Biblio

The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) enables secure transmission of confidential messages. Since its invention, there have been many proposed attacks against the scheme. For example, one can inject errors or faults to acquire the encryption keys. It has been shown that the AES algorithm itself does not provide a protection against these types of attacks. Therefore, additional techniques like error control codes (ECCs) have been proposed to detect active attacks. However, not all the proposed solutions show the adequate efficacy. For instance, linear ECCs have some critical limitations, especially when the injected errors are beyond their fault detection or tolerance capabilities. In this paper, we propose a new method based on a non-linear code to protect all four internal stages of the AES hardware implementation. With this method, the protected AES system is able to (a) detect all multiplicity of errors with a high probability and (b) correct them if the errors follow certain patterns or frequencies. Results shows that the proposed method provides much higher security and reliability to the AES hardware implementation with minimal overhead.

Vulnerabilities in hypervisors are crucial in multi-tenant clouds and attractive for attackers because a vulnerability in the hypervisor can undermine all the virtual machine (VM) security. This paper focuses on vulnerabilities in instruction emulators inside hypervisors. Vulnerabilities in instruction emulators are not rare; CVE-2017-2583, CVE-2016-9756, CVE-2015-0239, CVE-2014-3647, to name a few. For backward compatibility with legacy x86 CPUs, conventional hypervisors emulate arbitrary instructions at any time if requested. This design leads to a large attack surface, making it hard to get rid of vulnerabilities in the emulator. This paper proposes FWinst that narrows the attack surface against vulnerabilities in the emulator. The key insight behind FWinst is that the emulator should emulate only a small subset of instructions, depending on the underlying CPU micro-architecture and the hypervisor configuration. FWinst recognizes emulation contexts in which the instruction emulator is invoked, and identifies a legitimate subset of instructions that are allowed to be emulated in the current context. By filtering out illegitimate instructions, FWinst narrows the attack surface. In particular, FWinst is effective on recent x86 micro-architectures because the legitimate subset becomes very small. Our experimental results demonstrate FWinst prevents existing vulnerabilities in the emulator from being exploited on Westmere micro-architecture, and the runtime overhead is negligible.

In spite of numerous advantages of biometrics-based personal authentication systems over traditional security systems based on token or knowledge, they are vulnerable to attacks that can decrease their security considerably. In this paper, we propose a new hardware solution to protect biometric templates such as fingerprint. The proposed scheme is based on chaotic N × N grid multi-scroll system and it is implemented on Xilinx FPGA. The hardware implementation is achieved by applying numerical solution methods in our study, we use EM (Euler Method). Simulation and experimental results show that the proposed scheme allows a low cost image encryption for embedded systems while still providing a good trade-off between performance and hardware resources. Indeed, security analysis performed to the our scheme, is strong against known different attacks, such as: brute force, statistical, differential, and entropy. Therefore, the proposed chaos-based multiscroll encryption algorithm is suitable for use in securing embedded biometric systems.

The NEREIDA wave generation power plant installed in Mutriku, Spain is a multiple Oscillating Water Column (OWC) plant. The power takeoff consists of a Wells turbine coupled to a Doubly Fed Induction Generator (DFIG). The stalling behavior present in the Wells turbine limits the generated power. This paper presents the modeling and a Harmony Search Algorithm-based airflow control of the OWC. The Harmony Search Algorithm (HSA) is proposed to help overcome the limitations of a traditionally tuned PID. An investigation between HSA-tuned controller and the traditionally tuned controller has been performed. Results of the controlled and uncontrolled plant prove the effectiveness of the airflow control and the superiority of the HSA-tuned controller.

We report a an experimental study of device-independent quantum random number generation based on an detection-loophole free Bell test with entangled photons. After considering statistical fluctuations and applying an 80 Gb × 45.6 Mb Toeplitz matrix hashing, we achieve a final random bit rate of 114 bits/s, with a failure probability less than 10-5.

