Biblio

Recent technological advancement demands organizations to have measures in place to manage their Information Technology (IT) systems. Enterprise Architecture Frameworks (EAF) offer companies an efficient technique to manage their IT systems aligning their business requirements with effective solutions. As a result, experts have developed multiple EAF's such as TOGAF, Zachman, MoDAF, DoDAF, SABSA to help organizations to achieve their objectives by reducing the costs and complexity. These frameworks however, concentrate mostly on business needs lacking holistic enterprise-wide security practices, which may cause enterprises to be exposed for significant security risks resulting financial loss. This study focuses on evaluating business capabilities in TOGAF, NIST, COBIT, MoDAF, DoDAF, SABSA, and Zachman, and identify essential security requirements in TOGAF, SABSA and COBIT19 frameworks by comparing their resiliency processes, which helps organization to easily select applicable framework. The study shows that; besides business requirements, EAF need to include precise cybersecurity guidelines aligning EA business strategies. Enterprises now need to focus more on building resilient approach, which is beyond of protection, detection and prevention. Now enterprises should be ready to withstand against the cyber-attacks applying relevant cyber resiliency approach improving the way of dealing with impacts of cybersecurity risks.

This short paper argues that current conceptions in trust formation scholarship miss the context of zero trust, a practice growing in importance in cyber security. The contribution of this paper presents a novel approach to help conceptualize and operationalize zero trust and a call for a research agenda. Further work will expand this model and explore the implications of zero trust in future digital systems.

Cyber resiliency in Cloud computing is one of the most important capability of an enterprise network that provides continues ability to withstand and quick recovery from the adversary conditions. This capability can be measured through cybersecurity risk assessment techniques. However, cybersecurity risk management studies in cloud computing resiliency approaches are deficient. This paper proposes resilient cloud cybersecurity risk assessment tailored specifically to Dropbox with two methods: technical-based solution motivated by a cybersecurity risk assessment of cloud services, and a target personnel-based solution guided by cybersecurity-related survey among employees to identify their knowledge that qualifies them withstand to any cyberattack. The proposed work attempts to identify cloud vulnerabilities, assess threats and detect high risk components, to finally propose appropriate safeguards such as failure predicting and removing, redundancy or load balancing techniques for quick recovery and return to pre-attack state if failure happens.

This paper discusses securities and cryptocurrency trading using artificial intelligence (AI) in the sense that it focuses on performing Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) on selected technical indicators before proceeding to modelling, and then to develop more practical models by introducing new reward loss function that maximizes the returns during training phase. The results of EDA reveal that the complex patterns within the data can be better captured by discriminative classification models and this was endorsed by performing back-testing on two securities using Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and Random Forests (RF) as discriminative models against their counterpart Na\"ıve Bayes as a generative model. To enhance the learning process, the new reward loss function is utilized to retrain the ANN with testing on AAPL, IBM, BRENT CRUDE and BTC using auto-trading strategy that serves as the intelligent unit, and the results indicate this loss superiorly outperforms the conventional cross-entropy used in predictive models. The overall results of this work suggest that there should be larger focus on EDA and more practical losses in the research of machine learning modelling for stock market prediction applications.

Network resilience is crucial to ensure reliable and secure operation of critical infrastructures. Although graph theoretic methods have been developed to quantify the topological resilience of networks, i.e., measuring resilience with respect to connectivity, in this study we propose to use the tools from Topological Data Analysis (TDA), Algebraic Topology, and Optimal Transport (OT). In our prior work, we used these tools to create a resilience metric that bypassed the need to embed a network onto a space. We also hypothesized that embeddings could encode different information about a network and that different embeddings could result in different outcomes when computing resilience. In this paper we attempt to test this hypothesis. We will utilize the WEGL framework to compute the embedding for the considered network and compare the results against our prior work, which did not use an embedding process. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to study the ramifications of choosing an embedding, thus providing a novel understanding into how to choose an embedding and whether such a choice matters when quantifying resilience.

Threats, posed by ransomware, are rapidly increasing, and its cost on both national and global scales is becoming significantly high as evidenced by the recent events. Ransomware carries out an irreversible process, where it encrypts victims' digital assets to seek financial compensations. Adversaries utilize different means to gain initial access to the target machines, such as phishing emails, vulnerable public-facing software, Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP), brute-force attacks, and stolen accounts. To combat these threats of ransomware, this paper aims to help researchers gain a better understanding of ransomware application profiles through static analysis, where we identify a list of suspicious indicators and similarities among 727 active ran-somware samples. We start with generating portable executable (PE) metadata for all the studied samples. With our domain knowledge and exploratory data analysis tasks, we introduce some of the suspicious indicators of the structure of ransomware files. We reduce the dimensionality of the generated dataset by using the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) technique and discover clusters by applying the KMeans algorithm. This motivates us to utilize the one-class classification algorithms on the generated dataset. As a result, the algorithms learn the common data boundary in the structure of our studied ransomware samples, and thereby, we achieve the data-driven similarities. We use the findings to evaluate the trained classifiers with the test samples and observe that the Local Outlier Factor (LoF) performs better on all the selected feature spaces compared to the One-Class SVM and the Isolation Forest algorithms.

