Biblio

In times of Industry 4.0 and cyber-physical systems (CPS) providing security is one of the biggest challenges. A cyber attack launched at a CPS poses a huge threat, since a security incident may affect both the cyber and the physical world. Since CPS are very flexible systems, which are capable of adapting to environmental changes, it is important to keep an overview of the resulting costs of providing security. However, research regarding CPS currently focuses more on engineering secure systems and does not satisfactorily provide approaches for evaluating the resulting costs. This paper presents an interaction-based model for evaluating security costs in a CPS. Furthermore, the paper demonstrates in a use case driven study, how this approach could be used to model the resulting costs for guaranteeing security.

Cyber attacks against automobiles have increased over the last decade due to the expansion in attack surfaces. This is the result of modern automobiles having connections such as Bluetooth, WiFi, and other broadband services. While there has been numerous proposed solutions in the literature, none have been widely adopted as maintaining real-time message deliverability in the Controller Area Networks (CAN) outweighs proposed security solutions. Through iterative research, we have developed a solution which mitigates an attacker's impact on the CAN bus by using CAN's inherent features of arbitration, error detection and signaling, and fault confinement mechanism. The solution relies on an access controller and message priority thresholds added to the CAN data-link layer. The results provide no time delay for non-malicious traffic and mitigates bus impact of a subverted node attempting to fabricate messages at an unauthorized priority level.

In order to protect power grid network, the security assessment techniques which include both cyber side and the physical side should be considered. In this paper, we present a method for evaluating the dynamic vulnerability of cyber-physical power system (CPPS) considering the power grid infrastructures failure. First, according to the functional characteristics of different components, the impact of a single component function failure on CPPS operation is analyzed and quantified, such as information components, communication components and power components; then, the dynamic vulnerability of multiple components synchronization function failure is calculated, and the full probability evaluation formula of CPPS operational dynamic vulnerability is built; Thirdly, from an attacker's perspective to identify the most hazardous component combinations for CPPS multi-node collaborative attack; Finally, a local CPPS model is established based on the IEEE-9 bus system to quantify its operational dynamic vulnerability, and the effectiveness of proposed method is verified.

Data dropouts in communication network can have a significant impact on wide-area oscillation damping control of a smart power grid with large-scale deployment of distributed and networked phasor measurement units and wind energy resources. Remote feedback signals sent through communication channels encounter data dropout, which is represented by the Gilbert-Elliott model. An observer-driven reduced copy (ORC) approach is presented, which uses the knowledge of the nominal system dynamics during data dropouts to improve the damping performance where conventional feedback would suffer. An expression for the expectation of the bound on the error norm between the actual and the estimated states relating uncertainties in the cyber system due to data dropout and physical system due to change in operating conditions is also derived. The key contribution comes from the analytical derivation of the impact of coupling between the cyber and the physical layer on ORC performance. Monte Carlo simulation is performed to calculate the dispersion of the error bound. Nonlinear time-domain simulations demonstrate that the ORC produces significantly better performance compared to conventional feedback under higher data drop situations.

With the growing scale of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs), it is challenging to maintain their stability under all operating conditions. How to reduce the downtime and locate the failures becomes a core issue in system design. In this paper, we employ a hierarchical contract-based resilience framework to guarantee the stability of CPS. In this framework, we use Assume Guarantee (A-G) contracts to monitor the non-functional properties of individual components (e.g., power and latency), and hierarchically compose such contracts to deduce information about faults at the system level. The hierarchical contracts enable rapid fault detection in large-scale CPS. However, due to the vast number of components in CPS, manually designing numerous contracts and the hierarchy becomes challenging. To address this issue, we propose a technique to automatically decompose a root contract into multiple lower-level contracts depending on I/O dependencies between components. We then formulate a multi-objective optimization problem to search the optimal parameters of each lower-level contract. This enables automatic contract refinement taking into consideration the communication overhead between components. Finally, we use a case study from the manufacturing domain to experimentally demonstrate the benefits of the proposed framework.