When sensitive data is stored in the cloud, the only way to ensure its secrecy is by encrypting it before it is uploaded. The emerging multi-cloud model, in which data is stored redundantly in two or more independent clouds, provides an opportunity to protect sensitive data with secret-sharing schemes. Both data-protection approaches are considered computationally expensive, but recent advances reduce their costs considerably: (1) Hardware acceleration methods promise to eliminate the computational complexity of encryption, but leave clients with the challenge of securely managing encryption keys. (2) Secure RAID, a recently proposed scheme, minimizes the computational overheads of secret sharing, but requires non-negligible storage overhead and random data generation. Each data-protection approach offers different tradeoffs and security guarantees. However, when comparing them, it is difficult to determine which approach will provide the best application-perceived performance, because previous studies were performed before their recent advances were introduced. To bridge this gap, we present the first end-to-end comparison of state-of-the-art encryption-based and secret sharing data protection approaches. Our evaluation on a local cluster and on a multi-cloud prototype identifies the tipping point at which the bottleneck of data protection shifts from the computational overhead of encoding and random data generation to storage and network bandwidth and global availability.

ARM devices (mobile phone, IoT devices) are getting more popular in our daily life due to the low power consumption and cost. These devices carry a huge number of user's private information, which attracts attackers' attention and increase the security risk. The operating systems (e.g., Android, Linux) works out many memory data protection strategies on user's private information. However, the monolithic OS may contain security vulnerabilities that are exploited by the attacker to get root or even kernel privilege. Once the kernel privilege is obtained by the attacker, all data protection strategies will be gone and user's private information can be taken away. In this paper, we propose a hardened memory data protection framework called H-Securebox to defeat kernel-level memory data stolen attacks. H-Securebox leverages ARM hardware virtualization technique to protect the data on the memory with hypervisor privilege. We designed three types H-Securebox for programing developers to use. Although the attacker may have kernel privilege, she can not touch private data inside H-Securebox, since hypervisor privilege is higher than kernel privilege. With the implementation of H-Securebox system assisting by a tiny hypervisor on Raspberry Pi2 development board, we measure the performance overhead of our system and do the security evaluations. The results positively show that the overhead is negligible and the malicious application with root or kernel privilege can not access the private data protected by our system.

Vehicular Ad-Hoc Network, or VANETs, is a form of MANET, through which cars will exchange messages to detect dangerous situations and announce them to drivers. In VANETs, vehicles (nodes) are characterized by a high dynamics and high mobility, in addition to the high rate of topology change and density variability. Quality of service in VANETs represents a major challenge, not yet solved, due to the characteristics and strict constraints of VANETs. In order to improve the performance and reliability of message dissemination on VANETs, congestion control must be taken into account. Many studies asserted that proper congestion control algorithms are essential to ensure an efficient network operation. However, most of the existing congestion control solutions have limitations. In this paper, we propose congestion control algorithm as solution to avoid congestion in VANETs environment. The proposed solution is based on a combination of two approaches: the event-oriented and the measurement-based, with message scheduling. The proposed solution is to reduce congestion and increase reliability to VANETs by assigning higher priority to critical security message.

The Internet-of-Things designates the interconnection of a variety of communication-enabled physical objects. IoT systems and devices must operate with a deterministic behavior and respect user-defined system goals in any situation. We thus defined hybrid controller synthesis for decentralized and critical IoT systems relying on a set of rules to handle situations with asynchronous and synchronous event processing. This framework defines a declarative rule-driven governance mechanism of locally synchronous sub-systems enabling the hybrid control of IoT systems with formal guarantees over the satisfaction of system-wide QoS requirements. In order to prove the practicality of our framework, it was applied to a critical medical Internet-of-Things use case, demonstrating its usability for safety-critical IoT applications.

Third-party software daemons called host agents are increasingly responsible for a modern host's security, automation, and monitoring tasks. Because of their location within the host, these agents are at risk of manipulation by malware and users. Additionally, in virtualized environments where multiple adjacent guests each run their own set of agents, the cumulative resources that agents consume adds up rapidly. Consolidating agents onto the hypervisor can address these problems, but places a technical burden on agent developers. This work presents a development methodology to re-engineer a host agent in to a hyperagent, an out-of-guest agent that gains unique hypervisor-based advantages while retaining its original in-guest capabilities. This three-phase methodology makes integrating Virtual Machine Introspection (VMI) functionality in to existing code easier and more accessible, minimizing an agent developer's re-engineering effort. The benefits of hyperagents are illustrated by porting the GRR live forensics agent, which retains 89% of its codebase, uses 40% less memory than its in-guest counterparts, and enables a 4.9x speedup for a representative data-intensive workload. This work shows that a conventional off-the-shelf host agent can be feasibly transformed into a hyperagent and provide a powerful, efficient tool for defending virtualized systems.

