Biblio

The generative and transformative nature of the Internet which has become a synonym for the infrastructure of the contemporary digital society, is also a place where there are unsavoury and illegal activities such as fraud, human trafficking, exchange of control substances, arms smuggling, extremism, and terrorism. The legitimate concerns such as anonymity and privacy are used for proliferation of nefarious deeds in parts of the Internet termed as a deep web and a dark web. The cryptographic and anonymity mechanisms employed by the dark web miscreants create serious problems for the law enforcement agencies and other legal institutions to monitor, control, investigate, prosecute, and prevent the range of criminal events which should not be part of the Internet, and the human society in general. The paper describes the research on developing a framework for identifying, collecting, analysing, and reporting information from the dark web in a forensically sound manner. The framework should provide the fundamentals for creating a real-life system that could be used as a tool by law enforcement institutions, digital forensics researchers and practitioners to explore and study illicit actions and their consequences on the dark web. The design science paradigms is used to develop the framework, while international security and forensic experts are behind the ex-ante evaluation of the basic components and their functionality, the architecture, and the organization of the system. Finally, we discuss the future work concerning the implementation of the framework along with the inducement of some intelligent modules that should empower the tool with adaptability, effectiveness, and efficiency.

The persistence of search rank fraud in online, peer-opinion systems, made possible by crowdsourcing sites and specialized fraud workers, shows that the current approach of detecting and filtering fraud is inefficient. We introduce a fraud de-anonymization approach to disincentivize search rank fraud: attribute user accounts flagged by fraud detection algorithms in online peer-opinion systems, to the human workers in crowdsourcing sites, who control them. We model fraud de-anonymization as a maximum likelihood estimation problem, and introduce UODA, an unconstrained optimization solution. We develop a graph based deep learning approach to predict ownership of account pairs by the same fraudster and use it to build discriminative fraud de-anonymization (DDA) and pseudonymous fraudster discovery algorithms (PFD). To address the lack of ground truth fraud data and its pernicious impacts on online systems that employ fraud detection, we propose the first cheating-resistant fraud de-anonymization validation protocol, that transforms human fraud workers into ground truth, performance evaluation oracles. In a user study with 16 human fraud workers, UODA achieved a precision of 91%. On ground truth data that we collected starting from other 23 fraud workers, our co-ownership predictor significantly outperformed a state-of-the-art competitor, and enabled DDA and PFD to discover tens of new fraud workers, and attribute thousands of suspicious user accounts to existing and newly discovered fraudsters.

A morphed face image in a photo ID is a serious threat to image-based user verification enabling that multiple persons could be matched with the same document. The application of machine-readable travel documents (MRTD) at automated border control (ABC) gates is an example of a verification scenario that is very sensitive to this kind of fraud. Detection of morphed face images prior to face matching is, therefore, indispensable for effective border security. We introduce the face morphing detection approach based on fitting a logarithmic curve to nine Benford features extracted from quantized DCT coefficients of JPEG compressed original and morphed face images. We separately study the parameters of the logarithmic curve in face and background regions to establish the traces imposed by the morphing process. The evaluation results show that a single parameter of the logarithmic curve may be sufficient to clearly separate morphed and original images.

In fault diagnosis of industrial process, there are usually more than one variable that are faulty. When multiple faults occur, the generalized reconstruction-based contribution can be helpful while traditional RBC may make mistakes. Due to the correlation between the variables, these faults usually propagate to other normal variables, which is called smearing effect. Thus, it is helpful to consider the pervious fault diagnosis results. In this paper, a data-driven fault diagnosis method which is based on generalized RBC and bayesian decision is presented. This method combines multi-dimensional RBC and bayesian decision. The proposed method improves the diagnosis capability of multiple and minor faults with greater noise. A numerical simulation example is given to show the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method.

