single camera to perform its operation and the user can monitor a wide range of area, any device with a wireless connection to the internet can be used to operate this device. This robot can move to any location within the range of the network and can be accessed globally from anywhere and as it uses only one camera to secure a large area it is also cost-efficient. At the core of the system lies Raspberry-pi which is responsible for all the operation of the system and the size of the device can be engineered according to the area it is to be used.

The Robot Operation System (ROS) is widely used in academia as well as the industry to build custom robot applications. Successful cyberattacks on robots can result in a loss of control for the legitimate operator and thus have a severe impact on safety if the robot is moving uncontrollably. A high level of security thus needs to be mandatory. Neither ROS 1 nor 2 in their default configuration provide protection against network based attackers. Multiple protection mechanisms have been proposed that can be used to overcome this. Unfortunately, it is unclear how effective and usable each of them are. We provide a structured analysis of the requirements these protection mechanisms need to fulfill by identifying realistic, network based attacker models and using those to derive relevant security requirements and other evaluation criteria. Based on these criteria, we analyze the protection mechanisms available and compare them to each other. We find that none of the existing protection mechanisms fulfill all of the security requirements. For both ROS 1 and 2, we discuss which protection mechanism are most relevant and give hints on how to decide on one. We hope that the requirements we identify simplify the development or enhancement of protection mechanisms that cover all aspects of ROS and that our comparison helps robot operators to choose an adequate protection mechanism for their use case.

We present a novel approach for the collaborative training of neural network models in decentralized federated environments. In the iterative process a group of autonomous peers run multiple training rounds to train a common model. Thereby, participants perform all model training steps locally, such as stochastic gradient descent optimization, using their private, e.g. mission-critical, training datasets. Based on locally updated models, participants can jointly determine a common model by averaging all associated model weights without sharing the actual weight values. For this purpose we introduce a simple n-out-of-n secret sharing schema and an algorithm to calculate average values in a peer-to-peer manner. Our experimental results with deep neural networks on well-known sample datasets prove the generic applicability of the approach, with regard to model quality parameters. Since there is no need to involve a central service provider in model training, the approach can help establish trustworthy collaboration platforms for businesses with high security and data protection requirements.

With the development of 5G technology and intelligent terminals, the future direction of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) evolution is Pervasive Edge Computing (PEC). In the pervasive edge computing environment, intelligent terminals can perform calculations and data processing. By migrating part of the original cloud computing model's calculations to intelligent terminals, the intelligent terminal can complete model training without uploading local data to a remote server. Pervasive edge computing solves the problem of data islands and is also successfully applied in scenarios such as vehicle interconnection and video surveillance. However, pervasive edge computing is facing great security problems. Suppose the remote server is honest but curious. In that case, it can still design algorithms for the intelligent terminal to execute and infer sensitive content such as their identity data and private pictures through the information returned by the intelligent terminal. In this paper, we research the problem of honest but curious remote servers infringing intelligent terminal privacy and propose a differential privacy collaborative deep learning algorithm in the pervasive edge computing environment. We use a Gaussian mechanism that meets the differential privacy guarantee to add noise on the first layer of the neural network to protect the data of the intelligent terminal and use analytical moments accountant technology to track the cumulative privacy loss. Experiments show that with the Gaussian mechanism, the training data of intelligent terminals can be protected reduction inaccuracy.

Controller area network is the serial communication protocol, which broadcasts the message on the CAN bus. The transmitted message is read by all the nodes which shares the CAN bus. The message can be eavesdropped and can be re-used by some other node by changing the information or send it by duplicate times. The message reused after some delay is replay attack. In this paper, the CAN network with three CAN nodes is implemented using the universal verification components and the replay attack is demonstrated by creating the faulty node. Two types of replay attack are implemented in this paper, one is to replay the entire message and the other one is to replay only the part of the frame. The faulty node uses the first replay attack method where it behaves like the other node in the network by duplicating the identifier. CAN frame except the identifier is reused in the second method which is hard to detect the attack as the faulty node uses its own identifier and duplicates only the data in the CAN frame.