Smartphones have evolved over the years from simple devices to communicate with each other to fully functional portable computers although with comparatively less computational power but inholding multiple applications within. With the smartphone revolution, the value of personal data has increased. As technological complexities increase, so do the vulnerabilities in the system. Smartphones are the latest target for attacks. Android being an open source platform and also the most widely used smartphone OS draws the attention of many malware writers to exploit the vulnerabilities of it. Attackers try to take advantage of these vulnerabilities and fool the user and misuse their data. Malwares have come a long way from simple worms to sophisticated DDOS using Botnets, the latest trends in computer malware tend to go in the distributed direction, to evade the multiple anti-virus apps developed to counter generic viruses and Trojans. However, the recent trend in android system is to have a combination of applications which acts as malware. The applications are benign individually but when grouped, these may result into a malicious activity. This paper proposes a new category of distributed malware in android system, how it can be used to evade the current security, and how it can be detected with the help of graph matching algorithm.

To identify potential risks to the system security presented by time series it is offered to use wavelet analysis, the indicator of time-and-frequency distribution, the correlation analysis of wavelet-spectra for receiving rather complete range of data about the process studied. The indicator of time-and-frequency localization of time series was proposed allowing to estimate the speed of non-stationary changing. The complex approach is proposed to use the wavelet analysis, the time-and-frequency distribution of time series and the wavelet spectra correlation analysis; this approach contributes to obtaining complete information on the studied phenomenon both in numerical terms, and in the form of visualization for identifying and predicting potential system security threats.

An important source of cyber-attacks is malware, which proliferates in different forms such as botnets. The botnet malware typically looks for vulnerable devices across the Internet, rather than targeting specific individuals, companies or industries. It attempts to infect as many connected devices as possible, using their resources for automated tasks that may cause significant economic and social harm while being hidden to the user and device. Thus, it becomes very difficult to detect such activity. A considerable amount of research has been conducted to detect and prevent botnet infestation. In this paper, we attempt to create a foundation for an anomaly-based intrusion detection system using a statistical learning method to improve network security and reduce human involvement in botnet detection. We focus on identifying the best features to detect botnet activity within network traffic using a lightweight logistic regression model. The network traffic is processed by Bro, a popular network monitoring framework which provides aggregate statistics about the packets exchanged between a source and destination over a certain time interval. These statistics serve as features to a logistic regression model responsible for classifying malicious and benign traffic. Our model is easy to implement and simple to interpret. We characterized and modeled 8 different botnet families separately and as a mixed dataset. Finally, we measured the performance of our model on multiple parameters using F1 score, accuracy and Area Under Curve (AUC).

Peer-to-Peer botnets have become one of the significant threat against network security due to their distributed properties. The decentralized nature makes their detection challenging. It is important to take measures to detect bots as soon as possible to minimize their harm. In this paper, we propose PeerGrep, a novel system capable of identifying P2P bots. PeerGrep starts from identifying hosts that are likely engaged in P2P communications, and then distinguishes P2P bots from P2P hosts by analyzing their active ratio, packet size and the periodicity of connection to destination IP addresses. The evaluation shows that PeerGrep can identify all P2P bots with quite low FPR even if the malicious P2P application and benign P2P application coexist within the same host or there is only one bot in the monitored network.

This research aims to identify some vulnerabilities of advanced persistent threat (APT) attacks using multiple simulated attacks in a virtualized environment. Our experimental study shows that while updating the antivirus software and the operating system with the latest patches may help in mitigating APTs, APT threat vectors could still infiltrate the strongest defenses. Accordingly, we highlight some critical areas of security concern that need to be addressed.

This paper presents an image technique Discrete Wavelet Transform and Singular Value Decomposition for image steganography. We are using a text file and convert into an image as watermark and embed watermarks into the cover image. We evaluate performance and compare this method with other methods like Least Significant Bit, Discrete Cosine Transform, and Discrete Wavelet Transform using Peak Signal Noise Ratio and Mean Squared Error. The result of this experiment showed that combine of Discrete Wavelet Transform and Singular Value Decomposition performance is better than the Least Significant Bit, Discrete Cosine Transform, and Discrete Wavelet Transform. The result of Peak Signal Noise Ratio obtained from Discrete Wavelet Transform and Singular Value Decomposition method is 57.0519 and 56.9520 while the result of Mean Squared Error is 0.1282 and 0.1311. Future work for this research is to add the encryption method on the data to be entered so that if there is an attack then the encryption method can secure the data becomes more secure.