Today, there are several applications which allow us to share images over the internet. All these images must be stored in a secure manner and should be accessible only to the intended recipients. Hence it is of utmost importance to develop efficient and fast algorithms for encryption of images. This paper uses chaotic generators to generate random sequences which can be used as keys for image encryption. These sequences are seemingly random and have statistical properties. This makes them resistant to analysis and correlation attacks. However, these sequences have fixed cycle lengths. This restricts the number of sequences that can be used as keys. This paper utilises neural networks as a source of perturbation in a chaotic generator and uses its output to encrypt an image. The robustness of the encryption algorithm can be verified using NPCR, UACI, correlation coefficient analysis and information entropy analysis.

Present security study involving analysis of manipulation of individual droplets of samples and reagents by digital microfluidic biochip has remarked that the biochip design flow is vulnerable to piracy attacks, hardware Trojans attacks, overproduction, Denial-of-Service attacks, and counterfeiting. Attackers can introduce bioprotocol manipulation attacks against biochips used for medical diagnosis, biochemical analysis, and frequent diseases detection in healthcare industry. Among these attacks, hardware Trojans have created a major threatening issue in its security concern with multiple ways to crack the sensitive data or alter original functionality by doing malicious operations in biochips. In this paper, we present a systematic algorithm for the assignment of checkpoints required for error-recovery of available bioprotocols in case of hardware Trojans attacks in performing operations by biochip. Moreover, it can guide the placement and timing of checkpoints so that the result of an attack is reduced, and hence enhance the security concerns of digital microfluidic biochips. Comparative study with traditional checkpoint schemes demonstrate the superiority of the proposed algorithm without overhead of the bioprotocol completion time with higher error detection accuracy.

This paper proposes a compensation control scheme against DoS attack for nonlinear cyber-physical systems (CPSs). The dynamical process of the nonlinear CPSs are described by T-S fuzzy model that regulated by the corresponding fuzzy rules. The communication link between the controller and the actuator under consideration may be unreliable, where Denialof-Service (DoS) attack is supposed to invade the communication link randomly. To compensate the negative effect caused by DoS attack, a compensation control scheme is designed to maintain the stability of the closed-loop system. With the aid of the Lyapunov function theory, a sufficient condition is established to ensure the stochastic stability and strict dissipativity of the closed-loop system. Finally, an iterative linearization algorithm is designed to determine the controller gain and the effectiveness of the proposed approach is evaluated through simulations.

The network attack graph is a powerful tool for analyzing network security, but the generation of a large-scale graph is non-trivial. The main challenge is from the explosion of network state space, which greatly increases time and storage costs. In this paper, three parallel algorithms are proposed to generate scalable attack graphs. An OpenMP-based programming implementation is used to test their performance. Compared with the serial algorithm, the best performance from the proposed algorithms provides a 10X speedup.

In this paper we report preliminary results from the novel coupling of cyber-physical emulation and interdiction optimization to better understand the impact of a CrashOverride malware attack on a notional electric system. We conduct cyber experiments where CrashOverride issues commands to remote terminal units (RTUs) that are controlling substations within a power control area. We identify worst-case loss of load outcomes with cyber interdiction optimization; the proposed approach is a bilevel formulation that incorporates RTU mappings to controllable loads, transmission lines, and generators in the upper-level (attacker model), and a DC optimal power flow (DCOPF) in the lower-level (defender model). Overall, our preliminary results indicate that the interdiction optimization can guide the design of experiments instead of performing a “full factorial” approach. Likewise, for systems where there are important dependencies between SCADA/ICS controls and power grid operations, the cyber-physical emulations should drive improved parameterization and surrogate models that are applied in scalable optimization techniques.