Network information security pipeline based on the grey relational cluster and neural networks is designed and implemented in this paper. This method is based on the principle that the optimal selected feature set must contain the feature with the highest information entropy gain to the data set category. First, the feature with the largest information gain is selected from all features as the search starting point, and then the sample data set classification mark is fully considered. For the better performance, the neural networks are considered. The network learning ability is directly determined by its complexity. The learning of general complex problems and large sample data will bring about a core dramatic increase in network scale. The proposed model is validated through the simulation.

This paper integrates Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Information -Centric Networking (ICN) framework to enable low latency-based stateful routing and caching management by leveraging a novel forwarding and caching strategy. The framework is implemented in a clean- slate environment that does not rely on the TCP/IP principle. It utilizes Pending Interest Tables (PIT) instead of Forwarding Information Base (FIB) to perform data dissemination among peers in the proposed IC-SDN framework. As a result, all data exchanged and cached in the system are organized in chunks with the same interest resulting in reduced packet overhead costs. Additionally, we propose an efficient caching strategy that leverages in- network caching and naming of contents through an IC-SDN controller to support off- path caching. The testbed evaluation shows that the proposed IC-SDN implementation achieves an increased throughput and reduced latency compared to the traditional information-centric environment, especially in the high load scenarios.

To deal with the increasingly serious threat of industrial information malicious code, the simulations and characteristics of the domestic security and controllable operating system and office software were implemented in the virtual sandbox environment based on virtualization technology in this study. Firstly, the serialization detection scheme based on the convolution neural network algorithm was improved. Then, the API sequence was modeled and analyzed by the improved convolution neural network algorithm to excavate more local related information of variant sequences. Finally the variant detection of malicious code was realized. Results showed that this improved method had higher efficiency and accuracy for a large number of malicious code detection, and could be applied to the malicious code detection in security and controllable operating system.

The Internet-of-Things (IoT) paradigm at large continues to be compromised, hindering the privacy, dependability, security, and safety of our nations. While the operational security communities (i.e., CERTS, SOCs, CSIRT, etc.) continue to develop capabilities for monitoring cyberspace, tools which are IoT-centric remain at its infancy. To this end, we address this gap by innovating an actionable Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) feed related to Internet-scale infected IoT devices. The feed analyzes, in near real-time, 3.6TB of daily streaming passive measurements ( ≈ 1M pps) by applying a custom-developed learning methodology to distinguish between compromised IoT devices and non-IoT nodes, in addition to labeling the type and vendor. The feed is augmented with third party information to provide contextual information. We report on the operation, analysis, and shortcomings of the feed executed during an initial deployment period. We make the CTI feed available for ingestion through a public, authenticated API and a front-end platform.

Mobile payment protocols have attracted widespread attention over the past decade, due to advancements in digital technology. The use of these protocols in online industries can dramatically improve the quality of online services. However, the central issue of concern when utilizing these types of systems is their accountability, which ensures trust between the parties involved in payment transactions. It is, therefore, vital for researchers to investigate how to handle the accountability of mobile payment protocols. In this research, we introduce a secure mobile payment protocol to overcome this problem. Our payment protocol combines all the necessary security features, such as confidentiality, integrity, authentication, and authorization that are required to build trust among parties. In other words, is the properties of mutual authentication and non-repudiation are ensured, thus providing accountability. Our approach can resolve any conflicts that may arise in payment transactions between parties. To prove that the proposed protocol is correct and complete, we use the Scyther and AVISPA tools to verify our approach formally.

To understand the future trend of network security, the field of network security began to introduce the concept of NSSA(Network Security Situation Awareness). This paper implements the situation assessment model by using game theory algorithms to calculate the situation value of attack and defense behavior. After analyzing the ant colony algorithm and the RBF neural network, the defects of the RBF neural network are improved through the advantages of the ant colony algorithm, and the situation prediction model based on the ant colony-RBF neural network is realized. Finally, the model was verified experimentally.

Cyber ranges are proven to be effective towards the direction of cyber security training. Nevertheless, the existing literature in the area of cyber ranges does not cover, to our best knowledge, the field of 5G security training. 5G networks, though, reprise a significant field for modern cyber security, introducing a novel threat landscape. In parallel, the demand for skilled cyber security specialists is high and still rising. Therefore, it is of utmost importance to provide all means to experts aiming to increase their preparedness level in the case of an unwanted event. The EU funded SPIDER project proposes an innovative Cyber Range as a Service (CRaaS) platform for 5G cyber security testing and training. This paper aims to present the evaluation framework, followed by SPIDER, for the extraction of the user requirements. To validate the defined user requirements, SPIDER leveraged of questionnaires which included both closed and open format questions and were circulated among the personnel of telecommunication providers, vendors, security service providers, managers, engineers, cyber security personnel and researchers. Here, we demonstrate a selected set of the most critical questions and responses received. From the conducted analysis we reach to some important conclusions regarding 5G testing and training capabilities that should be offered by a cyber range, in addition to the analysis of the different perceptions between cyber security and 5G experts.