Real-time crowdsourced maps, such as Waze provide timely updates on traffic, congestion, accidents, and points of interest. In this paper, we demonstrate how lack of strong location authentication allows creation of software-based Sybil devices that expose crowdsourced map systems to a variety of security and privacy attacks. Our experiments show that a single Sybil device with limited resources can cause havoc on Waze, reporting false congestion and accidents and automatically rerouting user traffic. More importantly, we describe techniques to generate Sybil devices at scale, creating armies of virtual vehicles capable of remotely tracking precise movements for large user populations while avoiding detection. To defend against Sybil devices, we propose a new approach based on co-location edges, authenticated records that attest to the one-time physical co-location of a pair of devices. Over time, co-location edges combine to form large proximity graphs that attest to physical interactions between devices, allowing scalable detection of virtual vehicles. We demonstrate the efficacy of this approach using large-scale simulations, and how they can be used to dramatically reduce the impact of the attacks. We have informed Waze/Google team of our research findings. Currently, we are in active collaboration with Waze team to improve the security and privacy of their system.

This paper explores the possibility of detecting the hidden presence of wireless eavesdroppers. Such eavesdroppers employ passive receivers that only listen and never transmit any signals making them very hard to detect. In this paper, we show that even passive receivers leak RF signals on the wireless medium. This RF leakage, however, is extremely weak and buried under noise and other transmitted signals that can be 3-5 orders of magnitude larger. Hence, it is missed by today's radios. We design and build Ghostbuster, the first device that can reliably extract this leakage, even when it is buried under ongoing transmissions, in order to detect the hidden presence of eavesdroppers. Ghostbuster does not require any modifications to current transmitters and receivers and can accurately detect the eavesdropper in the presence of ongoing transmissions. Empirical results show that Ghostbuster can detect eavesdroppers with more than 95% accuracy up to 5 meters away.

The occurrence of security vulnerabilities in kernel, especially for macOS/iOS kernel XNU, has increased rapidly in recent years. Naturally, concerns were raised due to the high risks they would lead to, which in general are much more serious than common application vulnerabilities. However, discovering XNU kernel vulnerabilities is always very challenging, and the main approach in practice is still manual analysis, which obviously is not a scalable method. In this paper, we perform an in-depth empirical study on the 406 published XNU kernel vulnerabilities to identify distinguishing characteristics of them and then leverage the features to guide our vulnerability detection, i.e., locating suspicious functions. To further improve the efficiency of vulnerability detection, we present KInspector, a new and lightweight framework to detect XNU kernel vulnerabilities by leveraging feedback-based fuzzing techniques. We thoroughly evaluate our approach on XNU with various versions, and the results turn out to be quite promising: 21 N/0-day vulnerabilities have been discovered in our experiments.

Because major smartphone platforms are equipped with Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) capabilities, more and more smart devices have adopted BLE technologies to communicate with smartphones. In order to support the mesh topology in BLE networks, several proposals have been designed. Among them, the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) recently released a specification for Bluetooth mesh networks based upon BLE technology. This paper focuses on this standard solution and analyses its security protocol with hardware security in mind. As it is expected that internet of things (IoT) devices will be deployed everywhere, the risk of physical attacks must be assessed. First, we provide a comprehensive survey of the security features involved in Bluetooth mesh. Then, we introduce some physical attacks identified as serious threats for the IoT and discuss their relevance in the case of Bluetooth mesh networks. Finally, we briefly discuss possible countermeasures to reach a secure implementation.

With emerging smart automotive technologies, vehicle-to-vehicle communications, and software-dominated enhancements for enjoyable driving and advanced driver assistance systems, the complexity of providing guarantees in terms of security, trust, and privacy in a modern cyber-enabled automotive system is significantly elevated. New threat models emerge that require efficient system-level countermeasures. This article introduces synergies between on- and off-chip networking techniques to ensure secure execution environments for electronic control units. The proposed mechanisms consist of hardware firewalling and on-chip network physical isolation, whose mechanisms are combined with system-wide cryptographic techniques in automotive controller area network (CAN)-bus communications to provide authentication and confidentiality.

