Biblio

With the unprecedented prevalence of mobile network applications, cryptographic protocols, such as the Secure Socket Layer/Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS), are widely used in mobile network applications for communication security. The proven methods for encrypted video stream classification or encrypted protocol detection are unsuitable for the SSL/TLS traffic. Consequently, application-level traffic classification based networking and security services are facing severe challenges in effectiveness. Existing encrypted traffic classification methods exhibit unsatisfying accuracy for applications with similar state characteristics. In this paper, we propose a multiple-attribute-based encrypted traffic classification system named Multi-Attribute Associated Fingerprints (MAAF). We develop MAAF based on the two key insights that the DNS traces generated during the application runtime contain classification guidance information and that the handshake certificates in the encrypted flows can provide classification clues. Apart from the exploitation of key insights, MAAF employs the context of the encrypted traffic to overcome the attribute-lacking problem during the classification. Our experimental results demonstrate that MAAF achieves 98.69% accuracy on the real-world traceset that consists of 16 applications, supports the early prediction, and is robust to the scale of the training traceset. Besides, MAAF is superior to the state-of-the-art methods in terms of both accuracy and robustness.

Digitization has increased exposure and opened up for more cyber threats and attacks. To proactively handle this issue, enterprise modeling needs to include threat management during the design phase that considers antagonists, attack vectors, and damage domains. Agile methods are commonly adopted to efficiently develop and manage software and systems. This paper proposes to use an enterprise architecture repository to analyze not only shipped components but the overall architecture, to improve the traditional designs represented by legacy systems in the situated IT-landscape. It shows how the hidden structure method (with Design Structure Matrices) can be used to evaluate the enterprise architecture, and how it can contribute to agile development. Our case study uses an architectural descriptive language called ArchiMate for architecture modeling and shows how to predict the ripple effect in a damaging domain if an attacker's malicious components are operating within the network.

Software-Defined Network (SDN) is the dynamic network technology to address the issues of traditional networks. It provides centralized view of the whole network through decoupling the control planes and data planes of a network. Most SDN-based security services globally detect and block a malicious host based on IP address. However, the IP address is not verified during the forwarding process in most cases and SDN-based security service may block a normal host with forged IP address in the whole network, which means false-positive. In this paper, we introduce an attack scenario that uses forged packets to make the security service consider a victim host as an attacker so that block the victim. We also introduce cost-effective risk avoidance strategy.

This paper presents an access control modelling that integrates risk assessment elements in the attribute-based model to organize the identification, authentication and authorization rules. Access control is complex in integrated systems, which have different actors accessing different information in multiple levels. In addition, systems are composed by different components, much of them from different developers. This requires a complete supply chain trust to protect the many existent actors, their privacy and the entire ecosystem. The incorporation of the risk assessment element introduces additional variables like the current environment of the subjects and objects, time of the day and other variables to help produce more efficient and effective decisions in terms of granting access to specific objects. The risk-based attributed access control modelling was applied in a health platform, Project CityZen.

Keeping Internet users safe from attacks and other threats is one of the biggest security challenges nowadays. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) [1] is one of the most common attacks. DDoS makes the system stop working by resource overload. Software Define Networking (SDN) [2] has recently emerged as a new networking technology offering an unprecedented programmability that allows network operators to dynamically configure and manage their infrastructures. The flexible processing and centralized management of SDN controller allow flexibly deploying complex security algorithms and mitigation methods. In this paper, we propose a new TCP-SYN flood attack mitigation in SDN networks using machine learning. By using a testbed, we implement the proposed algorithms, evaluate their accuracy and address the trade-off between the accuracy and capacity of the security device. The results show that the algorithms can mitigate TCP-SYN Flood attack over 96.

This paper presents the details of the roving proxy framework for SMS spam and SMS phishing (SMishing) detection. The framework aims to protect organizations and enterprises from the danger of SMishing attacks. Feasibility and functionality studies of the framework are presented along with an update process study to define the minimum requirements for the system to adapt with the latest spam and SMishing trends.