With the rapid construction and popularization of smart grid, the security of data in smart grid has become the basis for the safe and stable operation of smart grid. This paper proposes a data security threat discovery model for smart grid. Based on the prediction data analysis method, combined with migration learning technology, it analyzes different data, uses data matching process to classify the losses, and accurately predicts the analysis results, finds the security risks in the data, and prevents the illegal acquisition of data. The reinforcement learning and training process of this method distinguish the effective authentication and illegal access to data.

This paper designs a data anomaly detection method for power grid data centers. The method uses cloud computing architecture to realize the storage and calculation of large amounts of data from power grid data centers. After that, the STL decomposition method is used to decompose the grid data, and then the decomposed residual data is used for anomaly analysis to complete the detection of abnormal data in the grid data. Finally, the feasibility of the method is verified through experiments.

Fog computing extends the capability of cloud services to support latency sensitive applications. Adding fog computing nodes in proximity to a data generation/ actuation source can support data analysis tasks that have stringent deadline constraints. We introduce a real time, security-aware scheduling algorithm that can execute over a fog environment [1 , 2] . The applications we consider comprise of: (i) interactive applications which are less compute intensive, but require faster response time; (ii) computationally intensive batch applications which can tolerate some delay in execution. From a security perspective, applications are divided into three categories: public, private and semi-private which must be hosted over trusted, semi-trusted and untrusted resources. We propose the architecture and implementation of a distributed orchestrator for fog computing, able to combine task requirements (both performance and security) and resource properties.

Since 2018, Thai People Map and Analytics Platform (TPMAP) has been developed with the aims of supporting government officials and policy makers with integrated household and community data to analyze strategic plans, implement policies and decisions to alleviate poverty. However, to acquire complex information from the platform, non-technical users with no database background have to ask a programmer or a data scientist to query data for them. Such a process is time-consuming and might result in inaccurate information retrieved due to miscommunication between non-technical and technical users. In this paper, we have developed a Thai conversational agent on top of TPMAP to support self-service data analytics on complex queries. Users can simply use natural language to fetch information from our chatbot and the query results are presented to users in easy-to-use formats such as statistics and charts. The proposed conversational agent retrieves and transforms natural language queries into query representations with relevant entities, query intentions, and output formats of the query. We employ Rasa, an open-source conversational AI engine, for agent development. The results show that our system yields Fl-score of 0.9747 for intent classification and 0.7163 for entity extraction. The obtained intents and entities are then used for query target information from a graph database. Finally, our system achieves end-to-end performance with accuracies ranging from 57.5%-80.0%, depending on query message complexity. The generated answers are then returned to users through a messaging channel.

Current cyber attribution approaches proposed to use a variety of datasets and analytical techniques to distill the information that will be useful to identify cyber attackers. In contrast, practitioners and researchers in cyber attribution face several technical and regulation challenges. In this paper, we describe the main challenges of cyber attribution and present a state of the art of used approaches to face these challenges. Then, we will present an exploratory study to perform cyber attacks attribution based on pattern recognition from real data. In our study, we are using attack pattern discovery and identification based on real data collection and analysis.

IoT devices such as Google Home and Amazon Echo provide great convenience to our lives. Many of these IoT devices collect data including Personal Identifiable Information such as names, phone numbers, and addresses and thus IoT security is important. However, conducting security analysis on IoT devices is challenging due to the variety, the volume of the devices, and the special skills required for hardware and software analysis. In this research, we create and demonstrate a dynamic analysis security testing infrastructure for capturing network traffic from IoT devices. The network traffic is automatically mirrored to a server for live traffic monitoring and offline data analysis. Using the dynamic analysis security testing infrastructure, we conduct extensive security analysis on network traffic from Google Home and Amazon Echo. Our testing results indicate that Google Home enforces tighter security controls than Amazon Echo while both Google and Amazon devices provide the desired security level to protect user data in general. The dynamic analysis security testing infrastructure presented in the paper can be utilized to conduct similar security analysis on any IoT devices.

OLAP is an authoritative analytical tool in the emerging big data analytics context, with particular regards to the target distributed environments (e.g., Clouds). Here, privacy-preserving OLAP-based big data analytics is a critical topic, with several amenities in the context of innovative big data application scenarios like smart cities, social networks, bio-informatics, and so forth. The goal is that of providing privacy preservation during OLAP analysis tasks, with particular emphasis on the privacy of OLAP aggregates. Following this line of research, in this paper we provide a deep contribution on experimenting and assessing a state-of-the-art distributed privacy-preserving OLAP framework, named as SPPOLAP, whose main benefit is that of introducing a completely-novel privacy notion for OLAP data cubes.