With all the exciting benefits of IoT in healthcare - from mobile applications to wearable and implantable health gadgets-it becomes prominent to ensure that patients, their medical data and the interactions to and from their medical devices are safe and secure. The security and privacy is being breached when the mobile applications are mishandled or tampered by the hackers by performing reverse engineering on the application leading to catastrophic consequences. To combat against these vulnerabilities, there is need to create an awareness of the potential risks of these devices and effective strategies are needed to be implemented to achieve a level of security defense. In this paper, the benefits of healthcare IoT system and the possible vulnerabilities that may result are presented. Also, we propose to develop solutions against these vulnerabilities by protecting mobile applications using obfuscation and return oriented programming techniques. These techniques convert an application into a form which makes difficult for an adversary to interpret or alter the code for illegitimate purpose. The mobile applications use keys to control communication with the implantable medical devices, which need to be protected as they are the critical component for securing communications. Therefore, we also propose access control schemes using white box encryption to make the keys undiscoverable to hackers.

Voice interfaces are increasingly becoming integrated into a variety of Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Such systems can dramatically simplify interactions between users and devices with limited displays. Unfortunately voice interfaces also create new opportunities for exploitation. Specifically any sound-emitting device within range of the system implementing the voice interface (e.g., a smart television, an Internet-connected appliance, etc) can potentially cause these systems to perform operations against the desires of their owners (e.g., unlock doors, make unauthorized purchases, etc). We address this problem by developing a technique to recognize fundamental differences in audio created by humans and electronic speakers. We identify sub-bass over-excitation, or the presence of significant low frequency signals that are outside of the range of human voices but inherent to the design of modern speakers, as a strong differentiator between these two sources. After identifying this phenomenon, we demonstrate its use in preventing adversarial requests, replayed audio, and hidden commands with a 100%/1.72% TPR/FPR in quiet environments. In so doing, we demonstrate that commands injected via nearby audio devices can be effectively removed by voice interfaces.

As more businesses and consumers move their information storage to the cloud, the need to protect sensitive data is higher than ever. Using encryption, data access can be restricted to only authorized users. However, with standard encryption schemes, modifying an encrypted file in the cloud requires a complete file download, decryption, modification, and upload. This is cumbersome and time-consuming. Recently, the concept of homomorphic computing has been proposed as a solution to this problem. Using homomorphic computation, operations may be performed directly on encrypted files without decryption, hence avoiding exposure of any sensitive user information in the cloud. This also conserves bandwidth and reduces processing time. In this paper, we present a homomorphic computation scheme that utilizes the affine cipher applied to the ASCII representation of data. To the best of the authors» knowledge, this is the first use of affine ciphers in homomorphic computing. Our scheme supports both string operations (encrypted string search and concatenation), as well as arithmetic operations (encrypted integer addition and subtraction). A design goal of our proposed homomorphism is that string data and integer data are treated identically, in order to enhance security.

In this exploratory study, we examine how personification and interactivity may influence people's disclosures around sensitive topics, such as psychological stressors. Participants (N=441) shared a recent stressful experience with one of three agent interfaces: 1) a non-interactive, non-personified survey, 2) an interactive, non-personified chatbot, and 3) an interactive, personified chatbot. We coded these responses to examine how agent type influenced the nature of the stressor disclosed, and the intimacy and amount of disclosure. Participants discussed fewer homelife related stressors, but more finance-related stressors and more chronic stressors overall with the personified chatbot than the other two agents. The personified chatbot was also twice as likely as the other agents to receive disclosures that contained very little detail. We discuss the role played by personification and interactivity in interactions with conversational agents, and implications for design.

Biometry is often used as a part of the multi-factor authentication in order to improve the security of IT systems. In this paper, we propose the palmprint-based solution for user identity verification. In particular, we present a new approach to feature extraction. The proposed method is based both on texture and color information. Our experiments show that using the proposed hybrid features allows for achieving satisfactory accuracy without increasing requirements for additional computational resources. It is important from our perspective since the proposed method is dedicated to smartphones and other handhelds in mobile verification scenarios.