Streaming APIs are becoming more pervasive in mainstream Object-Oriented programming languages. For example, the Stream API introduced in Java 8 allows for functional-like, MapReduce-style operations in processing both finite and infinite data structures. However, using this API efficiently involves subtle considerations like determining when it is best for stream operations to run in parallel, when running operations in parallel can be less efficient, and when it is safe to run in parallel due to possible lambda expression side-effects. In this paper, we present an automated refactoring approach that assists developers in writing efficient stream code in a semantics-preserving fashion. The approach, based on a novel data ordering and typestate analysis, consists of preconditions for automatically determining when it is safe and possibly advantageous to convert sequential streams to parallel and unorder or de-parallelize already parallel streams. The approach was implemented as a plug-in to the Eclipse IDE, uses the WALA and SAFE analysis frameworks, and was evaluated on 11 Java projects consisting of ?642K lines of code. We found that 57 of 157 candidate streams (36.31%) were refactorable, and an average speedup of 3.49 on performance tests was observed. The results indicate that the approach is useful in optimizing stream code to their full potential.

On ARM processors with TrustZone security extension, asynchronous introspection mechanisms have been developed in the secure world to detect security policy violations in the normal world. These mechanisms provide security protection via passively checking the normal world snapshot. However, since previous secure world checking solutions require to suspend the entire rich OS, asynchronous introspection has not been widely adopted in the real world. Given a multi-core ARM system that can execute the two worlds simultaneously on different cores, secure world introspection can check the rich OS without suspension. However, we identify a new normal-world evasion attack that can defeat the asynchronous introspection by removing the attacking traces in parallel from one core when the security checking is performing on another core. We perform a systematic study on this attack and present its efficiency against existing asynchronous introspection mechanisms. As the countermeasure, we propose a secure and trustworthy asynchronous introspection mechanism called SATIN, which can efficiently detect the evasion attacks by increasing the attackers' evasion time cost and decreasing the defender's execution time under a safe limit. We implement a prototype on an ARM development board and the experimental results show that SATIN can effectively prevent evasion attacks on multi-core systems with a minor system overhead.

Generating a secure source of publicly-verifiable randomness could be the single most fundamental technical challenge on a distributed network, especially in the blockchain context. Many current proposals face serious problems of scalability and security issues. We present a protocol which can be implemented on a blockchain that ensures unpredictable, tamper-resistant, scalable and publicly-verifiable outcomes. The main building blocks of our protocol are homomorphic encryption (HE) and verifiable random functions (VRF). The use of homomorphic encryption enables mathematical operations to be performed on encrypted data, to ensure no one knows the outcome prior to being generated. The protocol requires O(n) elliptic curve multiplications and additions as well as O(n) signature signing and verification operations, which permits great scalability. We present a comparison between recent approaches to the generation of random beacons.

Currently, the complexity of software quality and testing is increasing exponentially with a huge number of challenges knocking doors, especially when testing a mission-critical application in banking and other critical domains, or the new technology trends with decentralized and nonintegrated testing tools. From practical experience, software testing has become costly and more effort-intensive with unlimited scope. This thesis promotes the Scalable Quality and Testing Lab (SQTL), it's a centralized quality and testing platform, which integrates a powerful manual, automation and business intelligence tools. SQTL helps quality engineers (QE) effectively organize, manage and control all testing activities in one centralized lab, starting from creating test cases, then executing different testing types such as web, security and others. And finally, ending with analyzing and displaying all testing activities result in an interactive dashboard, which allows QE to forecast new bugs especially those related to security. The centralized SQTL is to empower QE during the testing cycle, help them to achieve a greater level of software quality in minimum time, effort and cost, and decrease defect density metric.

Despite bringing many benefits of global network configuration and control, Software Defined Networking (SDN) also presents potential challenges for both digital forensics and cybersecurity. In fact, there are various attacks targeting a range of vulnerabilities on vital elements of this paradigm such as controller, Northbound and Southbound interfaces. In addition to solutions of security enhancement, it is important to build mechanisms for digital forensics in SDN which provide the ability to investigate and evaluate the security of the whole network system. It should provide features of identifying, collecting and analyzing log files and detailed information about network devices and their traffic. However, upon penetrating a machine or device, hackers can edit, even delete log files to remove the evidences about their presence and actions in the system. In this case, securing log files with fine-grained access control in proper storage without any modification plays a crucial role in digital forensics and cybersecurity. This work proposes a blockchain-based approach to improve the security of log management in SDN for network forensics, called SDNLog-Foren. This model is also evaluated with different experiments to prove that it can help organizations keep sensitive log data of their network system in a secure way regardless of being compromised at some different components of SDN.