Nowadays, physical health of equipment controlled by Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) is a significant concern. This paper reports a work, in which, a hardware is placed between Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) and the actuator as a solution. The proposed hardware operates in two conditions, i.e. passive and active. Operation of the proposed solution is based on the repetitive operational profile of the actuators. The normal operational profile of the actuator is fed to the protective hardware and is considered as the normal operating condition. In the normal operating condition, the middleware operates in its passive mode and simply monitors electronic signals passing between PLC and Actuator. In case of any malicious operation, the proposed hardware operates in its active mode and both slowly stops the actuator and sends an alert to SCADA server initiating execution of the actuator's emergency profile. Thus, the proposed hardware gains control over the actuator and prevents any physical damage on the operating devices. Two sample experiments are reported in which, results of implementing the proposed solution are reported and assessed. Results show that once the PLC sends incorrect data to actuator, the proposed hardware detects it as an anomaly. Therefore, it does not allow the PLC to send incorrect and unauthorized data pattern to its actuator. Significance of the paper is in introducing a solution to prevent destruction of physical devices apart from source or purpose of the encountered anomaly and apart from CPS functionality or PLC model and operation.

Identifying cyberattack vectors on cyber supply chains (CSC) in the event of cyberattacks are very important in mitigating cybercrimes effectively on Cyber Physical Systems CPS. However, in the cyber security domain, the invincibility nature of cybercrimes makes it difficult and challenging to predict the threat probability and impact of cyber attacks. Although cybercrime phenomenon, risks, and treats contain a lot of unpredictability's, uncertainties and fuzziness, cyberattack detection should be practical, methodical and reasonable to be implemented. We explore Bayesian Belief Networks (BBN) as knowledge representation in artificial intelligence to be able to be formally applied probabilistic inference in the cyber security domain. The aim of this paper is to use Bayesian Belief Networks to detect cyberattacks on CSC in the CPS domain. We model cyberattacks using DAG method to determine the attack propagation. Further, we use a smart grid case study to demonstrate the applicability of attack and the cascading effects. The results show that BBN could be adapted to determine uncertainties in the event of cyberattacks in the CSC domain.

Modern cyber-physical systems are increasingly complex and vulnerable to attacks like false data injection aimed at destabilizing and confusing the systems. We develop and evaluate an attack-detection framework aimed at learning a dynamic invariant network, data-driven temporal causal relationships between components of cyber-physical systems. We evaluate the relative performance in attack detection of the proposed model relative to traditional anomaly detection approaches. In this paper, we introduce Granger Causality based Kalman Filter with Adaptive Robust Thresholding (G-KART) as a framework for anomaly detection based on data-driven functional relationships between components in cyber-physical systems. In particular, we select power systems as a critical infrastructure with complex cyber-physical systems whose protection is an essential facet of national security. The system presented is capable of learning with or without network topology the task of detection of false data injection attacks in power systems. Kalman filters are used to learn and update the dynamic state of each component in the power system and in-turn monitor the component for malicious activity. The ego network for each node in the invariant graph is treated as an ensemble model of Kalman filters, each of which captures a subset of the node's interactions with other parts of the network. We finally also introduce an alerting mechanism to surface alerts about compromised nodes.

With the popularity of smart devices and the widespread use of the Wi-Fi-based indoor localization, edge computing is becoming the mainstream paradigm of processing massive sensing data to acquire indoor localization service. However, these data which were conveyed to train the localization model unintentionally contain some sensitive information of users/devices, and were released without any protection may cause serious privacy leakage. To solve this issue, we propose a lightweight differential privacy-preserving mechanism for the edge computing environment. We extend ε-differential privacy theory to a mature machine learning localization technology to achieve privacy protection while training the localization model. Experimental results on multiple real-world datasets show that, compared with the original localization technology without privacy-preserving, our proposed scheme can achieve high accuracy of indoor localization while providing differential privacy guarantee. Through regulating the value of ε, the data quality loss of our method can be controlled up to 8.9% and the time consumption can be almost negligible. Therefore, our scheme can be efficiently applied in the edge networks and provides some guidance on indoor localization privacy protection in the edge computing.

This paper presents the encryption of advanced pictures dependent on turmoil hypothesis. Two principal forms are incorporated into this method those are pixel rearranging and pixel substitution. Disorder hypothesis is a part of science concentrating on the conduct of dynamical frameworks that are profoundly touchy to beginning conditions. A little change influences the framework to carry on totally unique, little changes in the beginning position of a disorganized framework have a major effect inevitably. A key of 128-piece length is created utilizing mayhem hypothesis, and decoding should be possible by utilizing a similar key. The bit-XOR activity is executed between the unique picture and disorder succession x is known as pixel substitution. Pixel rearranging contains push savvy rearranging and section astute rearranging gives extra security to pictures. The proposed strategy for encryption gives greater security to pictures.