The aim of the study is to evaluate the consistency of supplier risk assessment performed during the supplier selection process. Existing literature indicates that current supplier selection processes yield inconsistent results. Consistent supplier selection cannot be accomplished without stable risk assessment performed during the process. A case study was conducted in a train manufacturer in South Africa, and document analysis, interviews and questionnaires were employed to source information and data. Triangulation and pattern matching enabled a comparative study between literature and practice from which findings were derived. The study suggests selection criteria that may be considered when performing supplier risk assessment during the selection process. The findings indicate that structured supplier risk assessment with predefined supplier selection criteria may eliminate inconsistencies in supplier assessment and selection.

Considering reflected light in physical layer security (PLS) is very important because a small portion of reflected light enables an eavesdropper (ED) to acquire legitimate information. Moreover, it would be a practical strategy for an ED to be located at an outer area of the room, where the reflection light is strong, in order to escape the vigilance of a legitimate user. Therefore, in this paper, we investigate the impact of multipath reflections on PLS in visible light communication in the presence of randomly located eavesdroppers. We apply spatial point processes to characterize randomly distributed EDs. The generalized error in signal-to-noise ratio that occurs when reflections are ignored is defined as a function of the distance between the receiver and the wall. We use this error for quantifying the domain of interest that needs to be considered from the secrecy viewpoint. Furthermore, we investigate how the reflection affects the secrecy outage probability (SOP). It is shown that the effect of the reflection on the SOP can be removed by adjusting the light emitting diode configuration. Monte Carlo simulations and numerical results are given to verify our analysis.

With the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), wireless sensor and actuator networks, subsequently referred to as IoT networks (IoTNs), are proliferating at an unprecedented rate in several newfound areas such as smart cities, health care, and transportation, and consequently, securing them is of paramount importance. In this paper, we present several useful insights from an exploratory study of the impacts of network layer attacks on IoTNs. We envision that these insights will guide the design of future frameworks to defend against network layer attacks. We also present a preliminary such framework and demonstrate its effectiveness in detecting network layer attacks through experiments on a real IoTN test-bed.

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are eminent type of Mobile ad hoc Networks. The network created in VANETs is quite prone to security problem. In this work, a new mechanism is proposed to study the security of VANETs against DDoS attack. The proposed mechanism focuses on distributed denial of service attacks. The main idea of the paper is to detect the DDoS attack and mitigate it. The work consists of two stages, initially attack topology and network congestion is created. The second stage is to detect and mitigate the DDoS attack. The existing method is compared with the proposed method for mitigating DDoS attacks in VANETs. The existing solutions presented by the various researchers are also compared and analyzed. The solution for such kind of problem is provided which is used to detect and mitigate DDoS attack by using greedy approach. The network environment is created using NS-2. The results of simulation represent that the proposed approach is better in the terms of network packet loss, routing overhead and network throughput.

Aiming at the defect that the decoder does not need to be initialized before decoding and the attackers can easily reconstruct the decoder structure, a new method of codec improvement is proposed. The improved decoder can restore the original information sequence correctly only when the initial state of the coder and decoder is the same. The simulation results show that the improved chaotic codec structure has better confidentiality than the original structure.

Internet of Things (IoT) device authentication is weighed as a very important step from security perspective. Privacy and security of the IoT devices and applications is the major issue. From security perspective, important issue that needs to be addressed is the authentication mechanism, it has to be secure from different types of attacks and is easy to implement. The paper gives general idea about how different authentication mechanisms work, and then secure and efficient multi-factor device authentication scheme idea is proposed. The proposed scheme idea uses digital signatures and device capability to authenticate a device. In the proposed scheme device will only be allowed into the network if it is successfully authenticated through multi-factor authentication otherwise the authentication process fails and whole authentication process will restart. By analyzing the proposed scheme idea, it can be seen that the scheme is efficient and has less over head. The scheme not only authenticates the device very efficiently through multi-factor authentication but also authenticates the authentication server with the help of digital signatures. The proposed scheme also mitigates the common attacks like replay and man in the middle because of nonce and timestamp.