Many self-adaptive systems benefit from human involvement, where human operators can complement the capabilities of systems (e.g., by supervising decisions, or performing adaptations and tasks involving physical changes that cannot be automated). However, insufficient preparation (e.g., lack of task context comprehension) may hinder the effectiveness of human involvement, especially when operators are unexpectedly interrupted to perform a new task. Preparatory notification of a task provided in advance can sometimes help human operators focus their attention on the forthcoming task and understand its context before task execution, hence improving effectiveness. Nevertheless, deciding when to use preparatory notification as a tactic is not obvious and entails considering different factors that include uncertainties induced by human operator behavior (who might ignore the notice message), human attributes (e.g., operator training level), and other information that refers to the state of the system and its environment. In this paper, informed by work in cognitive science on human attention and context management, we introduce a formal framework to reason about the usage of preparatory notifications in self-adaptive systems involving human operators. Our framework characterizes the effects of managing attention via task notification in terms of task context comprehension. We also build on our framework to develop an automated probabilistic reasoning technique able to determine when and in what form a preparatory notification tactic should be used to optimize system goals. We illustrate our approach in a representative scenario of human-robot collaborative goods delivery.

Many self-adaptive systems benefit from human involvement, where human operators can complement the capabilities of systems (e.g., by supervising decisions, or performing adaptations and tasks involving physical changes that cannot be automated). However, insufficient preparation (e.g., lack of task context comprehension) may hinder the effectiveness of human involvement, especially when operators are unexpectedly interrupted to perform a new task. Preparatory notification of a task provided in advance can sometimes help human operators focus their attention on the forthcoming task and understand its context before task execution, hence improving effectiveness. Nevertheless, deciding when to use preparatory notification as a tactic is not obvious and entails considering different factors that include uncertainties induced by human operator behavior (who might ignore the notice message), human attributes (e.g., operator training level), and other information that refers to the state of the system and its environment. In this paper, informed by work in cognitive science on human attention and context management, we introduce a formal framework to reason about the usage of preparatory notifications in self-adaptive systems involving human operators. Our framework characterizes the effects of managing attention via task notification in terms of task context comprehension. We also build on our framework to develop an automated probabilistic reasoning technique able to determine when and in what form a preparatory notification tactic should be used to optimize system goals. We illustrate our approach in a representative scenario of human-robot collaborative goods delivery.

Many self-adaptive systems benefit from human involvement, where human operators can complement the capabilities of systems (e.g., by supervising decisions, or performing adaptations and tasks involving physical changes that cannot be automated). However, insufficient preparation (e.g., lack of task context comprehension) may hinder the effectiveness of human involvement, especially when operators are unexpectedly interrupted to perform a new task. Preparatory notification of a task provided in advance can sometimes help human operators focus their attention on the forthcoming task and understand its context before task execution, hence improving effectiveness. Nevertheless, deciding when to use preparatory notification as a tactic is not obvious and entails considering different factors that include uncertainties induced by human operator behavior (who might ignore the notice message), human attributes (e.g., operator training level), and other information that refers to the state of the system and its environment. In this paper, informed by work in cognitive science on human attention and context management, we introduce a formal framework to reason about the usage of preparatory notifications in self-adaptive systems involving human operators. Our framework characterizes the effects of managing attention via task notification in terms of task context comprehension. We also build on our framework to develop an automated probabilistic reasoning technique able to determine when and in what form a preparatory notification tactic should be used to optimize system goals. We illustrate our approach in a representative scenario of human-robot collaborative goods delivery.