Digital image security is now a severe issue, especially when sending images to telecommunications networks. There are many ways where digital images can be encrypted and decrypted from secure communication. Digital images contain data that is important when captured or disseminated to preserve and preserve data. The technique of encryption is one way of providing data on digital images. A key cipher block chaining and Gingerbreadman Map are used in our search to encrypt images. This new system uses simplicity, high quality, enhanced by the vehicle's natural efficiency and the number of the chain. The proposed method is performed for experimental purposes and the experiments are performed in- depth, highly reliable analysis. The results confirm that by referring to several known attacks, the plan cannot be completed. Comparative studies with other algorithms show a slight rise in the security of passwords with the advantages of security of the chain. The results of this experiment are a comparison of button sensitivity and a comparison after encryption and decryption of the initial image using the amount of pixel change rate and unified average change intensity.

This paper presents a novel game theoretic attack-defence decision making framework for cyber-physical system (CPS) security. Game theory is a powerful tool to analyse the interaction between the attacker and the defender in such scenarios. In the formulation of games, participants are usually assumed to be rational. They will always choose the action to pursuit maximum payoff according to the knowledge of the strategic situation they are in. However, in reality the capacity of rationality is often bounded by the level of intelligence, computational resources and the amount of available information. This paper formulates the concept of bounded rationality into the decision making process, in order to optimise the defender's strategy considering that the defender and the attacker have incomplete information of each other and limited computational capacity. Under the proposed framework, the defender can often benefit from deviating from the minimax Nash Equilibrium strategy, the theoretically expected outcome of rational game playing. Numerical results are presented and discussed in order to demonstrate the proposed technique.

More and more security and privacy issues are arising as new technologies, such as big data and cloud computing, are widely applied in nowadays. For decreasing the privacy breaches in access control system under opening and cross-domain environment. In this paper, we suggest a game and risk based access model for privacy preserving by employing Shannon information and game theory. After defining the notions of Privacy Risk and Privacy Violation Access, a high-level framework of game theoretical risk based access control is proposed. Further, we present formulas for estimating the risk value of access request and user, construct and analyze the game model of the proposed access control by using a multi-stage two player game. There exists sub-game perfect Nash equilibrium each stage in the risk based access control and it's suitable to protect the privacy by limiting the privacy violation access requests.

The main objective of this paper is to present a more secured and computationally efficient procedure of encrypting and decrypting images using the enigma algorithm in comparison to the existing methods. Available literature on image encryptions and descriptions are not highly secured in every case.To achieve more secured image processing for highly advanced technologies, a proposed algorithm can be the process used in enigma machine for image encryption and decryption. Enigma machine is piece of spook hardware that was used frequently during the World War II by the Germans. This paper describes the detailed algorithm along with proper demonstration of several essential components present in an enigma machine that is required for image security. Each pixel in a colorful picture can be represented by RGB (Red, Green, Blue) value. The range of RGB values is 0 to 255 that states the red, green and blue intensity of a particular picture.These RGB values are accessed one by one and changed into another by various steps and hence it is not possible to track the original RGB value. In order to retrieve the original image, the receiver needs to know the setting of the enigma. To compare the decrypted image with the original one,these two images are subtracted and their results are also discussed in this paper.