Cloud computing is a technology is where client require not to stress over the expense of equipment establishment and their support cost. Distributed computing is presently turned out to be most prominent innovation on account of its accessibility, ease and some different elements. Yet, there is a few issues in distributed computing, the principle one is security in light of the fact that each client store their valuable information on the system so they need their information ought to be shielded from any unapproved get to, any progressions that isn't done for client's benefit. To take care of the issue of Key administration, Key Sharing different plans have been proposed. The outsider examiner is the plan for key administration and key sharing. The primary preferred standpoint of this is the cloud supplier can encourage the administration which was accessible by the customary outsider evaluator and make it trustful. The outsider examining plan will be fizzled, if the outsider's security is endangered or of the outsider will be malignant. To take care of the issue, there is another modular for key sharing and key administration in completely Homomorphic Encryption conspire is outlined. In this paper we utilized the symmetric key understanding calculation named Diffie Hellman to make session key between two gatherings who need to impart and elliptic curve cryptography to create encryption keys rather than RSA and have utilized One Time Password (OTP) for confirming the clients.

Conference and journal publications increasingly require experiments associated with a submitted article to be repeatable. Authors comply to this requirement by sharing all associated digital artifacts, i.e., code, data, and environment configuration scripts. To ease aggregation of the digital artifacts, several tools have recently emerged that automate the aggregation of digital artifacts by auditing an experiment execution and building a portable container of code, data, and environment. However, current tools only package non-distributed computational experiments. Distributed computational experiments must either be packaged manually or supplemented with sufficient documentation. In this paper, we outline the reproducibility requirements of distributed experiments using a distributed computational science experiment involving use of message-passing interface (MPI), and propose a general method for auditing and repeating distributed experiments. Using Sciunit we show how this method can be implemented. We validate our method with initial experiments showing application re-execution runtime can be improved by 63% with a trade-off of longer run-time on initial audit execution.

Vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) are designed to play a key role in the development of future transportation systems. Although cooperative awareness messages provide the required situational awareness for new safety and efficiency applications, they also introduce a new attack vector to compromise privacy. The use of ephemeral credentials called pseudonyms for privacy protection was proposed while ensuring the required security properties. In order to prevent an attacker from linking old to new pseudonyms, mix-zones provide a region in which vehicles can covertly change their signing material. In this poster, we extend the idea of mix-zones to mitigate pseudonym linking attacks with a mechanism inspired by chaff-based privacy defense techniques for mix-networks. By providing chaff trajectories, our system restores the efficacy of mix-zones to compensate for a lack of vehicles available to participate in the mixing procedure. Our simulation results of a realistic traffic scenario show that a significant improvement is possible.

Creating and maintaining an up-to-date set of security rules that match misuses of crypto APIs is challenging, as crypto APIs constantly evolve over time with new cryptographic primitives and settings, making existing ones obsolete. To address this challenge, we present a new approach to extract security fixes from thousands of code changes. Our approach consists of: (i) identifying code changes, which often capture security fixes, (ii) an abstraction that filters irrelevant code changes (such as refactorings), and (iii) a clustering analysis that reveals commonalities between semantic code changes and helps in eliciting security rules. We applied our approach to the Java Crypto API and showed that it is effective: (i) our abstraction effectively filters non-semantic code changes (over 99% of all changes) without removing security fixes, and (ii) over 80% of the code changes are security fixes identifying security rules. Based on our results, we identified 13 rules, including new ones not supported by existing security checkers.

This paper analyzes information network security risk assessment methods and models. Firstly an improved AHP method is proposed to assign the value of assets for solving the problem of risk judgment matrix consistency effectively. And then the neural network technology is proposed to construct the neural network model corresponding to the risk judgment matrix for evaluating the individual risk of assets objectively, the methods for calculating the asset risk value and system risk value are given. Finally some application results are given. Practice proves that the methods are correct and effective, which has been used in information network security risk assessment application and offers a good foundation for the implementation of the automatic assessment.