As the worldwide internet has non-stop developments, it comes with enormous amount automatically generated malware. Those malware had become huge threaten to computer users. A comprehensive malware family classifier can help security researchers to quickly identify characteristics of malware which help malware analysts to investigate in more efficient way. However, despite the assistance of the artificial intelligent (AI) classifiers, it has been shown that the AI-based classifiers are vulnerable to so-called adversarial attacks. In this paper, we demonstrate how the adversarial settings can be applied to the classifier of malware families classification. Our experimental results achieved high successful rate through the adversarial attack. We also find the important features which are ignored by malware analysts but useful in the future analysis.

Ubiquitous Healthcare System (U-Healthcare) is a well-known application of wireless sensor networking (WSN). In this system, the sensors take less power for operating the function. As the data transfers between sensor and other stations is sensitive so there needs to provide a security scheme. Due to the low life of sensor nodes in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), asymmetric key based security (AKS) architecture is always considered as unsuitable for these types of networks. Several papers have been published in recent past years regarding how to incorporate AKS in WSN, Haque et al's Asymmetric key based Architecture (AKA) is one of them. But later it is found that this system has authentication problem and therefore prone to man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack, furthermore it is not a truly asymmetric based scheme. We address these issues in this paper and proposed a complete asymmetric approach using PEKS-PM (proposed by Pham in [8]) to remove impersonation attack. We also found some other vulnerabilities in the original AKA system and proposed solutions, therefore making it a better and enhanced asymmetric key based architecture.

This paper presents some verifications and improved considerations of NAND PUF, which was introduced recently [1]. For embedded system such as IC cards, the secret data in memory is vulnerable, so it has to be encrypted and secured. PUF circuit is sensitive to environmental condition, especially in the temperature range influences and variations of current and voltages. This proposed bank IC card would be operated in AB class standard, i.e. voltage would be constant except for power mode changing. Nevertheless, operational temperatures may vary such as the situation of outdoor ATM. Thus, this paper presented some results of our PUF work in Cadence, also on FPGA board. Around 5ns is spent for stabilization of our PUF output that is under variance temperature when power mode changes. Inter Hamming distances is 48.9%, very near to uniqueness and robustness value, that our PUF is feasible to use in bankcard. The maximum error rates are HDintra(0$^\circ$C) = 3.9961 and HDintra(80$^\circ$C) = 3.9916 where at antipoles, while the minimum error rate is HDintra(20$^\circ$C) = 2.9 at room temperature. For improvement, Repetition, LDPC and SEC-DED codes are considered that would eliminate error rates.

Recent work, including ZKBoo, ZKB++, and Ligero, has developed efficient non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs of knowledge (NIZKPoKs) for Boolean circuits based on symmetric-key primitives alone, using the "MPC-in-the-head" paradigm of Ishai et al. We show how to instantiate this paradigm with MPC protocols in the preprocessing model; once optimized, this results in an NIZKPoK with shorter proofs (and comparable computation) as in prior work for circuits containing roughly 300–100,000 AND\textasciitildegates. In contrast to prior work, our NIZKPoK also supports witness-independent preprocessing, which allows the prover to shift most of its work to an offline phase before the witness is known. We use our NIZKPoK to construct a signature scheme based only on symmetric-key primitives (and hence with "post-quantum" security). The resulting scheme has shorter signatures than the scheme built using ZKB++ (and comparable signing/verification time), and is even competitive with hash-based signature schemes. To further highlight the flexibility and power of our NIZKPoK, we also use it to build efficient ring and group signatures based on symmetric-key primitives alone. To our knowledge, the resulting schemes are the most efficient constructions of these primitives that offer post-quantum security.

Industry 4.0 is based on the CPS architecture since it is the next generation in the industry. The CPS architecture is a system based on Cloud Computing technology and Internet of Things where computer elements collaborate for the control of physical entities. The security framework in this architecture is necessary for the protection of two parts (physical and information) so basically, security in CPS is classified into two main parts: information security (data) and security of control. In this work, we propose two models to solve the two problems detected in the security framework. The first proposal SCCAF (Smart Cloud Computing Adoption Framework) treats the nature of information that serves for the detection and the blocking of the threats our basic architecture CPS. The second model is a modeled detector related to the physical nature for detecting node information.