In recent years, there is fast growth in the high throughput DNA sequencing technology, and also there is a reduction in the cost of genome-sequencing, that has led to a advances in the genetic industries. However, the reduction in cost and time required for DNA sequencing there is still an issue of managing such large amount of data. Also, the security and transmission of such huge amount of DNA sequence data is still an issue. The idea is to provide a secure storage platform for future generation bioinformatics systems for both researchers and healthcare user. Secure data sharing strategies, that can permit the healthcare providers along with their secured substances for verifying the accuracy of data, are crucial for ensuring proper medical services. In this paper, it has been surveyed about the applications of blockchain technology for securing healthcare data, where the recorded information is encrypted so that it becomes difficult to penetrate or being removed, as the primary goals of block-chaining technology is to make data immutable.

In this New Age where information has an indispensable value for companies and data mining technologies are growing in the area of Information Technology, privacy remains a sensitive issue in the approach to the exploitation of the large volume of data generated and processed by companies. The way data is collected, handled and destined is not yet clearly defined and has been the subject of constant debate by several areas of activity. This literature review gives an overview of privacy in the era of Business Analytics and Big Data in different timelines, the opportunities and challenges faced, aiming to broaden discussions on a subject that deserves extreme attention and aims to show that, despite measures for data protection have been created, there is still a need to discuss the subject among the different parties involved in the process to achieve a positive ideal for both users and companies.

Smart Meters (SM) are IoT end devices used to collect user utility consumption with limited processing power on the edge of the smart grid (SG). While SMs have great applications in providing data analysis to the utility provider and consumers, private user information can be inferred from SMs readings. For preserving user privacy, a number of methods were developed that use perturbation by adding noise to alter user load and hide consumer data. Most methods limit the amount of perturbation noise using differential privacy to preserve the benefits of data analysis. However, additive noise perturbation may have an undesirable effect on billing. Additionally, users may desire to select complete privacy without giving consent to having their data analyzed. We present a virtual battery model that uses perturbation with additive noise obtained from a virtual chargeable battery. The level of noise can be set to make user data differentially private preserving statistics or break differential privacy discarding the benefits of data analysis for more privacy. Our model uses fog aggregation with authentication and encryption that employs lightweight cryptographic primitives. We use Diffie-Hellman key exchange for symmetrical encryption of transferred data and a two-way challenge-response method for authentication.

As a new paradigm for the monitoring and troubleshooting of backbone networks, the multilayer in-band network telemetry (ML-INT) with deep learning (DL) based data analytics (DA) has recently been proven to be effective on realtime visualization and fine-grained monitoring. However, the existing studies on ML-INT&DA systems have overlooked the privacy and security issues, i.e., a malicious party can apply tapping in the data reporting channels between the data and control planes to illegally obtain plaintext ML-INT data in them. In this paper, we discuss a privacy-preserving DL-based ML-INT&DA system for realizing AI-assisted network automation in backbone networks in the form of IP-over-Optical. We first show a lightweight encryption scheme based on integer vector homomorphic encryption (IVHE), which is used to encrypt plaintext ML-INT data. Then, we architect a DL model for anomaly detection, which can directly analyze the ciphertext ML-INT data. Finally, we present the implementation and experimental demonstrations of the proposed system. The privacy-preserving DL-based ML-INT&DA system is realized in a real IP over elastic optical network (IP-over-EON) testbed, and the experimental results verify the feasibility and effectiveness of our proposal.

Tensors, as the multidimensional generalization of matrices, are naturally suited for representing and processing high-dimensional data. To date, tensors have been widely adopted in various data-intensive applications, such as machine learning and big data analysis. However, due to the inherent large-size characteristics of tensors, tensor algorithms, as the approaches that synthesize, transform or decompose tensors, are very computation and storage expensive, thereby hindering the potential further adoptions of tensors in many application scenarios, especially on the resource-constrained hardware platforms. In this paper, we propose a reduced-complexity SVD (Singular Vector Decomposition) scheme, which serves as the key operation in Tucker decomposition. By using iterative self-multiplication, the proposed scheme can significantly reduce the storage and computational costs of SVD, thereby reducing the complexity of the overall process. Then, corresponding hardware architecture is developed with 28nm CMOS technology. Our synthesized design can achieve 102GOPS with 1.09 mm2 area and 37.6 mW power consumption, and thereby providing a promising solution for accelerating Tucker decomposition.

