Biblio

Mining is the foundation of blockchain-based cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin rewarding the miner for finding blocks for new transactions. The Monero currency enables mining with standard hardware in contrast to special hardware (ASICs) as often used in Bitcoin, paving the way for in-browser mining as a new revenue model for website operators. In this work, we study the prevalence of this new phenomenon. We identify and classify mining websites in 138M domains and present a new fingerprinting method which finds up to a factor of 5.7 more miners than publicly available block lists. Our work identifies and dissects Coinhive as the major browser-mining stakeholder. Further, we present a new method to associate mined blocks in the Monero blockchain to mining pools and uncover that Coinhive currently contributes 1.18% of mined blocks having turned over 1293 Moneros in June 2018.

Successive interference cancellation (SIC) receiver is adopted by power domain non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) at the receiver side as the baseline receiver scheme taking the forthcoming expected mobile device evolution into account. Development technologies and advanced techniques are boldly being considered in order to achieve power saving in many networks, to reach sustainability and reliability in communication due to envisioned huge amount of data delivery. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme of NOMA-SIC for the sake of balancing the trade-off between system performance and complexity. In the proposed scheme, each SIC level is comprised by a matching filter (MF), a MF detector and a regenerator. In simulations, the proposed scheme demonstrates the best performance on power saving, of which energy efficiency increases with an increase in the number of NOMA device pairs.

While existing research has explored the trade-off between security and performance, these efforts primarily focus on software consumers and often overlook the effectiveness and productivity of software producers. In this paper, we highlight an established security practice, air-gap isolation, and some challenges it uniquely instigates. To better understand and start quantifying the impacts of air-gap isolation on software development productivity, we conducted a survey at a commercial software company: Analytical Graphics, Inc. Based on our insights of dealing with air-gap isolation daily, we suggest some possible directions for future research. Our goal is to bring attention to this neglected area of research and to start a discussion in the SE community about the struggles faced by many commercial and governmental organizations.

This paper presents the effects of problem based learning project on a high-school student in Technology school “Electronic systems” associated with Technical University Sofia. The problem is creating an intrusion detection system for Apache HTTP Server with duration 6 months. The intrusion detection system is based on a recurrent neural network classifier namely long-short term memory units.

Many techniques have been presented to protect image content confidentiality. The owner of an image encrypts it using a key and transmits the encrypted image across a network. If the recipient is authorized to access the original content of the image, he can reconstruct it losslessly. However, if during the transmission the encrypted image is noised, some parts of the image can not be deciphered. In order to localize and correct these errors, we propose an approach based on the local Shannon entropy measurement. We first analyze this measure as a function of the block-size. We provide then a full description of our blind error localization and removal process. Experimental results show that the proposed approach, based on local entropy, can be used in practice to correct noisy encrypted images, even with blocks of very small size.

Code obfuscation is the de facto standard to protect intellectual property when delivering code in an unmanaged environment. It relies on additive layers of code tangling techniques, white-box encryption calls and platform-specific or tool-specific countermeasures to make it harder for a reverse engineer to access critical pieces of data or to understand core algorithms. The literature provides plenty of different obfuscation techniques that can be used at compile time to transform data or control flow in order to provide some kind of protection against different reverse engineering scenarii. Scheduling code transformations to optimize a given metric is known as the pass scheduling problem, a problem known to be NP-hard, but solved in a practical way using hard-coded sequences that are generally satisfactory. Adding code obfuscation to the problem introduces two new dimensions. First, as a code obfuscator needs to find a balance between obfuscation and performance, pass scheduling becomes a multi-criteria optimization problem. Second, obfuscation passes transform their inputs in unconventional ways, which means some pass combinations may not be desirable or even valid. This paper highlights several issues met when blindly chaining different kind of obfuscation and optimization passes, emphasizing the need of a formal model to combine them. It proposes a non-intrusive formalism to leverage on sequential pass management techniques. The model is validated on real-world scenarii gathered during the development of an industrial-strength obfuscator on top of the LLVM compiler infrastructure.

Embedded systems that communicate with each other over the internet and build up a larger, loosely coupled (hardware) system with an unknown configuration at runtime is often referred to as a cyberphysical system. Many of these systems can become, due to its associated risks during their operation, safety critical. With increased complexity of such systems, the number of configurations can either be infinite or even unknown at design time. Hence, a certification at design time for such systems that documents a safe interaction for all possible configurations of all participants at runtime can become unfeasible. If such systems come together in a new configuration, a mechanism is required that can decide whether or not it is safe for them to interact. Such a mechanism can generally not be part of such systems for the sake of trust. Therefore, we present in the following sections the SEnSE device, short for Secure and Safe Embedded, that tackles these challenges and provides a secure and safe integration of safety-critical embedded systems.