The widespread adoption of social networking and cloud computing has transformed today's Internet to a trove of personal information. As a consequence, data breaches are expected to increase in gravity and occurrence. To counteract unintended data disclosure, a great deal of effort has been dedicated in devising methods for uncovering privacy leaks. Existing solutions, however, have not addressed the time- and data-intensive nature of leak detection. The shift from hardware-specific implementation to software-based solutions is the core idea behind the concept of Network Function Virtualization (NFV). On the other hand, the Software Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm is characterized by the decoupling of the forwarding and control planes. In this paper, an SDN/NFV-enabled architecture is proposed for improving the efficiency of leak detection systems. Employing a previously developed identification strategy, Personally Identifiable Information detector (PIID) and load balancer VNFs are packaged and deployed in OpenStack through an NFV MANO. Meanwhile, SDN controllers permit the load balancer to dynamically redistribute traffic among the PIID instances. In a physical testbed, tests are conducted to evaluate the proposed architecture. Experimental results indicate that the proportions of forwarding and parsing on total overhead is influenced by the traffic intensity. Furthermore, an NFV-enabled system with scalability features was found to outperform a non-virtualized implementation in terms of latency (85.1%), packet loss (98.3%) and throughput (8.41%).

Network attacks have become a growing threat to the current Internet. For the enhancement of network security and accountability, it is urgent to find the origin and identity of the adversary who misbehaves in the network. Some studies focus on embedding users' identities into IPv6 addresses, but such design cannot support the Stateless Address Autoconfiguration (SLAAC) protocol which is widely deployed nowadays. In this paper, we propose SDN-Ti, a general solution to traceback and identification for attackers in IPv6 networks based on Software Defined Network (SDN). In our proposal, the SDN switch performs a translation between the source IPv6 address of the packet and its trusted ID-encoded address generated by the SDN controller. The network administrator can effectively identify the attacker by parsing the malicious packets when the attack incident happens. Our solution not only avoids the heavy storage overhead and time synchronism problems, but also supports multiple IPv6 address assignment scenarios. What's more, SDN-Ti does not require any modification on the end device, hence can be easily deployed. We implement SDN-Ti prototype and evaluate it in a real IPv6 testbed. Experiment results show that our solution only brings very little extra performance cost, and it shows considerable performance in terms of latency, CPU consumption and packet loss compared to the normal forwarding method. The results indicate that SDN-Ti is feasible to be deployed in practice with a large number of users.

In this paper, an agent-based cross-layer secure service discovery scheme has been presented. Service discovery in MANET is a critical task and it presents numerous security challenges. These threats can compromise the availability, privacy and integrity of service discovery process and infrastructure. This paper highlights various security challenges prevalent to service discovery in MANET. Then, in order to address these security challenges, the paper proposes a cross-layer, agent based secure service discovery scheme for MANET based on deep neural network. The software agents will monitor the intrusive activities in the network based on an Intrusion Detection System (IDS). The service discovery operation is performed based on periodic dissemination of service, routing and security information. The QoS provisioning is achieved by encapsulating QoS information in the periodic advertisements done by service providers. The proposed approach has been implemented in JIST/ SWANS simulator. The results show that proposed approach provides improved security, scalability, latency, packet delivery ratio and service discovery success ratio, for various simulation scenarios.

Increasingly organizations are collecting ever larger amounts of data to build complex data analytics, machine learning and AI models. Furthermore, the data needed for building such models may be unstructured (e.g., text, image, and video). Hence such data may be stored in different data management systems ranging from relational databases to newer NoSQL databases tailored for storing unstructured data. Furthermore, data scientists are increasingly using programming languages such as Python, R etc. to process data using many existing libraries. In some cases, the developed code will be automatically executed by the NoSQL system on the stored data. These developments indicate the need for a data security and privacy solution that can uniformly protect data stored in many different data management systems and enforce security policies even if sensitive data is processed using a data scientist submitted complex program. In this paper, we introduce our vision for building such a solution for protecting big data. Specifically, our proposed system system allows organizations to 1) enforce policies that control access to sensitive data, 2) keep necessary audit logs automatically for data governance and regulatory compliance, 3) sanitize and redact sensitive data on-the-fly based on the data sensitivity and AI model needs, 4) detect potentially unauthorized or anomalous access to sensitive data, 5) automatically create attribute-based access control policies based on data sensitivity and data type.