The number of organizations adopting the Data Warehouse (DW) technology along with data analytics in order to improve the effectiveness of their decision-making processes is permanently increasing. Despite the efforts invested, the DW design remains a great challenge research domain. More accurately, the design quality of the DW depends on several aspects; among them, the requirement-gathering phase is a critical and complex task. In this context, we propose a Natural language (NL) NL-template based design approach, which is twofold; firstly, it facilitates the involvement of decision-makers in the early step of the DW design; indeed, using NL is a good and natural means to encourage the decision-makers to express their requirements as query-like English sentences. Secondly, our approach aims to generate a DW multidimensional schema from a set of gathered requirements (as OLAP: On-Line-Analytical-Processing queries, written according to the NL suggested templates). This approach articulates around: (i) two NL-templates for specifying multidimensional components, and (ii) a set of five heuristic rules for extracting the multidimensional concepts from requirements. Really, we are developing a software prototype that accepts the decision-makers' requirements then automatically identifies the multidimensional components of the DW model.

The purpose of any data analysis is to extract essential information implicitly present in the data. To do this, it often seems necessary to transform the initial data into a form that allows one to identify and interpret the essential features of their structure. One of the most important tasks of data analysis is to reduce the dimension of the original data. The paper considers an approach to solving this problem based on singular value decomposition (SVD).

Cybersecurity community is slowly leveraging Machine Learning (ML) to combat ever evolving threats. One of the biggest drivers for successful adoption of these models is how well domain experts and users are able to understand and trust their functionality. As these black-box models are being employed to make important predictions, the demand for transparency and explainability is increasing from the stakeholders.Explanations supporting the output of ML models are crucial in cyber security, where experts require far more information from the model than a simple binary output for their analysis. Recent approaches in the literature have focused on three different areas: (a) creating and improving explainability methods which help users better understand the internal workings of ML models and their outputs; (b) attacks on interpreters in white box setting; (c) defining the exact properties and metrics of the explanations generated by models. However, they have not covered, the security properties and threat models relevant to cybersecurity domain, and attacks on explainable models in black box settings.In this paper, we bridge this gap by proposing a taxonomy for Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) methods, covering various security properties and threat models relevant to cyber security domain. We design a novel black box attack for analyzing the consistency, correctness and confidence security properties of gradient based XAI methods. We validate our proposed system on 3 security-relevant data-sets and models, and demonstrate that the method achieves attacker's goal of misleading both the classifier and explanation report and, only explainability method without affecting the classifier output. Our evaluation of the proposed approach shows promising results and can help in designing secure and robust XAI methods.

Experimentation focused on assessing the value of complex visualisation approaches when compared with alternative methods for data analysis is challenging. The interaction between participant prior knowledge and experience, a diverse range of experimental or real-world data sets and a dynamic interaction with the display system presents challenges when seeking timely, affordable and statistically relevant experimentation results. This paper outlines a hybrid approach proposed for experimentation with complex interactive data analysis tools, specifically for computer network traffic analysis. The approach involves a structured survey completed after free engagement with the software platform by expert participants. The survey captures objective and subjective data points relating to the experience with the goal of making an assessment of software performance which is supported by statistically significant experimental results. This work is particularly applicable to field of network analysis for cyber security and also military cyber operations and intelligence data analysis.

Based on the analysis of the difficulties and pain points of privacy protection in the opening and sharing of government data, this paper proposes a new method for intelligent discovery and protection of structured and unstructured privacy data. Based on the improvement of the existing government data masking process, this method introduces the technologies of NLP and machine learning, studies the intelligent discovery of sensitive data, the automatic recommendation of masking algorithm and the full automatic execution following the improved masking process. In addition, the dynamic masking and static masking prototype with text and database as data source are designed and implemented with agent-based intelligent masking middleware. The results show that the recognition range and protection efficiency of government privacy data, especially government unstructured text have been significantly improved.

In recent years, with the progress of data analysis methods utilizing artificial intelligence (AI) technology, concepts of smart cities collecting data from IoT devices and creating values by analyzing it have been proposed. However, making sure that the data is not tampered with is of the utmost importance. One way to do this is to utilize blockchain technology to record and trace the history of the data. Park and Kim proposed ensuring the trustworthiness of the data by utilizing an IoT device with a trusted execution environment (TEE). Also, Guan et al. proposed authenticating an IoT device and mediating data using a TEE. For the authentication, they use the physically unclonable function of the IoT device. Usually, IoT devices suffer from the lack of resources necessary for creating transactions for the blockchain ledger. In this paper, we present a secure protocol in which a TEE acts as a proxy to the IoT devices and creates the necessary transactions for the blockchain. We use an authenticated encryption method on the data transmission between the IoT device and TEE to authenticate the device and ensure the integrity and confidentiality of the data generated by the IoT devices.

Analyzing multi-dimensional geospatial data is difficult and immersive analytics systems are used to visualize geospatial data and models. There is little previous work evaluating when immersive and non-immersive visualizations are the most suitable for data analysis and more research is needed.