Biblio

Online information security labs intended for training and facilitating hands-on learning for distance students at master’s level are not easy to develop and administer. This research focuses on analyzing the results of a DSR project for design, development, and implementation of an InfoSec lab. This research work contributes to the existing research by putting forth an initial outline of a generalized model for design theory for InfoSec labs aimed at hands-on education of students in the field of information security. The anatomy of design theory framework is used to analyze the necessary components of the anticipated design theory for InfoSec labs in future.

In control systems, the operation of the system after an incident occurs is important. This paper proposes to design a whitelist model that can detect anomalies and identify locations of anomalous actuators using finite automata during multiple actuators attack. By applying this model and comparing the whitelist model with the operation data, the monitoring system detects anomalies and identifies anomaly locations of actuator that deviate from normal operation. We propose to construct a whitelist model focusing on the order of the control system operation using binary search trees, which can grasp the state of the system when anomalies occur. We also apply combinatorial compression based on BDD (Binary Decision Diagram) to the model to speed up querying and identification of abnormalities. Based on the model designed in this study, we aim to construct a secured control system that selects and executes an appropriate fallback operation based on the state of the system when anomaly is detected.

As one of the effective methods to enhance traffic safety and improve traffic efficiency, the Internet of vehicles has attracted wide attention from all walks of life. V2X secure communication, as one of the research hotspots of the Internet of vehicles, also has many security and privacy problems. Attackers can use these vulnerabilities to obtain vehicle identity information and location information, and can also attack vehicles through camouflage.Therefore, the identity authentication process in vehicle network communication must be effectively protected. The anonymous identity authentication scheme based on moving target defense proposed in this paper not only ensures the authenticity and integrity of information sources, but also avoids the disclosure of vehicle identity information.

Counterfeited products are a significant problem in both developed and developing countries and has become more critical as an aftermath of COVID-19, exclusively for drugs and medical equipment’s. In this paper, an innovative approach is proposed to resist counterfeiting which is based on the principles of Synthetic DNA. The proposed encryption approach has employed the distinctive features of synthetic DNA in amalgamation with DNA encryption to provide information security and functions as an anticounterfeiting method that ensures usability. The scheme’s security analysis and proof of concept are detailed. Scyther is used to carry out the formal analysis of the scheme, and all of the modeled assertions are verified without any attacks.

A classification issue in machine learning is the issue of spotting Distributed Denial of Service (DDos) attacks. A Denial of Service (DoS) assault is essentially a deliberate attack launched from a single source with the implied intent of rendering the target's application unavailable. Attackers typically aims to consume all available network bandwidth in order to accomplish this, which inhibits authorized users from accessing system resources and denies them access. DDoS assaults, in contrast to DoS attacks, include several sources being used by the attacker to launch an attack. At the network, transportation, presentation, and application layers of a 7-layer OSI architecture, DDoS attacks are most frequently observed. With the help of the most well-known standard dataset and multiple regression analysis, we have created a machine learning model in this work that can predict DDoS and bot assaults based on traffic.

With the rapid development of the Internet of Things and the exploration of its application scenarios, embedded devices are deployed in various environments to collect information and data. In such environments, the security of embedded devices cannot be guaranteed and are vulnerable to various attacks, even device capture attacks. When embedded devices are attacked, the attacker can obtain the information transmitted by the channel during the encryption process and the internal operation of the encryption. In this paper, we analyze various existing white-box schemes and show whether they are suitable for application in IoT. We propose an application of WBEAs for distributed devices in IoT scenarios and conduct experiments on several devices in IoT scenarios.

The internet has developed and transformed the world dramatically in recent years, which has resulted in several cyberattacks. Cybersecurity is one of society’s most serious challenge, costing millions of dollars every year. The research presented here will look into this area, focusing on malware that can establish botnets, and in particular, detecting connections made by infected workstations connecting with the attacker’s machine. In recent years, the frequency of network security incidents has risen dramatically. Botnets have previously been widely used by attackers to carry out a variety of malicious activities, such as compromising machines to monitor their activities by installing a keylogger or sniffing traffic, launching Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks, stealing the identity of the machine or credentials, and even exfiltrating data from the user’s computer. Botnet detection is still a work in progress because no one approach exists that can detect a botnet’s whole ecosystem. A detailed analysis of a botnet, discuss numerous parameter’s result of detection methods related to botnet attacks, as well as existing work of botnet identification in field of machine learning are discuss here. This paper focuses on the comparative analysis of various classifier based on design of botnet detection technique which are able to detect P2P botnet using machine learning classifier.