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are among the most harmful cyberattack types in the Internet. The main goal of a DDoS defense mechanism is to reduce the attack's effect as close as possible to their sources to prevent malicious traffic in the Internet. In this work, we examine the DDoS attacks as a rate management and congestion control problem and propose a collaborative fair rate throttling mechanism to combat DDoS attacks. Additionally, we propose anomaly detection mechanisms to detect attacks at the victim site, early attack detection mechanisms by intermediate Autonomous Systems (ASes), and feedback mechanisms between ASes to achieve distributed defense against DDoS attacks. To reduce additional vulnerabilities for the feedback mechanism, we use a secure, private, and authenticated communication channel between AS monitors to control the process. Our mathematical model presents proactive resource management, where the victim site sends rate adjustment requests to upstream routers. We conducted several experiments using a real-world dataset to demonstrate the efficiency of our approach under DDoS attacks. Our results show that the proposed method can significantly reduce the impact of DDoS attacks with minimal overhead to routers. Moreover, the proposed anomaly detection techniques can help ASes to detect possible attacks and early attack detection by intermediate ASes.

Internet of Things (IoT) apps provide great convenience but exposes us to new safety threats. Unlike traditional software systems, threats may emerge from the joint behavior of multiple apps. While prior studies use handcrafted safety and security policies to detect these threats, these policies may not anticipate all usages of the devices and apps in a smart home, causing false alarms. In this study, we propose to use the technique of mining sandboxes for securing an IoT environment. After a set of behaviors are analyzed from a bundle of apps and devices, a sandbox is deployed, which enforces that previously unseen behaviors are disallowed. Hence, the execution of malicious behavior, introduced from software updates or obscured through methods to hinder program analysis, is blocked.While sandbox mining techniques have been proposed for Android apps, we show and discuss why they are insufficient for detecting malicious behavior in a more complex IoT system. We prototype IoTBox to address these limitations. IoTBox explores behavior through a formal model of a smart home. In our empirical evaluation to detect malicious code changes, we find that IoTBox achieves substantially higher precision and recall compared to existing techniques for mining sandboxes.

The number of devices in the Internet of Things (IoT) immensely grew in recent years. A frequent challenge in the assurance of the dependability of IoT systems is that components of the system appear as a black box. This paper presents a semi-automatic testing methodology for black-box systems that combines automata learning and fuzz testing. Our testing technique uses stateful fuzzing based on a model that is automatically inferred by automata learning. Applying this technique, we can simultaneously test multiple implementations for unexpected behavior and possible security vulnerabilities.We show the effectiveness of our learning-based fuzzing technique in a case study on the MQTT protocol. MQTT is a widely used publish/subscribe protocol in the IoT. Our case study reveals several inconsistencies between five different MQTT brokers. The found inconsistencies expose possible security vulnerabilities and violations of the MQTT specification.

Higher education is increasingly called upon to enhance cyber education, including hands-on "experiential" training. The good news is that additional tools and techniques are becoming more available, both in-house and through third parties, to provide cyber training environments and simulations at various features and price points. However, the training thus far has only focused on "traditional" Cybersecurity that lightly touches on wireless in undergraduate and master's degree programs, and certifications. The purpose of this research is to identify and recognize nascent cyber training emphasizing a broader spectrum of wireless security and encourage curricular development that includes critical experiential training. Experiential wireless security training is important to keep pace with the growth in wireless communication mediums and associated Internet of Things (IoT) and Cyber Physical System (CPS) applications. Cyber faculty at a university offering undergraduate and master's Cybersecurity degrees authored this paper; both degrees are offered to resident as well as online students.

Named Data Network (NDN) is considered to be the future of Internet architecture. The nature of NDN is to disseminate data based on the naming scheme rather than the location of the node. This feature caters to the need of vehicular applications, resulting in Vehicular Named Data Networks (VNDN). Although it is still in the initial stages of research, the collaboration has assured various advantages which attract the researchers to explore the architecture further. VNDN face challenges such as intermittent connectivity, mobility of nodes, design of efficient forwarding and naming schemes, among others. In order to develop effective forwarding strategies, behavior of data and interest packets under various circumstances needs to be studied. In this paper, propagation behavior of data and interest packets is analyzed by considering metrics such as Interest Satisfaction Ratio (ISR), Hop Count Difference (HCD) and Copies of Data Packets Processed (CDPP). These metrics are evaluated under network conditions such as varying network size, node mobility and amount of interest produced by each node. Simulation results show that data packets do not follow the reverse path of interest packets.