Nowadays, with such a huge amount of information available online, one key challenge is how to retrieve target data efficiently. A recent state-of-art solution, k-means hashing (KMH), codes data via a string of binary code obtained by iterative k-means clustering and binary code optimizing. To deal with high dimensional data, KMH divides the space into low-dimensional subspaces, places a hypercube in each subspace and finds its proper location by the mentioned optimizing process. However, the complexity of the optimization increases rapidly when the dimension of the hypercube increases. To address this issue, we propose an improved hashing method stacked k-means hashing (SKMH). The main idea is to increase the approximation by a coarse-to-fine multi-layer lower-dimensional cubes. With these kinds of lower-dimensional cubes, SKMH can achieve a similar approximation ability via a less optimizing time, compared with KMH method using higher-dimensional cubes. Extensive experiments have been conducted on two public databases, demonstrating the performance of our method by some common metrics in fast nearest neighbor search.

Every company will largely depend on other companies. This will help unite a large business process. Risks that arise from other companies will affect the business performance of a company. Because of this, the right choice for suppliers is crucial. Each vendor has different characteristics. Everything is not always suitable basically the selection process is quite complex and risky. This has led to a new case study which has been studied for years by researchers known as Supplier Selection Problems. Selection of vendors with multi-criteria decision making has been widely studied over years ago. The Best Worst Method is a new science in Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) determination. In this research, taking case study at XYZ company is in Indonesia which is engaged in mining and industry. The research utilized the transaction data that have been recorded by the XYZ company and analyzed vendor valuation. The weighting of Best Worst Method is calculated based on vendor assessment result. The results show that XYZ company still focuses on Price as its key criteria.

This paper presents a theoretical background of main research activity focused on the evaluation of wiping/erasure standards which are mostly implemented in specific software products developed and programming for data wiping. The information saved in storage devices often consists of metadata and trace data. Especially but not only these kinds of data are very important in the process of forensic analysis because they sometimes contain information about interconnection on another file. Most people saving their sensitive information on their local storage devices and later they want to secure erase these files but usually there is a problem with this operation. Secure file destruction is one of many Anti-forensics methods. The outcome of this paper is to define the future research activities focused on the establishment of the suitable digital environment. This environment will be prepared for testing and evaluating selected wiping standards and appropriate eraser software.

With the increase in the popularity of computerized online applications, the analysis, and detection of a growing number of newly discovered stealthy malware poses a significant challenge to the security community. Signature-based and behavior-based detection techniques are becoming inefficient in detecting new unknown malware. Machine learning solutions are employed to counter such intelligent malware and allow performing more comprehensive malware detection. This capability leads to an automatic analysis of malware behavior. The proposed oblique random forest ensemble learning technique is efficient for malware classification. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated with three malware classification datasets from various sources. The results are compared with other variants of decision tree learning models. The proposed system performs better than the existing system in terms of classification accuracy and false positive rate.

Advancements in computing, communication, and sensing technologies are making it possible to embed, control, and gather vital information from tiny devices that are being deployed and utilized in practically every aspect of our modernized society. From smart home appliances to municipal water and electric industrial facilities to our everyday work environments, the next Internet frontier, dubbed IoT, is promising to revolutionize our lives and tackle some of our nations' most pressing challenges. While the seamless interconnection of IoT devices with the physical realm is envisioned to bring a plethora of critical improvements in many aspects and diverse domains, it will undoubtedly pave the way for attackers that will target and exploit such devices, threatening the integrity of their data and the reliability of critical infrastructure. Further, such compromised devices will undeniably be leveraged as the next generation of botnets, given their increased processing capabilities and abundant bandwidth. While several demonstrations exist in the literature describing the exploitation procedures of a number of IoT devices, the up-to-date inference, characterization, and analysis of unsolicited IoT devices that are currently deployed "in the wild" is still in its infancy. In this article, we address this imperative task by leveraging active and passive measurements to report on unsolicited Internet-scale IoT devices. This work describes a first step toward exploring the utilization of passive measurements in combination with the results of active measurements to shed light on the Internet-scale insecurities of the IoT paradigm. By correlating results of Internet-wide scanning with Internet background radiation traffic, we disclose close to 14,000 compromised IoT devices in diverse sectors, including critical infrastructure and smart home appliances. To this end, we also analyze their generated traffic to create effective mitigation signatures that could be deployed in local IoT realms. To support largescale empirical data analytics in the context of IoT, we make available the inferred and extracted IoT malicious raw data through an authenticated front-end service. The outcomes of this work confirm the existence of such compromised devices on an Internet scale, while the generated inferences and insights are postulated to be employed for inferring other similarly compromised IoT devices, in addition to contributing to IoT cyber security situational awareness.