Information Technology (IT) governance crosses the organization practices, culture, and policy that support IT management in controlling five key functions, which are strategic alignment, performance management, resource management, value delivery, and risk management. The line of sight is extended from the corporate strategy to the risk management, and risk controls are assessed against operational goals. Thus, the risk management model is concerned with ensuring that the corporate risks are sufficiently controlled and managed. Many organizations rely on IT services to facilitate and sustain their operations, which mandate the existence of a risk management model in their IT governance. This paper examines prior research based on IT governance by using a risk management framework. It also proposes a new method for calculating and classifying IT-related risks. Additionally, we assessed our technique with one of the critical IT services that proves the reliability and accuracy of the implemented model.

Currently, the rapid development of digital communication and multimedia has made security an increasingly prominent issue of communicating, storing, and transmitting digital data such as images, audio, and video. Encryption techniques such as chaotic map based encryption can ensure high levels of security of data and have been used in many fields including medical science, military, and geographic satellite imagery. As a result, ensuring image data confidentiality, integrity, security, privacy, and authenticity while transferring and storing images over an unsecured network like the internet has become a high concern. There have been many encryption technologies proposed in recent years. This paper begins with a summary of cryptography and image encryption basics, followed by a discussion of different kinds of chaotic image encryption techniques and a literature review for each form of encryption. Finally, by examining the behaviour of numerous existing chaotic based image encryption algorithms, this paper hopes to build new chaotic based image encryption strategies in the future.

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.

In most PUF-based authentication schemes, a central server is usually engaged to verify the response of the device’s PUF to challenge bit-streams. However, the server availability may be intermittent in practice. To tackle such an issue, this paper proposes a new protocol for supporting distributed authentication while avoiding vulnerability to information leakage where CRPs could be retrieved from hacked devices and collectively used to model the PUF. The main idea is to provision for scrambling the challenge bit-stream in a way that is dependent on the verifier. The scrambling pattern varies per authentication round for each device and independently across devices. In essence, the scrambling function becomes node- and packetspecific and the response received by two verifiers of one device for the same challenge bit-stream could vary. Thus, neither the scrambling function can be reverted, nor the PUF can be modeled even by a collusive set of malicious nodes. The validation results using data of an FPGA-based implementation demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in thwarting PUF modeling attacks by collusive actors. We also discuss the approach resiliency against impersonation, Sybil, and reverse engineering attacks.

This paper is concered with the nonlinear cyber physical system (CPS) with uncertain parameters under false data injection (FDI) attacks. The interval type-2 (IT2) fuzzy model is utilized to approximate the nonlinear system, then the nonlinear system can be represented as a convex combination of linear systems. To detect the FDI attacks, a novel robust fuzzy extended state observer with H∞ preformance is proposed, where the fuzzy rules are utilized to the observer to estimate the FDI attacks. Utilizing the observation of the FDI attacks, a security control scheme is proposed in this paper, in which a compensator is designed to offset the FDI attacks. Simulation examples are given to illustrate the effecitveness of the proposed security scheme.

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.

One of the major concerns in the real-time monitoring systems in a smart grid is the Cyber security threat. The false data injection attack is emerging as a major form of attack in Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). A False data Injection Attack (FDIA) can lead to severe issues like insufficient generation, physical damage to the grid, power flow imbalance as well as economical loss. The recent advancements in machine learning algorithms have helped solve the drawbacks of using classical detection techniques for such attacks. In this article, we propose to use Autoencoders (AE’s) as a novel Machine Learning approach to detect FDI attacks without any major modifications. The performance of the method is validated through the analysis of the simulation results. The algorithm achieves optimal accuracy owing to the unsupervised nature of the algorithm.

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.

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 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.