The rapid growth of computer systems which generate graph data necessitates employing privacy-preserving mechanisms to protect users' identity. Since structure-based de-anonymization attacks can reveal users' identity's even when the graph is simply anonymized by employing naïve ID removal, recently, k- anonymity is proposed to secure users' privacy against the structure-based attack. Most of the work ensured graph privacy using fake edges, however, in some applications, edge addition or deletion might cause a significant change to the key property of the graph. Motivated by this fact, in this paper, we introduce a novel method which ensures privacy by adding fake nodes to the graph. First, we present a novel model which provides k- anonymity against one of the strongest attacks: seed-based attack. In this attack, the adversary knows the partial mapping between the main graph and the graph which is generated using the privacy-preserving mechanisms. We show that even if the adversary knows the mapping of all of the nodes except one, the last node can still have k- anonymity privacy. Then, we turn our attention to the privacy of the graphs generated by inter-domain routing against degree attacks in which the degree sequence of the graph is known to the adversary. To ensure the privacy of networks against this attack, we propose a novel method which tries to add fake nodes in a way that the degree of all nodes have the same expected value.

Image encryption is an essential part of a Visual Cryptography. Existing traditional sequential encryption techniques are infeasible to real-time applications. High-performance reformulations of such methods are increasingly growing over the last decade. These reformulations proved better performances over their sequential counterparts. A rotational encryption scheme encrypts the images in such a way that the decryption is possible with the rotated encrypted images. A parallel rotational encryption technique makes use of a high-performance device. But it less-leverages the optimizations offered by them. We propose a rotational image encryption technique which makes use of memory coalescing provided by the Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA). The proposed scheme achieves improved global memory utilization and increased efficiency.

To promote InGaP solar cell efficiency toward the theoretical limit, one promising approach is to incorporate multiple quantum wells (MQWs) into the InGaP host and improve its open-circuit voltage by facilitating radiative carrier recombination owing to carrier confinement. In this research, we demonstrate numerically that a strain-balanced (SB) In1-xGaxP/In1-yGayP MQW enhances confined carrier density while degrades the effective carrier mobility. However, a smart design of the MQW structure is possible by considering quantitatively the trade-off between carrier confinement effect and carrier transport, and MQW can be advantageous over the InGaP bulk material for boosting photovoltaic efficiency.

This paper presents a methodology for utilizing Phasor Measurement units (PMUs) for procuring real time synchronized measurements for assessing the security of the power system dynamically. The concept of wide-area dynamic security assessment considers transient instability in the proposed methodology. Intelligent framework based approach for online dynamic security assessment has been suggested wherein the database consisting of critical features associated with the system is generated for a wide range of contingencies, which is utilized to build the data mining model. This data mining model along with the synchronized phasor measurements is expected to assist the system operator in assessing the security of the system pertaining to a particular contingency, thereby also creating possibility of incorporating control and preventive measures in order to avoid any unforeseen instability in the system. The proposed technique has been implemented on IEEE 39 bus system for accurately indicating the security of the system and is found to be quite robust in the case of noise in the measurement data obtained from the PMUs.

Modern large scale technical systems often face iterative changes on their behaviours with the requirement of validated quality which is not easy to achieve completely with traditional testing. Regression verification is a powerful tool for the formal correctness analysis of software-driven systems. By proving that a new revision of the software behaves similarly as the original version of the software, some of the trust that the old software and system had earned during the validation processes or operation histories can be inherited to the new revision. This trust inheritance by the formal analysis relies on a number of implicit assumptions which are not self-evident but easy to miss, and may lead to a false sense of safety induced by a misunderstood regression verification processes. This paper aims at pointing out hidden, implicit assumptions of regression verification in the context of cyber-physical systems by making them explicit using practical examples. The explicit trust inheritance analysis would clarify for the engineers to understand the extent of the trust that regression verification provides and consequently facilitate them to utilize this formal technique for the system validation.

The trending technological research platform is Internet of Things (IoT)and most probably it will stay that way for a while. One of the main application areas of IoT is Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs), in which IoT devices can be leveraged as actuators and sensors in accordance with the system needs. The public acceptance and adoption of CPS services and applications will create a huge amount of privacy issues related to the processing, storage and disclosure of the user location information. As a remedy, our paper proposes a methodology to provide location privacy for the users of CPSs. Our proposal takes advantage of concepts such as mix-zone, context-awareness, and location-obfuscation. According to our best knowledge, the proposed methodology is the first privacy-preserving location service for CPSs that offers adaptable privacy levels related to the current context of the user.