With the development of Internet of Things, numerous IoT devices have been brought into our daily lives. Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), due to the low energy consumption and generic service stack, has become one of the most popular wireless communication technologies for IoT. However, because of the short communication range and exclusive connection pattern, a BLE-equipped device can only be used by a single user near the device. To fully explore the benefits of BLE and make BLE-equipped devices truly accessible over the Internet as IoT devices, in this paper, we propose a cloud-based software framework that can enable multiple users to interact with various BLE IoT devices over the Internet. This framework includes an agent program, a suite of services hosting in cloud, and a set of RESTful APIs exposed to Internet users. Given the availability of this framework, the access to BLE devices can be extended from local to the Internet scale without any software or hardware changes to BLE devices, and more importantly, shared usage of remote BLE devices over the Internet is also made available.

The paper offers an approach for implementation of intelligent agents intended for network traffic and security risk analysis in cyber-physical systems. The agents are based on the algorithm of pseudo-gradient adaptive anomaly detection and fuzzy logical inference. The suggested algorithm operates in real time. The fuzzy logical inference is used for regulation of algorithm parameters. The variants of the implementation are proposed. The experimental assessment of the approach confirms its high speed and adequate accuracy for network traffic analysis.

This paper proposed method for source code authorship attribution using modern natural language processing methods. Our method based on text embedding with convolutional recurrent neural network reaches 94.5% accuracy within 500 authors in one dataset, which outperformed many state of the art models for authorship attribution. Our approach is dealing with source code as with natural language texts, so it is potentially programming language independent with more potential of future improving.

In this article, a detailed survey of the quantum approach to image processing is presented. Recently, it has been established that existing quantum algorithms are applicable to image processing tasks allowing quantum informational models of classical image processing. However, efforts continue in identifying the diversity of its applicability in various image processing domains. Here, in addition to reviewing some of the critical image processing applications that quantum mechanics have targeted, such as denoising, edge detection, image storage, retrieval, and compression, this study will also highlight the complexities in transitioning from the classical to the quantum domain. This article shall establish theoretical fundamentals, analyze performance and evaluation, draw key statistical evidence to support claims, and provide recommendations based on published literature mostly during the period from 2010 to 2015.

Outside the highly publicized victories in the game of Go, there have been numerous successful applications of deep learning in the fields of information retrieval, computer vision, and speech recognition. In cybersecurity, an increasing number of companies have begun exploring the use of deep learning (DL) in a variety of security tasks with malware detection among the more popular. These companies claim that deep neural networks (DNNs) could help turn the tide in the war against malware infection. However, DNNs are vulnerable to adversarial samples, a shortcoming that plagues most, if not all, statistical and machine learning models. Recent research has demonstrated that those with malicious intent can easily circumvent deep learning-powered malware detection by exploiting this weakness. To address this problem, previous work developed defense mechanisms that are based on augmenting training data or enhancing model complexity. However, after analyzing DNN susceptibility to adversarial samples, we discover that the current defense mechanisms are limited and, more importantly, cannot provide theoretical guarantees of robustness against adversarial sampled-based attacks. As such, we propose a new adversary resistant technique that obstructs attackers from constructing impactful adversarial samples by randomly nullifying features within data vectors. Our proposed technique is evaluated on a real world dataset with 14,679 malware variants and 17,399 benign programs. We theoretically validate the robustness of our technique, and empirically show that our technique significantly boosts DNN robustness to adversarial samples while maintaining high accuracy in classification. To demonstrate the general applicability of our proposed method, we also conduct experiments using the MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets, widely used in image recognition research.