Aiming at the big data security and privacy protection issues in the smart grid, the current key technologies for big data security and privacy protection in smart grids are sorted out, and a privacy-protecting smart grid association rule is proposed according to the privacy-protecting smart grid big data analysis and mining technology route The mining plan specifically analyzes the risk factors in the operation of the new power grid, and discusses the information security of power grid users from the perspective of the user, focusing on the protection of privacy and security, using safe multi-party calculation of the support and confidence of the association rules. Privacy-protecting smart grid big data mining enables power companies to improve service quality to 7.5% without divulging customer private information.

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.

Blind identification of channel codes is crucial in intelligent communication and non-cooperative signal processing, and it plays a significant role in wireless physical layer security, information interception, and information confrontation. Previous researches show a high computation complexity by manual feature extractions, in addition, problems of indisposed accuracy and poor robustness are to be resolved in a low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). For solving these difficulties, based on deep residual shrinkage network (DRSN), this paper proposes a novel recognizer by deep learning technologies to blindly distinguish the type and the parameter of channel codes without any prior knowledge or channel state, furthermore, feature extractions by the neural network from codewords can avoid intricate calculations. We evaluated the performance of this recognizer in AWGN, single-path fading, and multi-path fading channels, the results of the experiments showed that the method we proposed worked well. It could achieve over 85 % of recognition accuracy for channel codes in AWGN channels when SNR is not lower than 4dB, and provide an improvement of more than 5% over the previous research in recognition accuracy, which proves the validation of the proposed method.

In the smart grid, the sharing of power data among various energy entities can make the data play a higher value. However, there may be unauthorized access while sharing data, which makes many entities unwilling to share their data to prevent data leakage. Based on blockchain and ABAC (Attribute-based Access Control) technology, this paper proposes an access control scheme, so that users can achieve fine-grained access control of their data when sharing them. The solution uses smart contract to achieve automated and reliable policy evaluation. IPFS (Interplanetary File System) is used for off-chain distributed storage to share the storage pressure of blockchain and guarantee the reliable storage of data. At the same time, all processes in the system are stored in the blockchain, ensuring the accountability of the system. Finally, the experiment proves the feasibility of the proposed scheme.

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 botnet is a serious network security threat that can cause servers crash, so how to detect the behavior of Botnet has already become an important part of the research of network security. DNS(Domain Name System) request is the first step for most of the mainframe computers controlled by Botnet to communicate with the C&C(command; control) server. The detection of DNS request domain names is an important way for mainframe computers controlled by Botnet. However, the detection method based on fixed rules is hard to take effect for botnet based on DGA(Domain Generation Algorithm) because malicious domain names keep evolving and derive many different generation methods. Contrasted with the traditional methods, the method based on machine learning is a better way to detect it by learning and modeling the DGA. This paper presents a method based on the Naive Bayes model, the XGBoost model, the SVM(Support Vector Machine) model, and the MLP(Multi-Layer Perceptron) model, and tests it with real data sets collected from DGA, Alexa, and Secrepo. The experimental results show the precision score, the recall score, and the F1 score for each model.

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) models are used widely in applications for voice navigation and voice control of domestic appliances. ASRs have been misused by attackers to generate malicious outputs by attacking the deep learning component within ASRs. To assess the security and robustnesss of ASRs, we propose techniques within our framework SPAT that generate blackbox (agnostic to the DNN) adversarial attacks that are portable across ASRs. This is in contrast to existing work that focuses on whitebox attacks that are time consuming and lack portability. Our techniques generate adversarial attacks that have no human audible difference by manipulating the input speech signal using a psychoacoustic model that maintains the audio perturbations below the thresholds of human perception. We propose a framework SPAT with three attack generation techniques based on the psychoacoustic concept and frame selection techniques to selectively target the attack. We evaluate portability and effectiveness of our techniques using three popular ASRs and two input audio datasets using the metrics- Word Error Rate (WER) of output transcription, Similarity to original audio, attack Success Rate on different ASRs and Detection score by a defense system. We found our adversarial attacks were portable across ASRs, not easily detected by a state-of the-art defense system, and had significant difference in output transcriptions while sounding similar to original audio.