In order to solve the problem of vulnerable password guessing attacks caused by dictionary attacks, replay attacks in the authentication process, and man-in-the-middle attacks in the existing wireless local area network in terms of security authentication, we make some improvements to the 802.1X / EAP authentication protocol based on the study of the current IEEE802.11i security protocol with high security. After introducing the idea of Kerberos protocol authentication and applying the idea in the authentication process of 802.1X / EAP, a new protocol of Kerberos extensible authentication protocol (KEAP) is proposed. Firstly, the protocol introduces an asymmetric key encryption method, uses public key encryption during data transmission, and the receiver uses the corresponding private key for decryption. With unidirectional characteristics and high security, the encryption can avoid password guessing attacks caused by dictionary attacks as much as possible. Secondly, aiming at the problem that the request message sent from the client to the authentication server is vulnerable to replay attacks, the protocol uses a combination of the message sequence number and the random number, and the message serial number is added to the request message sent from the client to the authentication server. And establish a list database for storing message serial number and random number in the authentication server. After receiving a transfer message, the serial number and the random number are extracted and compared with the values in the list database to distinguish whether it is a retransmission message. Finally, the protocol introduces a keychain mechanism and uses an irreversible Hash function to encrypt the final authentication result, thereby effectively solving the man-in-the-middle attack by the pretender. The experiment uses the OPNET 14.5 simulation platform to model the KEAP protocol and simulate simulation attacks, and compares it with the current more common EAP-TLS authentication protocol. Experimental results show that the average traffic of the KEAP protocol is at least 14.74% higher than the EAP-TLS authentication protocol, and the average bit error rate is reduced by at least 24.00%.

We survey elliptic curve implementations from several vantage points. We perform internet-wide scans for TLS on a large number of ports, as well as SSH and IPsec to measure elliptic curve support and implementation behaviors, and collect passive measurements of client curve support for TLS. We also perform active measurements to estimate server vulnerability to known attacks against elliptic curve implementations, including support for weak curves, invalid curve attacks, and curve twist attacks. We estimate that 1.53% of HTTPS hosts, 0.04% of SSH hosts, and 4.04% of IKEv2 hosts that support elliptic curves do not perform curve validity checks as specified in elliptic curve standards. We describe how such vulnerabilities could be used to construct an elliptic curve parameter downgrade attack called CurveSwap for TLS, and observe that there do not appear to be combinations of weak behaviors we examined enabling a feasible CurveSwap attack in the wild. We also analyze source code for elliptic curve implementations, and find that a number of libraries fail to perform point validation for JSON Web Encryption, and find a flaw in the Java and NSS multiplication algorithms.

Converged Multi-Level Secure systems allow users to interact with and freely move between applications and data of varying sensitivity on a single user interface. They promise unprecedented usability and security, especially in security-critical environments like Defence. Yet these promises rely on hard assumptions about secure user behaviour. We present initial work to test the validity of these assumptions in the absence of deception by an adversary. We conducted a user study with 21 participants on the Cross Domain Desktop Compositor. Chief amongst our findings is that the vast majority of participants (19 of 21) behave securely, even when doing so requires more effort than to behave insecurely. Our findings suggest that there is large scope for further research on converged Multi-Level Secure systems, and highlight the value of user studies to complement formal security analyses of critical systems.

For modern Automatic Test Equipment (ATE) one of the most daunting tasks is now Information Assurance (IA). What was once at most a secondary item consisting mainly of installing an Anti-Virus suite is now becoming one of the most important aspects of ATE. Given the current climate of IA it has become important to ensure ATE is kept safe from any breaches of security or loss of information. Even though most ATE are not on the Internet (or even on a network for many) they are still vulnerable to some of the same attack vectors plaguing common computers and other electronic devices. This paper will discuss some of the processes and procedures which must be used to ensure that modern ATE can continue to be used to test and detect faults in the systems they are designed to test. The common items that must be considered for ATE are as follows: The ATE system must have some form of Anti-Virus (as should all computers). The ATE system should have a minimum software footprint only providing the software needed to perform the task. The ATE system should be verified to have all the Operating System (OS) settings configured pursuant to the task it is intended to perform. The ATE OS settings should include password and password expiration settings to prevent access by anyone not expected to be on the system. The ATE system software should be written and constructed such that it in itself is not readily open to attack. The ATE system should be designed in a manner such that none of the instruments in the system can easily be attacked. The ATE system should insure any paths to the outside world (such as Ethernet or USB devices) are limited to only those required to perform the task it was designed for. These and many other common configuration concerns will be discussed in the paper.