Single Root I/O Virtualization (SRIOV) allows one physical device to be used by multiple virtual machines simultaneously without the mediation from the hypervisor. Such technique significantly decreases the overhead of I/O virtualization. But according to our latest findings, in the meantime, it introduces a high-risk security issue that enables an adversary-controlled VM to cut off the connectivity of the host machine, given the limited filtering capabilities provided by the SRIOV devices. As showcase, we demonstrate two attacks against SRIOV NIC by exploiting a vulnerability in the standard network management protocol, OAM. The vulnerability surfaces because SRIOV NICs treat the packets passing through OAM as data-plane packets and allow untrusted VMs to send and receive these packets on behalf of the host. By examining several off-the-shelf SRIOV NICs and switches, we show such attack can easily turn off the network connection within a short period of time. In the end, we propose a defense mechanism which runs on the existing hardware and can be readily deployed.

As Internet of Things (IoT) devices become more and more prevalent, it is important for research to be done around the security and integrity of them. By doing so, consumers can make well-informed choices about the smart devices that they purchase. This poster presents information about how three different IoT-specific malware variants operate and impact newly connected devices.

Dynamic taint analysis and symbolic execution find many important applications in security-related program analyses. However, current techniques for such analyses do not take proper account of control transfers due to exceptions. As a result, they can fail to account for implicit flows arising from exception-based control transfers, leading to loss of precision and potential false negatives in analysis results. While the idea of using exceptions for obfuscating (unconditional) control transfers is well known, we are not aware of any prior work discussing the use of exceptions to implement conditional control transfers and implicit information flows. This paper demonstrates the problems that can arise in existing dynamic taint analysis and symbolic execution systems due to exception-based implicit information flows and proposes a generic architecture-agnostic solution for reasoning about the behavior of code using user-defined exception handlers. Experimental results from a prototype implementation indicate that the ideas described produce better results than current state-of-the-art systems.

As the era of cloud technology arises, more and more people are beginning to migrate their applications and personal data to the cloud. This makes web-based applications an attractive target for cyber-attacks. As a result, web-based applications now need more protections than ever. However, current anomaly-based web attack detection approaches face the difficulties like unsatisfying accuracy and lack of generalization. And the rule-based web attack detection can hardly fight unknown attacks and is relatively easy to bypass. Therefore, we propose a novel deep learning approach to detect anomalous requests. Our approach is to first train two Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) with the complicated recurrent unit (LSTM unit or GRU unit) to learn the normal request patterns using only normal requests unsupervisedly and then supervisedly train a neural network classifier which takes the output of RNNs as the input to discriminate between anomalous and normal requests. We tested our model on two datasets and the results showed that our model was competitive with the state-of-the-art. Our approach frees us from feature selection. Also to the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that the RNN is applied on anomaly-based web attack detection systems.

Thumbnail preserving encryption (TPE) was suggested by Wright et al. [Information Hiding & Multimedia Security Workshop 2015] as a way to balance privacy and usability for online image sharing. The idea is to encrypt a plaintext image into a ciphertext image that has roughly the same thumbnail as well as retaining the original image format. At the same time, TPE allows users to take advantage of much of the functionality of online photo management tools, while still providing some level of privacy against the service provider. In this work we present two new approximate TPE encryption schemes. In our schemes, ciphertexts and plaintexts have perceptually similar, but not identical, thumbnails. Our constructions are the first TPE schemes designed to work well with JPEG compression. In addition, we show that they also have provable security guarantees that characterize precisely what information about the plaintext is leaked by the ciphertext image. We empirically evaluate our schemes according to the similarity of plaintext & ciphertext thumbnails, increase in file size under JPEG compression, preservation of perceptual image hashes, among other aspects. We also show how approximate TPE can be an effective tool to thwart inference attacks by machine-learning image classifiers, which have shown to be effective against other image obfuscation techniques.

Virtual machine introspection (VMI) is a technology with many possible applications, such as malware analysis and intrusion detection. However, this technique is resource intensive, as inspecting program behavior includes recording of a high number of events caused by the analyzed binary and related processes. In this paper we present an architecture that leverages cloud resources for virtual machine-based malware analysis in order to train a classifier for detecting cloud-specific malware. This architecture is designed while having in mind the resource consumption when applying the VMI-based technology in production systems, in particular the overhead of tracing a large set of system calls. In order to minimize the data acquisition overhead, we use a data-driven approach from the area of resource-aware machine learning. This approach enables us to optimize the trade-off between malware detection performance and the overhead of our VMI-based tracing system.