IEC 61850 is an international standard that is widely used in substation automation systems (SAS) in smart grids. During its development, security was not considered thus leaving SAS vulnerable to attacks from adversaries. IEC 62351 was developed to provide security recommendations for SAS against (distributed) denial-of-service, replay, alteration, spoofing and detection of devices attacks. However, real-time communications, which require protocols such as Generic Object-Oriented Substation Event (GOOSE) to function efficiently, cannot implement these recommendations due to latency constraints. There has been researching that sought to improve the security of GOOSE messages, however, some cannot be practically implemented due to hardware requirements while others are theoretical, even though latency requirements were met. This research investigates the possibility of encrypting GOOSE messages with One- Time Pads (OTP), leveraging the fact that encryption/decryption processes require the random generation of OTPs and modulo addition (XOR), which could be a realistic approach to secure GOOSE while maintaining latency requirements. Results show that GOOSE messages can be encrypted with some future work required.

In recent days, Enterprises are expanding their business efficiently through web applications which has paved the way for building good consumer relationship with its customers. The major threat faced by these enterprises is their inability to provide secure environments as the web applications are prone to severe vulnerabilities. As a result of this, many security standards and tools have been evolving to handle the vulnerabilities. Though there are many vulnerability detection tools available in the present, they do not provide sufficient information on the attack. For the long-term functioning of an organization, data along with efficient analytics on the vulnerabilities is required to enhance its reliability. The proposed model thus aims to make use of Machine Learning with Analytics to solve the problem in hand. Hence, the sequence of the attack is detected through the pattern using PAA and further the detected vulnerabilities are classified using Machine Learning technique such as SVM. Probabilistic results are provided in order to obtain numerical data sets which could be used for obtaining a report on user and application behavior. Dynamic and Reconfigurable PAA with SVM Classifier is a challenging task to analyze the vulnerabilities and impact of these vulnerabilities in heterogeneous web environment. This will enhance the former processing by analysis of the origin and the pattern of the attack in a more effective manner. Hence, the proposed system is designed to perform detection of attacks. The system works on the mitigation and prevention as part of the attack prediction.

With the interconnection of services and customers, network attacks are capable of large amounts of damage. Flexible Random Virtual IP Multiplexing (FRVM) is a Moving Target Defence (MTD) technique that protects against reconnaissance and access with address mutation and multiplexing. Security techniques must be trusted, however, FRVM, along with past MTD techniques, have gaps in realistic evaluation and thorough analysis of security and performance. FRVM, and two comparison techniques, were deployed on a virtualised network to demonstrate FRVM's security and performance trade-offs. The key results include the security and performance trade-offs of address multiplexing and address mutation. The security benefit of IP address multiplexing is much greater than its performance overhead, deployed on top of address mutation. Frequent address mutation significantly increases an attackers' network scan durations as well as effectively obfuscating and hiding network configurations.

Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET for short) is a new art of wireless technology that connect a group of mobile nodes in a dynamically decentralized fashion without the need of a base station, or a centralized administration, whereas each mobile node can work as a router. MANET topology changes frequently, because of the MANET dynamically formation nature, and freely to move randomly. MANET can function as standalone or can be connected to external networks. Mobile nodes are characterized with minimal human interaction, weight, less memory, and power. Despite all the pros of MANET and the widely spreading in many and critical industries, MANET has some cons and suffers from severe security issues. In this survey we emphasize on the different types of attacks at MANET protocol stack, and show how MANET is vulnerable to those attacks.

Software-defined networking (SDN) allows the smart grid to be centrally controlled and managed by decoupling the control plane from the data plane, but it also expands attack surface for attackers. Existing studies about the security of SDN-enabled smart grid (SDSG) mainly focused on static methods such as access control and identity authentication, which is vulnerable to attackers that carefully probe the system. As the attacks become more variable and complex, there is an urgent need for dynamic defense methods. In this paper, we propose a security function virtualization (SFV) based moving target defense of SDSG which makes the attack surface constantly changing. First, we design a dynamic defense mechanism by migrating virtual security function (VSF) instances as the traffic state changes. The centralized SDN controller is re-designed for global status monitoring and migration management. Moreover, we formalize the VSF instances migration problem as an integer nonlinear programming problem with multiple constraints and design a pre-migration algorithm to prevent VSF instances' resources from being exhausted. Simulation results indicate the feasibility of the proposed scheme.

Blockchain may have a potential to prove its value for the new US FDA regulatory requirements defined in the Drug Supply Chain Security Act (DSCSA) as innovative solutions are needed to support the highly complex pharmaceutical industry supply chain as it seeks to comply. In this paper, we examine how blockchain can be applied to meet with the security compliance requirement for the pharmaceutical supply chain. We explore the online playground of Hyperledger Composer, a set of tools for building blockchain business networks, to model the data and access control rules for the drug supply chain. Our experiment shows that this solution can provide a prototyping opportunity for compliance checking with certain limitations.

Software integration in modern vehicles is continuously expanding. This is due to the fact that vehicle manufacturers are always trying to enhance and add more innovative and competitive features that may rely on complex software functionalities. However, these features come at a cost. They amplify the security vulnerabilities in vehicles and lead to more security issues in today's automobiles. As a result, the need for identifying vulnerable components in a vehicle software system has become crucial. Security experts need to know which components of the vehicle software system can be exploited for attacks and should focus their testing and inspection efforts on it. Nevertheless, it is a challenging and costly task to identify these weak components in a vehicle's system. In this paper, we propose some security vulnerability metrics for connected vehicles that aim to assist software testers during the development life-cycle in order to identify the frail links that put the vehicle at highsecurity risks. Vulnerable function assessment can give software testers a good idea about which components in a connected vehicle need to be prioritized in order to mitigate the risk and hence secure the vehicle. The proposed metrics were applied to OpenPilot - a software that provides Autopilot feature - and has been integrated with 48 different vehicles.. The application shows how the defined metrics can be effectively used to quantitatively measure the vulnerabilities of a vehicle software system.

Internet of Things (IoT) is a contemporary concept for connecting the existing things in our environment with the Internet for a sake of making the objects information are accessible from anywhere and anytime to support a modern life style based on the Internet. With the rapid development of the IoT technologies and widely spreading in most of the fields such as buildings, health, education, transportation and agriculture. Thus, the IoT applications require increasing data collection from the IoT devices to send these data to the applications or servers which collect or analyze the data, so it is a very important to secure the data and ensure that do not reach a malicious adversary. This paper reviews some attacks in the IoT applications and the security weaknesses in the IoT environment. In addition, this study presents the challenges of IoT in terms of hardware, network and software. Moreover, this paper summarizes and points to some attacks on the smart car, smart home, smart campus, smart farm and healthcare.

In this paper, we present a semi-supervised remote sensing change detection method based on graph model with Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). Firstly, the multi-temporal remote sensing change detection problem is converted as a problem of semi-supervised learning on graph where a majority of unlabeled nodes and a few labeled nodes are contained. Then, GANs are adopted to generate samples in a competitive manner and help improve the classification accuracy. Finally, a binary change map is produced by classifying the unlabeled nodes to a certain class with the help of both the labeled nodes and the unlabeled nodes on graph. Experimental results carried on several very high resolution remote sensing image data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Data outsourcing to cloud has been a common IT practice nowadays due to its significant benefits. Meanwhile, security and privacy concerns are critical obstacles to hinder the further adoption of cloud. Although data encryption can mitigate the problem, it reduces the functionality of query processing, e.g., disabling SQL queries. Several schemes have been proposed to enable one-dimensional query on encrypted data, but multi-dimensional range query has not been well addressed. In this paper, we propose a secure and scalable scheme that can support multi-dimensional range queries over encrypted data. The proposed scheme has three salient features: (1) Privacy: the server cannot learn the contents of queries and data records during query processing. (2) Efficiency: we utilize hierarchical cubes to encode multi-dimensional data records and construct a secure tree index on top of such encoding to achieve sublinear query time. (3) Verifiability: our scheme allows users to verify the correctness and completeness of the query results to address server's malicious behaviors. We perform formal security analysis and comprehensive experimental evaluations. The results on real datasets demonstrate that our scheme achieves practical performance while guaranteeing data privacy and result integrity.